The Enemy At Home (9 page)

The depth of the divide can be seen in the vehemence that attends contemporary debate. Nicholson Baker writes a political tract, barely disguised as a novel, about a man who wants to kill President Bush. Philip Roth offers his attempt at social criticism with his book
The Plot Against America,
described by reviewer James Wolcott as “a cautionary tale about how easily the country could slide into fascism.” Liberal columnists like Jonathan Chait confess to “Bush hatred,” which Chait defines as “a deep and personal loathing for Bush.” Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean describes the Republicans as “a white Christian party.”
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This is the political equivalent of a Republican leader describing the Democrats as the party of blacks, homosexuals, and atheists. The issue here is not whether these descriptions are accurate. It is the sharp decline in civility that such characterizations reveal.

Even sober voices have succumbed to the new stridency. In the months leading up to the 2004 election, liberal jurist Guido Calabresi gave a speech before the American Constitution Society in New York in which he said that Bush had ascended to the presidency through a kind of legal coup. Referring to the Supreme Court’s decision to declare Bush the winner of the 2000 election, Calabresi said, “Somebody came to power as a result of the illegitimate acts of a legitimate institution.” Then he added, “That is exactly what happened when Mussolini was put in by the king of Italy.”
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Minor in itself, this episode is revealing because Calabresi is not a reckless man of the left. He is the former dean of the Yale Law School and now a federal judge. He is a widely respected and thoughtful liberal. The immoderation of his remarks shows the degree to which political campaigns have become exercises in character assassination. It is also an indicator of how civility has virtually disappeared from American politics. The “vital center” is largely gone, and now there is only the angry left and the angry right. The titles of recent books convey this anger:
Treason
,
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy,
and so on.

While some see the acrimony of contemporary politics as a mark of a general deterioration of American culture, I think it is also an indication of an erosion of shared values between liberals and conservatives. No longer do the two sides have the same goals and merely disagree about how to get there. In that situation the parties can easily see the benefits of civility and compromise. Now, however, liberals and conservatives seem to inhabit two different moral universes. They have different and sometimes irreconcilable objectives. In many cases, what one side considers good and desirable, the other side considers destructive and dangerous. In some ways the two groups want to live in very different countries.

Since liberalism and conservatism are the guiding principles of the Democratic and Republican Parties, the two major parties have become strange to each other in a way that America has not seen since 1860, when one faction saw slavery as a “positive good” and the other saw it as an entrenched evil. Now, as then, the two sides have difficulty recognizing each other as legitimate, as fully American, as possessing the same moral decency that we all take for granted in ourselves. The vicious liberal attacks on Bush, which parallel the vicious conservative attacks on Clinton, are a way of saying, “We have difficulty recognizing you as human beings who inhabit the same moral planet that we do. Consequently we see you as usurpers and moral reprobates who should be hounded and driven from the corridors of power by any means necessary.”

The new moral divide has confused many observers because traditionally American politics has been divided along economic lines. In previous decades politics was very simple: wealthier people voted Republican and poorer people voted Democrat. Historically, the only clear exception to this voting pattern was Jews. As Irving Kristol once noted, Jews are the only group that earns like Episcopalians and votes like Puerto Ricans. But now the political ground has shifted, and in voting habits most of America has “gone Jewish.” Indeed no group today, with the exception of African Americans, can be counted on to vote its economic self-interest.

The liberal political scientist Thomas Frank noticed this, and is greatly disturbed by it. During the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, Frank saw what we all saw: the Democrats won the Northeastern states and the West Coast, plus a couple of Midwestern states, and the Republicans won the rest of the country. The significance of this was not lost on Frank. The richest states in the country were now voting Democratic, and the poorest states were voting Republican. Frank was especially perturbed to find out that in his home state of Kansas, all the poorest counties voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Frank concluded that a nefarious scheme was afoot: crafty Republican strategists were using religious and moral demagoguery to hoodwink poor people into voting against their economic interests!
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Unfortunately Frank’s one-eyed analysis prevented him from seeing the other side of the equation: if right-wing demagogues were conning the poor into a senseless alliance with Republicans, it would seem to follow that left-wing demagogues were bamboozling the rich into equally irrational support for Democrats. Frank never considered the possibility that neither group was being misled; rather, Americans at all economic levels are now voting on the basis of something other than, and perhaps more important than, their pocketbooks. This is not to say that economic issues are irrelevant. The pocketbook still counts, and poorer people are still on average more likely to be Democrats, and richer people to be Republicans. But economic class is no longer a good predictor of political preference. It has ceased to be the animating issue in American politics.

IN ORDER TO
chart the moral and ideological divide in today’s America, let’s begin with a brief look at the results of the two previous presidential elections. I’m not sure if you noticed, but in the last two presidential elections every place in America with good restaurants voted for Al Gore and John Kerry. The political divide seems to reflect a culinary divide, or more broadly a cultural divide. Political pundits refer to this as the red state–blue state divide. This classification has its limits. Certainly many red states went narrowly for Bush and obviously contain a substantial minority of blue voters, and the reverse is true of the blue states that went for the Democratic candidate. If you look more closely at the electoral map, however, you will see a more illuminating distinction: in both presidential elections, virtually all the big cities went for Gore and Kerry, and virtually all the rural areas and small towns went for Bush. Viewed this way, liberal Democrats are the party of the urban lifestyle, and conservative Republicans are the party of the small-town lifestyle.

Even this analysis is incomplete, because there are some small-town liberals and big-city conservatives. There are NASCAR leftists and latte-sipping right-wingers. Liberal columnist Molly Ivins claims that she is a pickup-driving, beer-drinking, rodeo-watching liberal. These examples show that our cultural markers are not entirely accurate. To get to the real difference, one has to dig deeper. Political scientist Morris Fiorina, a colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution, disagrees with this approach. Pointing out the obvious flaws of the red America–blue America framework, he challenges the notion that there is any deep divide in American politics. His argument is that it is the political parties and the political activists, not the American people, who are bitterly divided. Fiorina draws on opinion poll data to make his case that the American people retain many shared values, even on controversial issues like abortion and homosexuality, and that political and cultural divisions, where they exist, are not as stark as some people think.
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I disagree with Fiorina on two counts. First, if the major parties and the political leadership of the country are deeply divided, then the nation is deeply divided, and the views of the “American people” don’t enter into it at all. Abraham Lincoln once said that America is ruled by “public opinion,” but by this he did not mean the opinion of the American public. The opinion of the American people counts—but only on Election Day. So how is America ruled? By elected leaders, yes, but what shapes the parameters of their choices? Public opinion. Here “public opinion” refers to the views of the minority of Americans who actively participate in political debate and shape the way that major issues are decided. Are you a member of this political elite? If you subscribe to the
Atlantic Monthly,
call in to the Rush Limbaugh radio show, contribute to moveon.org, write letters to your local newspaper, subscribe to the Focus on the Family newsletter, attend political conventions, or read political blogs on the Internet, you are part of the influential group of Americans that make “public opinion.” If you don’t know who Dick Cheney is, couldn’t locate the Middle East on a map, and don’t vote if it’s raining outside, then you are not part of American “public opinion,” and thank God for it!

When Fiorina concedes that American political parties and their most active supporters are further apart than ever before, he is conceding far more than he recognizes. Traditionally, the two parties were more like political clubs. The Republicans were a kind of Rotary Club and the Democrats a kind of Kiwanis Club. Both parties were ideologically diverse. For example, the Democratic Party was the party of civil rights—and of the Southern segregationists. (Bull Connor was not a Republican.) But in the past few decades the Democratic Party has become a liberal party and the Republican Party a conservative party. The moral divide in American politics is now expressed in the organized preferences of the two major parties.

My second criticism is that Fiorina’s own data show profound differences between liberals and conservatives on both foreign policy and social and moral issues. Fiorina’s data is corroborated by a study of the ideological and partisan divide in American politics conducted by the Pew Research Center. According to the Pew study, most Republicans and conservatives support the Iraq war, while most Democrats and liberals oppose it. There is an equally significant divide between conservatives and liberals on moral issues. While a substantial majority of conservatives think “government should do more to protect morality in society,” nearly 90 percent of liberals think “the government is getting too involved in the issue of morality.” Republicans and conservatives rank strengthening the country’s moral values and protecting the homeland from terrorism as their highest priorities. By contrast, the Pew study found, “Just 2 percent of Kerry voters volunteer any topic related to moral values, and even fewer mention terrorism” as priorities they consider central.
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Fiorina downplays these differences by stressing areas of agreement among most Americans. We all know that Americans agree on certain things. For example, Americans agree that when there is a natural disaster, like hurricane Katrina, the federal government should help. Americans also agree that homosexuals are human beings who should be treated with tolerance and decency. Americans generally believe that abortion should be permitted under certain circumstances. Americans overwhelmingly believe that people of different religious faiths, or no faith, should be free to follow their convictions without government interference.

All of this is true, but largely irrelevant to politics. Politics focuses on those issues on which people disagree. At one time “the family” was not a political issue because there was widespread social agreement about it. Now the family is a source of heated debate—because the two sides strongly disagree on what a family is and on which “family values” American society should actively promote. Similarly, religion has become a major political issue because liberals and conservatives now have very different views of what role religion should play in public life.

Religion and family are now at the center of the moral divide in contemporary America. This can be seen not just from the intensity of public debate over the two issues, but also from the actual voting behavior of the American people. After the 2004 election, there was a moment of liberal panic when commentators saw that nearly 25 percent of Americans said they voted on the basis of “moral values.” Many of these commentators expressed relief when further analysis showed that Americans cast their ballots on the basis of a whole host of important issues, including unemployment, free trade, Iraq, and homeland security. If we look again at the election results, however, we find two extremely powerful predictors of the electoral choices of the American people.

The first is religious practice. Election results showed that religious Americans were vastly more likely to vote for Bush, and non-religious or secular Americans were vastly more likely to vote for Bush’s opponent. Bush overwhelmingly won the evangelical Christian vote, but he also won heavily among churchgoing Catholics and Orthodox Jews. In the 2000 election, two out of three regular churchgoers voted for Bush and three out of four secular voters went for Gore. Four years later the same pattern was evident: Bush won the votes of practicing Catholics and Protestants by 25 percentage points, while Kerry won the nonreligious vote by a stunning 40 point margin.
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The second reliable predictor of American voting behavior is family status. Married people, especially married people with children, were far more likely to vote for Bush. This pattern, which was evident in the 2000 election, became even more pronounced in 2004. Married voters that year favored Bush over Kerry by 15 percentage points, while unmarried voters preferred Kerry by a margin of 18 points.
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Former Clinton pollster Dick Morris points out that the “marriage gap” is far more significant than the “gender gap,” and it shows some interesting contours. Taking note of group voting trends, Morris observes, “If a woman is divorced, she is almost certain to be a Democrat. If she’s single, she is likely to lean Democratic. If she’s married, she’s likely to lean Republican. If she’s married with children, she’s safely in the Republican camp.” The point here is not that Americans vote based on their religious affiliation or family status but that being religious, married, and a parent shapes the moral compass through which people see the whole range of political issues, from gay marriage to the war against terrorism. Religion and family are not the “issue” but the lens through which the issues are perceived.