Opinionator: The Great Experiment

Timothy Egan on American politics and life, as seen from the West.

Anyone who still has a smidge of humanity left after our $6 billion electoral argument should consider the symbolism at the top of a ballot now headed for history's vault. The incumbent's father is from a race of people first brought to these shores in chains and sold like whiskey barrels at portside auctions. The challenger's father was born in Mexico, to a family of sexual and religious outlaws who fled the United States.

At the first-ever Republican convention, in 1856, the party platform called for ending the two great sins of American life — "these twin relics of barbarism, polygamy and slavery."

Slavery and polygamy are indeed relics, for the American story is one of working past the barbarism, past the irrational hatred — an arc of enlightenment, with dips along the way.

All of which makes Tuesday's election worth looking at from a longer, wider view. The audacity of electing a black man or a Mormon bishop to lead the free world is something, still. But the overarching Great Experiment — the attempt to create a big, educated, multi-racial, multi-faith democracy that is not divided by oligarchical gaps between rich and poor — is still hanging in the balance.

Animus based on skin color has hardly disappeared: a majority of Americans, 56 percent, harbor some anti-black sentiment, up from 49 percent four years ago, according to a recent Associated Press survey.

You need only read the comments section on a typical day on Glenn Beck's Web site, The Blaze, to find that pond scum has found a crowd. There, Michelle Obama is oft-compared to a cow, her husband is routinely labeled a Muslim Kenyan, and the following type of anonymous post about blacks, from July 12, goes by without challenge: "I think they should go to Africa and live among 'their people' and see how far they get. They as a whole do not appear to see past color and 'gimmee somethin' mista.' There is something missing with these people."

The scatter shots after the election — from a knot of students shouting racial slurs at the University of Mississippi to Bill O'Reilly's absurd lament that "the white establishment is now the minority" — are further evidence that race is more than a subtext in the second-term nod given President Obama. The easy analysis is to look at the overwhelming minority vote for the black guy, and the nearly 60 percent white vote for the white guy, and see a nation guided by skin color.

The flip side — optimism alert! — is to consider results from nearly all-white states like New Hampshire and Iowa. There, in the whitest of the swing states, Obama won handily. What was the white establishment thinking in Manchester and Des Moines? Probably not about the decline of their race.

The most retrograde public figure of this election is the despicable Donald Trump. After challenging the president's American birthright and legitimacy for a dim, hate-filled audience in the far right blogosphere, this man tweeted out calls for revolution on Tuesday night. "We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty."

His outburst prompted a memorable line from Brian Williams, that Trump had "driven well past the last exit to relevance." If he were flying a Confederate flag and swilling moonshine, Trump would be seen for what he is. But his money buys him protection from censure, particularly at NBC, which continues to write checks to him.

Romney's near-miss purged another type of bias: that a Mormon is unfit to be president. This particular chestnut long ago found a home with Southern Baptists, many of whom consider Mormonism a cult. Polls had shown that among evangelical Christians, religion was a bigger issue than race; in this case, a reason to vote against somebody. But it didn't hold up on Election Day, as Romney overwhelmingly carried the evangelical vote. "Mormon moment ends with a loss — but his religion still won," was the accurate headline Wednesday in The Salt Lake Tribune.

Through the years, Americans have expanded the vote, equal rights, and the ladder to broad prosperity. The G.I. Bill sent the warriors of the Greatest Generation off to college, and tax code progressivism of presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower ensured that wealth would not concentrate strictly with those who are born with it.

The challenge now, at a time when 40 percent of all wealth goes to 1 percent of the population, is to see if national policy can really do something to revert middle-class losses. I get tired of hearing about how countries like Sweden, Norway or Canada are so much ahead of us in taking care of their own. Agreed. But there are more people in just two of our states together, Texas and California, than in all three of those nations combined.

Anybody can form a perfect Norway, a nation of five million people. But there is no country on earth with our size, our racial diversity, our mix of religions that is close to bringing most of its citizens the rights and comforts of the modern age. Health care was always the big asterisk, and now, with Obama's re-election, this "right," as Franklin Roosevelt called it, is extended within our borders.

Those who see nothing but decline, loss and failure in Tuesday's results, those who see a victory for "the transfer-payment state," and the "entitlement mentality," miss the point. The winner on Tuesday was the Great Experiment, given fresh life.

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