Loathing Bush

Victor David Hanson has an excellent piece at NRO titled On Loathing Bush. Hanson argues that there are rational reasons why millions of people won't vote for Bush in November, but the impetus which will drive many to push the lever for Kerry has nothing to do with reasons or rationality but pure irrational hatred. The phenomenom that Hanson then addresses is the genesis of that hatred. It derives, he writes, not so much from what Bush does but because of who he is.

He argues that there are four characteristics of the President that make him loathsome in the eyes of the left: He's perceived as a southern conservative; he's a Christian; he sees the world in black and white, good and evil; and he has spurned his aristocratic, northeastern heritage and disdains the elite culture indigenous to that part of the country. Some of these may seem implausible bases for hatred, perhaps, until one reads Hanson's reasoning behind them.

The most salient of the above sources of the left's pathological animus toward George Bush, in Viewpoint's opinion, is his Christianity. Hanson says this about Bush's religion:

Bush's Christianity seems evangelical and literal. It comes across as disturbing to liberals of the country who see religion as a mere social formality at best, useful for weddings and funerals, perhaps comforting at Christmas and Easter of course, but otherwise a potential threat to the full expression of lifestyle "choices."

American politicos like their candidates to be Episcopalian, Unitarian, or Congregationalist, perhaps even mainstream but quiet Methodists or Presbyterians. Baptists of the southern flavor, or anything not found in a New England township, reflect a real belief in the literalness of the Bible - primordial ideas that religion is not a social necessity but a fire-and-brimstone path to eternal salvation.

It could be argued that the last two reasons that Hanson gives for the unprecedented invective that has been directed at this man can really be conflated into the second, his religious faith. Bush's Christianity is the basis for his rejection of a jaded, effete culture. It's the reason why he tends to see things in terms of good and evil, two categories that have faded into desuetude in the increasing secularization of the last twenty five years. Bush's Christianity is also the well from which he derives his opposition to abortion and gay marriage. Indeed, there is no non-arbitrary reason to oppose either of these unless one's aversion flows from transcendent moral springs.

The left has always hated Christianity and Christians, but the American people have always been at least respectful or reverential toward the faith, if only out of a guilty conscience resulting from their own personal luke-warmness toward it. As long as the overwhelming majority of people were sympathetic to the church and the Christian religion its enemies have bided their time and masked their hostility. Popular sympathy, however, is passing away with the WW II generation, and the left is now emboldened to bare its teeth against its enemy. George Bush, being the most prominent representative of that which they detest, has therefore become the focal point of their loathing.