After Bush's narrow but decisive victory, Europe in particular is going to have to face without flinching a new reality: a world order in which the US is more part of the problem than it is of the solution, writes Fintan O'Toole
After the 2000 election result, lovers of Bill Clinton's America could wash away their disappointment in oceans of consolation. A majority of Americans had voted for Al Gore.
George W. Bush had not been elected but appointed by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court. The shenanigans in Florida reeked of a stolen election. The anthem for the next four years would be "Hail to the Thief". Bush was not the real America.
This time, the only place for liberals to seek consolation is in fantasy land. Even if, by some combination of fluke and litigation, John Kerry were now to become president, his victory would be a sham.
Bush has won a narrow but decisive victory in the popular vote after an election process that generated massive interest and presented the American electorate with real choices.
With a sixth consecutive term in control of the House of Representatives, an apparently increased majority in the Senate, and the retention of a majority of state governorships, his party clearly reflects the popular will. Bush is the real America.
Liberal Europeans have to face the fact that America has chosen, freely and fairly, to present itself to the world as an aggressive, unilateralist, neo-imperial power that doesn't much care what anyone else thinks. The rogue super-power that we have seen in action over the last four years is where Americans want to live.
However much John Kerry may have deserved the "flip-flop" taunts, he clearly articulated the case for a return to an older, multilateralist USA that exercised its muscle by being the first among equals in a consensual world order.
That many Americans would like it that way is obvious from the results. But so is the fact that they form an ineffectual minority.
This truth is all the starker because, by any normal criteria, Bush should have been almost unelectable. He came into office with an extremely weak mandate and immediately broke all his promises to be a uniter, not a divider.
He became the first US president in modern history to preside over a net loss of jobs. He turned the huge surplus he inherited from Clinton into a massive and still spiralling deficit. His tax cuts produced a flagrant bonanza for the rich at the expense of the middle-class. Five million more Americans ended up with no health insurance.
The incompetence of his administration contributed significantly to the success of the attacks of September 11th, 2001. His defining action - the invasion of Iraq - was sold by deception and executed with staggering ineptitude.
If this data was fed into a computer, there is no doubt what result it would produce: a Kerry landslide.
What could possibly have trumped all these factors and given Bush victory? The answer is that a majority of American voters prefer to imagine a world divided between the Righteous and the Evil-doers than to deal with the complex problems of their vast nation.
This conclusion is supported by the exit polls. The top three issues that influenced voters' choices were the economy, Iraq and "moral values".
The first two of these issues are about facing reality, and people who made them a priority voted, by and large, for Kerry. Those who cited the economy as the most important issue voted overwhelmingly for Kerry: by 81 per cent to 17 per cent. Likewise, those who saw Iraq as the number one issue were far more likely to vote for Kerry.
But the election did not turn on the economy, stupid, or on Iraq, even stupider. The Democrats were not able to articulate a fully truthful position on either of these issues for the simple reason that optimism is the only language of American public discourse.
Historically, presidential candidates who say that things are bad and that they will take some time to fix tend to lose.
The real case against Bush was the case for a reality check. It was about saying that there are structural problems with American society and the American economy and that some painful adjustments will be required.
It was about saying that Iraq shows how delusional American militarist and imperial fantasies really are and that being the only super-power is not such a good deal after all. But both of these positions would have demanded a kind of language that Americans have been taught not to speak.
Kerry would have had to challenge the whole notion that the US is God's own country.
Bush, on the other hand, appealed to those who desperately want to believe that God wakes up every morning and salutes the Stars and Stripes. He won because the vast swathe of voters who saw the election as being about "moral values" backed him by 78 per cent to 19 per cent.
Nebulous as this phrase might be, Bush and his people have controlled its content brilliantly. The strange but increasingly viable alliance between secular neo-conservative intellectuals and the Christian right has determined what "moral values" are, and, more importantly, what they are not. They are not about grotesque inequality, starvation wages or the denial of healthcare to hard-working families. They are not about torture, the abuse of human rights and the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis.
What they are about, though, is a range of evils that threaten the good life. The genius of Bushism is that it has forged an emotional connection between vastly disparate issues. Middle Eastern Islamist terrorists and American homosexuals; tax-and-spend liberals and stem-cell researchers; girlie men who want to take your guns away and unbelievers who won't let your kids pray in school; abortionists who kill American babies and traitors who claim that the US military committed atrocities in Vietnam.
All of them can be filed under the capacious heading of Evil-doers. And in the words of a slogan that was printed on millions of badges, T-shirts, and bumper-stickers after 9/11, "Evil-doers Suck".
What makes this bundle of fears into a powerful political movement is that it is not entirely nebulous. There are good reasons for Americans to be deeply anxious. Apart altogether from the threat from al-Qaeda, there are the enormous structural weakness manifested in everything from long-term trade deficits to crumbling public schools, and from an unsustainable addiction to cheap oil to the inability of an 18th-century system of government to function in the 21st century.
What the Republicans have done so deftly, however, is to displace those anxieties on to the twin threats of cultural liberalism and Islamist terrorism.
An emotional response that has proved itself so strong and so politically useful will not be appeased.
The mandate for an aggressive America, acting outside of international law and contemptuous of those who don't offer 100 per cent support, is clear, and it is foolish to imagine that Bush won't act on it.
The strategy adopted by Tony Blair of cosying up to Bush in the hope of bringing his inner liberal out of the closet, is now more hopeless than it ever was. Europe, in particular, is going to have to face without flinching a new reality: a world order in which the US is more part of the problem than it is of the solution.