In the hands of an angry electorate

Tuesday’s election ended Wednesday morning, after we had gone to work or to school, shopped for groceries or lowered the storm windows against the cold, going about the day with renewed hope or frustration, wondering what was so united about these states anyway. After a year of considering the hard issues of war and jobs, security of the nation’s borders or in our old age, a decisive number of voters replied loudly that homosexuals may not marry, drawing many of us into a morals fight for which we were unprepared.

The world has changed when one of its sturdier clich?s no longer applies. “You can’t legislate morality.” A lot of voters today would answer, “Says who?”

Evangelicals voted in record numbers to re-elect President Bush. They helped expand the Republican hold on the Senate and make it a more conservative place. They added to an already conservative majority in the House. They kept the strong Republican majority of 29 governorships. In the 11 states where the question of banning gay marriage was on the ballot, voters overwhelmingly voted to ban it. Their agenda is now the federal government’s agenda. The president Thursday said, “I’ll reach out to everyone who shares our goals” and “I earned capital in this election, and I’m going to spend it.” Honest dissent will be scattered as heaps of light chaff before the whirlwind.

Only in a nation as closely divided as ours could a 3-percentage point win stand as an overwhelming mandate; the president’s opportunity is to calm hubris on one side and resentment on the other, but he seems already eager to ignore the chance. If so, this fight over morals will spread, and those who believe they would find comfort in the Blue Coasts are fooling themselves. Those who believe the battle over gay marriage ranks below actual fighting in Iraq miss the point entirely.

Before legislating morality, however, you have to locate it. An internal compass can be a fickle instrument. It directs equally from fear as from hope; it may provide answers without reason and point to assurance without pausing at the possibility of error. Trust it absolutely and risk losing yourself in your own confidence. It is a device that deceives its owner as often as others.

During the election, the Bush-Cheney moral compass spun madly just once, when in the third debate Sen. Kerry replied to a question about whether homosexuality was a choice. He said, “If you were to talk to Dick Cheney’s daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she’s being who she was, she’s being who she was born as.” The Bush campaign condemned him swiftly and avoided risking the uncomfortable thought that if the Cheneys could have a gay daughter without supporting a gay lifestyle then perhaps there was something to the genetic argument, which could lead to considering homosexuality a not unnatural state among a minority of the population, which would suggest they would deserve equal … Stop! Sen. Kerry is not a good man. End the discussion; the compass rights itself.

Moral questions of abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research will not find converts. If you do not agree with the president’s responses to these issues, you can argue pointlessly with those who do or you can expand the range of questions. A few years ago, Harvard Professor Robert Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone,” in which he looked at states’ social capital – their demonstrations of personal connections, good will, fellowship, sympathy. He held these results against a dozen or more measures of community health: crime rates, education levels, income equality, tolerance, mortality, physical health, etc.

In nearly every case, states with high social capital – the Northeast and northern Heartland states – scored well. Their citizens are more likely to take care of their neighbors, pay their taxes, stay out of jail and participate in community activities. The Southeast and South, lowest in social capital, highest in moral certainty if the anti-gay marriage vote is an indication, scored dismally by comparison.

One chart especially traces a peculiarity in the current national divide. It plots levels of agreement to the notion, “I’d do better than average in a fistfight,” a pugnacity measure in which Maine was a humble second-lowest in agreeing with the statement, above only South Dakota and just below Iowa and New Hampshire. At the other end were Louisiana, West Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, places where citizens, says Mr. Putnam, “are readier for a fight (perhaps because they need to be), and they are predisposed to mayhem.”

The fistfight measure judges less how well someone might do in a brawl than how they view the world, or confront it. It is a probe into how one might treat strangers. I prefer to live in a place that doesn’t walk around with its fists up, like a nervous 12-year-old who is ready just in case.

During the campaign, George Bush joked, “Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called ‘walking.'” When a Mainer walks, no one sees a swagger. It wouldn’t be right. Maine’s national politicians, its members of Congress, mostly, have tended not to be showy. They’ve worked toward the middle – moderate Republicans and mild Democrats who have approached issues pragmatically because that’s what moves legislation. They would rather work than go on about how hard the work is.

There’s a broad moral code behind the Putnam numbers and the politics of work and consensus that is not unique to Maine or to blue states, to Democrats or Republicans, but is fully part of life here even as its opposite also exists. It is a morality to be held favorably against the narrowness of anti-gay votes and stem-cell politics, against the exclusivity of those “who share our goals.” It is the morality of decency, which by its nature does not assert itself, though would certainly stand up well in a brawl.

If there is capital to be spent in the next four years, Maine offers a rich store.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.