In his belated concession speech, John Kerry spoke of his conversation with President Bush, in a phone call made earlier in the day to let him know the race was officially over. Kerry said they spoke of the "deep divisions" in the country and the need for "healing."

Later in the day, accepting his victory, President Bush referenced this conversation and reached out to all who voted for Mr. Kerry, saying that he would work to earn their trust and support.

But what Mr. Kerry and liberals mean by "division" and "healing" is far different than what President Bush and conservatives mean.

Liberal ideology rests upon the assumption that the differences between the two parties are differences of perception that can be dissolved through rhetoric. The Democratic party, since the ascendancy of Bill and Hilary Clinton, has convinced itself that style, not substance, wins elections, and that convincing people to support a candidate is a matter of gaming the message--so that a candidate's language speaks to the constituency in tones that soothe its anxieties. Two phrases from the Clinton era stick out as expressive of this attitude: "It's the economy, stupid," from the 1992 presidential campaign, and "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' means" from Clinton's Grand Jury testimony as part of the investigation of perjury in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit, and which lead to his impeachment.

The first phrase, "It's the economy, stupid," represents the successful shaping of a message that resonated during a time when the American public had grown used to the "peace dividend" of the Reagan engineered defeat of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War and the subsequent prosperity that followed. Looking back, it seems that a majority of the American public woke up with a kind of "success" hangover in the early nineties, and decided that it was time to pay the piper by drifting toward the perceived more socially responsible government of the democrats.

The second phrase, however, gives the lie to the idea that the democrats really ever cared about what the American public expected of their elected officials, and reminds us that the first phrase ends with the word "stupid." The near lack of a legislative mark left by Clinton's two terms in office perhaps provides proof of an American rejection of the liberal attitude about government as a tool for social engineering.

For liberals, message supersedes meaning. The economy, for instance, is growing more rapidly now than during the Clinton years, the unemployment rate is the same, and jobs are being created at a faster rate, interest rates are low, and gasoline--in constant dollars, costs a third less than it did in the early eighties (in today's dollars, for instance, oil cost $88 a barrel in 1982). But the media and the democrats have persistently described the economy now in the most dire terms--hoping against hope that Bush '43 could be defeated, in part, by a recycling of the message that removed his father from office. Clinton's lawyerly parsing of language, of course, during his
Grand Jury testimony reflects the attitude that what a sentence means is less important than how it is expressed.

But in 2004, such a strategy did not work because the liberal wing of the Democratic party has progressed so far from the heady days of Clinton's misadventures in the White House that it has, with John Kerry's candidacy, fully embraced in practice the core of its liberal philosophy.

In the days following Kerry's defeat, behind-the-scenes stories have been published that reflect this essential truth: that for the Democrats, John Kerry was irrelevant. And this goes beyond the view that the entire liberal effort in this election cycle was to remove Bush from office--no matter whom he was replaced by. Kerry's support with his own party regulars never got much beyond 50%. Polls throughout the campaign consistently reflected that a democratic vote in the election was equally divided between those who actually supported Kerry and those who simply hated President Bush.

But hate for President Bush on the left goes beyond a mere desire for power. The hate for the President is rooted in a genuine fear of what he represents--because the core philosophy of conservatism is a wholesale rejection of liberalism. For conservatives, language expresses meanings about a reality that is understood to be objective. This objective reality--whether it take the form of the Constitution, in the light of which we determine the legitimacy of our laws (not the other way around), or in the form of a belief in God, in the light of whose divinity we determine the legitimacy of our lives--does not bend according to the whims of our interpretations.

The great divide in this presidential election may be seen in the stark difference between the two candidates, their styles, their messages and the ways in which they ran their campaigns. John Kerry set out to convince a plurality of the electorate that he stood for what they believed. George Bush set out to convince a plurality that he believed what they stood for. Such a strategy lead Mr. Kerry to the excessively nuanced and contradictory statements he made on nearly every issue discussed in this campaign and revealed liberalism in all its glory as a philosophy with no core. As a result, as insiders are now telling us, Kerry's campaign was unfocused, scattershot, disorganized, and inefficient. By comparison, Bush's campaign remained focused and consistent on the issues that are most important to Americans right now--the War on Terror (including Iraq), national security, the economy and jobs, and social security. And by expressing what he believed and telling people how his beliefs on the issues would determine the actions he would pursue as President in a second term, he revealed himself to possess a quality impossible for Mr. Kerry: genuineness. Even if people did not agree with what the President said, at least they knew that he said what he meant.

It is telling that a few short days before the election, liberal feminist Camille Paglia--who supported Kerry--had this to say about the election: "If Bush wins this election, he did it on his own. Ever since the Republican Convention, he's been on fire, with a dynamic energy that makes him look like the underdog. He's cast off his paternalistic mentors and has come into his own as president. Going out to rallies really energizes him. And the crowds, who adore him, have truly made a turnaround, because for a while, the Republican base was a bit pathetic."

Paglia went on to speak of the moment she realized something of the qualitative difference between support for Bush and support for Kerry. She was sitting in her car listening to Sean Hannity on the radio: "He was talking slowly and thoughtfully after hanging up with a like-minded caller, and I got really alarmed. I said to myself, wow, here it is. It was a whole, comprehensive geopolitical picture: the only way we can win the war against terror is to take the fight to the terrorists abroad, America must be a beacon to the world. America has a divine mission to bring liberty to the world. It was a view of destiny that had a staggering clarity and simplicity.

"Now," she went on, "If the Democratic consultants had any brains, they would have viewed all this as an important system of ideas that needed to be logically addressed, instead of just sneering at it. This is a war of ideas! But too many Democrats rely on a juvenile Al Franken level of discourse--sneer, sneer, sneer at the benighted ones. We are all so superior in our little elite enclaves. So even if Kerry wins the election, the Democrats have lost this war of ideas."

And that is the story of the great "division" that needs to be "healed." A majority of Americans (including President Bush) understood that this election was a war of ideas. The minority did not recognize the fundamental truth that politics is not, at the end of the day, about policies and programs only. It is more fundamentally about those things that form the very basis and fabric of what it means to be human.

The founders wrote that government springs from the universal nature of mankind, whose condition is "self-evident" (which means, inarguable): we have the fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--regardless of whether we live in the United States, Iraq, or Afghanistan. These rights do not flow from the government. The government's existence rests upon this fundamental condition of our nature, its power flows from the people. Government exists therefore to "secure" these rights (which means to protect them), not to grant them.

When John Kerry spoke of healing the divisions in America, he was speaking of divisions between the liberals and the conservatives about policies and programs. And in doing so, he reflected the liberal belief that government exists as an organ of compromise. But these are not the divisions that actually decided the presidential race in 2004. The real divisions are between those who believe that truth is objective and those who believe that truth is subjective. For these latter, meaning springs from the message--and so is malleable and manipulable. For the former, the message expresses a meaning whose integrity remains unsullied by the distortions of its medium. The majority of Americans, Republican and Democratic alike, belong to that former group--as the election results attest.

The great divide then, as Camille Paglia rightly recognized before the election, is not between the left and the right--it is between the leftist leaders of the Democratic Party and the rank and file Democrats with whom they disagree more and more and whom they represent less and less.