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2024-04-25, 5:57 PM |
American Metamorphosis Part 2
| Mr Obama has adapted to that; Mr Romney did not. Instead, his campaign drew much of its energy from forces hostile to this new America
– "the angry, elderly white men”, as one commentator put it, of the Tea Party movement.Yet candidates from the Tea Party wing of the Republicans did badly in the concurrent Senate or Congressional elections. Even before the campaign began, the fundamentalist Protestant Christian Right – which had become a bogeyman of the lib eral intelligentsia in Britain and America as well as a Tea Party standard bearer
– had failed to find a candidate of its own. Not long ago, the Mormon-Catholic alliance
of the Romney- Ryan ticket would have been anathema to
the
Christian Right, which suggests that this once-powerful ideological force is largely spent.
The same may apply to the political influence
of the Catholic
bishops – who are implicitly behind the Republican cause because of sex and gender issues – which appears to
have waned even as the Catholic percentage of the population waxes. So the kaleidoscope of American politics has been well shaken this time, and the new pattern will become the norm. The old white Anglo-Saxon
Protestant ascendancy
has had its day of reckoning. Power and influence will belong to
those who adapt best to this new reality. Yet the Latin
American immigrant experience is not yet fully understood or explored,
neither by mainstream politicians nor by the media – nor indeed by the Catholic Church’s leadership – and
nor does it have a clear political voice. But it has already done one important thing. It has legitimised and normalised Mr Obama’s presidency, which can no longer be treated as an exception soon to be extinguished, but has to be recognised as symbolising an emerging new America that is here to stay.
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| Category: My articles | Added by: GreatEconomist (2012-11-24)
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| Views: 264
| Rating: 0.0/0 |
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