John Leo
Splitting society, not hairs
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | The more polarized American society becomes, the more we see intellectuals explaining that this polarization isn't real — it's just the swordplay of media and political elites.
Each new bundle of
evidence saying,
"We're deeply divided"
is closely followed by
some prominent
commentator saying,
"No, we're not." Last
month, the Pew
Research Center
released a major
survey of today's
political landscape.
The title of the study
said it all: "Evenly
Divided and
Increasingly
Polarized." Andrew
Kohut, director of Pew, told me the anger level is so high that if the
demonstrators of 1968 had felt like this, "there would have been gunfire in the
streets."
Not so, wrote Robert Samuelson, one of our best and most balanced
columnists. He thinks the polarization of the 1960s was much worse, while
stridency today is in large part an attention-grabbing strategy adopted by
commentators, academics, and advocates. This would not seem to account
for the upsurge of bitterness and angry rhetoric, though the appearance of
two polarizing presidents in succession is clearly a factor.
Behind the smoke and fire, Samuelson thinks, most Americans are tolerant,
moderate, and in broad agreement on many issues. That was the conclusion
of the chief spokesman for the no-polarization argument, sociologist Alan
Wolfe of Boston College. After a broad study of middle-class Americans,
recounted in his influential 1998 book, One Nation, After All, Wolfe concluded
that the culture war is "being fought primarily by intellectuals."
Is this really so? If polarization is essentially confined to a small number of
actors clashing swords in front of klieg lights, why do polls show that the
number of centrists and swing votes is dwindling? This would explain why
both parties seem to spend so much time and money appealing to their
base — they are no longer convinced that there is much of a middle to appeal
to. I'm told by a reliable source that Karl Rove is working with data showing
that true swing voters are down to 7 percent of the electorate. (Kohut says
no — the percentage of legitimate swing voters is at least 20 points higher.)
Like most analysts who say they see no polarization, Samuelson cites America's great improvement in racial attitudes and increased tolerance for homosexuals. True, but left unsaid is that a fierce and apparently growing majority of Americans oppose gay marriage (up 6 points to 59 percent, according to Pew) and an even larger percentage of the public opposes racial preferences. (Wolfe found that 76 percent of blacks and 83 percent of whites oppose preferences even when the euphemism "priority" is used in the question.) These are not random findings but hot-button issues in a continuing war over basic values. If the left keeps using the courts to impose minority opinions on unwilling majorities, conflict will broaden and intensify.
Consider, too, the growing polarization that pits secularists against religious
people. In the 2000 Senate race in New York, two thirds of secularists voted
for Hillary Rodham Clinton and two thirds of religious people voted for Rick
Lazio. This kind of split showed up in House races around the country, says
Louis Bolce, an associate professor of political science at Baruch College in
New York City. The Pew study shows that the most religious states vote
Republican, the least religious go Democratic.
Antagonism. More and more, religiously
committed people tend to vote Republican,
largely because of "the increased
prominence of secularists within the
Democratic Party and the party's resulting
antagonism toward traditional values." That's
the judgment of Bolce and his Baruch
colleague Gerald De Maio in "Our Secularist
Democratic Party," an article in the
conservative intellectual journal Public Interest.
The gap started
opening at the 1972
Democratic convention
that nominated George
McGovern: A third of
the white delegates
were secular, compared
with 5 percent of the
general population. By
1992, the year the
culture war is said to
have broken into the
open, 60 percent of
first-time white
delegates to the
Democratic convention
were secularists or
nominally religious people who said they attend services a few times a year
or less.
The secular-religious gap, larger than the gender and class gaps journalists
like to focus on, is simply not on the media radar. Bolce and De Maio think
the Republicans became the traditionalist party almost by default — it had less
to do with Republican efforts than with the impact of secular progressives on
the Democratic Party. Many secularists in the Republican Party are leaving
to vote Democratic. The most intensely religious Democrats are heading the
other way. The obvious word for a shift like this is polarization.
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