Victor Davis Hanson on the mandate granted to President Bush by the American people: American Exceptionalism.

The Democrats now lament that America would prefer to be “wrong” with George Bush than “right” with them. They will no doubt adduce a number of other paradoxes, excuses, and sorrows. But the fact is that the Left was united, well-funded, and ran the most vitriolic campaign in the Democratic party’s history — and still lost, taking all branches of power with it. The New York Times and the major networks have undone their legacy of a half-century, and in the desire for cheap partisan advantage have ruined the reputations of anchor men, the very notion of fair front-page reporting, and, indeed, the useful concept itself of an exit poll. 60 Minutes, Nightline, ABC News — these are now seen by millions as mere highbrow versions of Fahrenheit 9/11.

Much of the world — in Europe, among the dictatorships and autocracies of the Middle East, and indeed among the terrorists themselves — realized that the presidential election was a referendum on America’s will in both Afghanistan and Iraq. So be it. Thus the president’s victory is a strong message to the Arab League that democracy is coming to the Middle East as it did earlier to Germany, Japan, South Korea, Panama, Serbia, and Afghanistan, and a message to the terrorists that their beheadings, their sick infomercials, and their deified mass murderers will only earn a rendezvous with defeat if not annihilation. The farmers of Utah, the plant workers of Ohio, and the immigrants of Florida are not the same folk as those of Spain. America saw the election-eve face of bin Laden, heard his pathetic rant — and shrugged that he, not it, was going down.

Finally, with the Kerry defeat we should lay to rest the Left’s latest revisionism that was much in vogue during the last few months in the mainstream media — promulgated by journalists and pundits in places like Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic. We were lectured ad nauseam that the terrorists did not — as did extremists of all ages such as the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviet totalitarians — hate us for our allegiance to consensual government, modernism, and the freedom of the individual, but rather had understandable grievances because of our support for Israel, the war in Iraq, or the presence of oil companies in the Middle East. That canard too was rejected by the voters.