A Four-Year Nightmare

By Mike Marqusee
The Guardian
Nov. 4, 2004

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"I will sleep and dream of great danger" ran the opening line of an email from a friend in Brooklyn. It was 4am eastern standard time and the last hope of a Kerry victory - or, more precisely, a Bush defeat - had dissolved into the night. "I believe the field day Bush will have for the next four years will create a nightmare worse than anything this country has seen."

Make no mistake, the fear and despair evoked across the globe by the US election result are shared by many millions of US citizens. Indeed, their grief, their frustration, has a peculiar intensity - because there's no loathing like the loathing within families. The 55 million Kerry voters who went to the polls primarily motivated by a burning desire to dump Bush are no more reconciled to his rule this morning than they were a few days ago.

Bush will claim a mandate, but there's no reason we should accept the claim. The result confirms that this is a wartime leader who does not speak for, or enjoy, the confidence of half the population.

There will be those in Europe who will seize on this result to urge us to reconcile ourselves to the superpower and its peculiar ways. And it will be claimed that a refusal to do so is tantamount to "anti-Americanism". This charge has been fouling the atmosphere since 9/11. It is alleged that the left or Europe is blindly hostile to America and Americans. As a US passport-holder long resident in London, I know that this charge is baloney.

Anti-Americanism has become a catch-all charge levied against anyone who engages in a radical critique of America's global power, its sway over the lives of billions who had no vote in Tuesday's election. People rebel against US hegemony for the same reasons they rebelled against the dominance of earlier imperial powers, not out of a distaste for the culture of the rulers but out of an objection to undemocratic, unaccountable, self-serving rule by remote elites of whatever culture.

A disbelief in the prerogatives or the beneficence of the American empire is not anti-American. Nor is it anti-American to be alarmed by features of US political culture, an alarm shared by many millions of Americans.

Bush supporters should be wary of crowing too soon. This election result will do nothing to placate those Americans who cry out for health care, a living wage, and decent public services. It will not reverse the leftwing tide in Latin America. And it will do nothing to curb resistance in Iraq. As casualties mount, there is bound to be increasingly militant opposition to White House war policies among a widening spectrum of US citizens, including serving GIs.

My friend in Brooklyn fears for his children's future. He sees them growing up in a benighted, detested land, their liberties, living standards and security menaced by the triumphant neocons. He's right to dream of danger. But the millions of US voters who queued for hours to register their protest against Bush should reflect in their hour of despair that they are by no means alone - not within their own country and not within the human community at large.

Bulatlat 

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