All across the vast wasteland, heads are saying that the country really elected Ronald Reagan, since a) the country is center-right and b) Barack Hussein Obama ran as a Reagan Republican. And boyoboy he'd better  not try any of those liberal things people think he said he'd do, because--see a) and b). 

It's one of those whiplash performances. It was ludicrous when, in 2006, after a masive sweep of Congress, all the bells of the Washington Press Corps Village were ringing out Centrism! Centrism! in a furious denial of what took place--and it's positively hilarious now. They are fooling nobody, and if they're reassuring themselves, it's pathetic.

But I'm seeing something that looks more benign, is more fervently delivered, and is just as wrong, and that's the trope of America advancing because we've elected Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States.

It's important, and pivotal, and even magnificent--but this has to be said: the liberal side of America was ready to elect a black man to  the Presidency thirty years ago--or a woman, or a homosexual, or an atheist, or a Native American--it just didn't matter then, and it doesn't matter now. And what happened this year is that the other side was finally outnumbered. This was not some great consensus rising up like morning mist as the centrist, independent, undecided (white) voters decided that It Was Time--it was liberals making it time by organizing and motivating one side of America. All America was not elevated by this--and specifically, the Right is no more enlightened, benign, or judicious than it was a week ago when they were shrieking Socialism! at the top of their voices.

But isn't that a partisan view of things? And didn't Obama campaign against that sort of partisanship?

No and no.

It really irks me (REALLY irks me ) is when a word like partisanship gets degraded by the Death Of A Thousand Blogs, for the purpose of making it a blunt instrument. Now that the Good Guys Have Won, let me see If I can't wrench the thing from their unrepentant hands.

Partisanship is best defined as being interested in the promotion of a group, its power and authority more than principles. Now it's possible to treat it more generally, as an advocate for a particular group, but then it's scarcely a term of attack, is it? So let's load it negatively and bring it close to the usage in question.

A criticism 'a partisan attack' would mean "an attack on us simply because they're the opposing political party and are vying with us for power." The connotations are that there are no principles involved and they would not attack the proposal were it not from us. 

It's an effective bit of attack--except that it's an appeal to venality and lack of principle. If you try to couple it with an attack on their evil principles and how they hate America and work for its destruction every day, they don't do anything so neat as to cancel each other out, but it creates a mess that simply smells nasty without making any sense. No principles--evil principles--four legs good, two legs bad.

Yet another anti-argumentation ploy--but it points out a difference that's important if we're going to talk about America as one and pulling together and burying the partisan hatchet. Barack Hussein Obama has no use for true partisan animosity, and we should follow his lead--but principles are another matter. 

There are real problems with the principles of many of the people on the other side, and opposing those principles is not partisanship. It is a division of a different sort. It can be more damaging than a power struggle or an ethnic division, and less easily resolved. But they can not and should not simply be defined away for the sake of amity. 

Ignoring the differences leads to a morally insane society. Accepting the differences leads to a morally corrupt society. A house divided against itself cannot stand--it must move. And that motion is history. It's trollish dishonesty and cheap brass to assert as these hacks have done that others should give up their principles because they are not the principles of Holy Mother Elephant Cabal, by shouting from every media outlet that they are Partisan.

It's Newspeak, of course, to take a word and destroy its meaning to make people that much stupider and less able to communicate. It's another thing entirely to encourage that debasement simply because one despises politics.

It's easy to say that we've matured as a nation to the point of electing a brilliant and personable Professor of Constitutional Law who, as Silvio Berlusconi put it, has a beautiful suntan. It gives all of us virtue like gentle rain, upon the just and unjust. And it ignores that unfortunate Hegelian cockpit where ideas and ideals are confronted. Barack Obama is above it all because we feel he should be.

We got nothing Hegelian out of this past election: with a corrupted and inane media presided over stupid charges and stupid formulations of real problems which precluded any engagement, any dialogue, and so once again our history is simply made by one force who have always had that virtue embodied in its ideals (and much good it does us) riding roughshod by dint of numbers and the incompetence, venality and ghastly crimes of the other side.

At the bottom, ideals had something to do with it--but not unity, not evolution, not any virtue of the whole. There's a virtue in the framework of Western political life that allows us to fight this fight without destroying everything. But that's about it.

It's worth it, giving Barack Hussein Obama his time as a monument. But the true measure of democracy is that thing called an election still sprawled over every state in the union. There's change there, to be sure, and hope--but not all that much for a nation to be proud of.

Let that be a lesson to us.