What Culture Wars?

"There is a religious war going on in this country, a cultural war as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America."

With those ringing words insurgent candidate Pat Buchanan fired up his supporters at the 1992 Republican National Convention. To be sure, not all delegates cheered Mr. Buchanan's call to arms, which was at odds with the "kinder, gentler" image that George H.W. Bush had attempted to project. Election analysts later listed Mr. Buchanan's fiery words among the factors contributing to the defeat of President Bush, albeit one of lesser importance than the slow economy and the repudiation of his "Read my lips, no new taxes" pledge.

In the years since Mr. Buchanan's declaration of cultural war, the idea of a clash of cultures has become a common theme in discussions of American politics. The culture-war metaphor refers to a displacement of the classic economic conflicts that animated 20th-century politics in the advanced democracies by newly emergent moral and cultural ones. The literature generally attributes Mr. Buchanan's inspiration to a 1991 book, "Culture Wars," by sociologist James Davison Hunter, who divided Americans into the culturally "orthodox" and the culturally "progressive" and argued that increasing conflict was inevitable.

No one has embraced the concept of the culture war more enthusiastically than journalists, ever alert for subjects that have "news value." Conflict is high in news value. Disagreement, division, polarization, battles and war make good copy. Agreement, consensus, moderation, compromise and peace do not. Thus, the notion of a culture war fits well with the news sense of journalists who cover politics. Their reports tell us that contemporary voters are sharply divided on moral issues. As David Broder wrote in the Washington Post in November 2000, "The divide went deeper than politics. It reached into the nation's psyche . . . It was the moral dimension that kept Bush in the race."

Additionally, it is said that close elections do not reflect indifferent or ambivalent voters; rather, such elections reflect evenly matched blocs of deeply committed partisans. According to a February 2002 report in USA Today, "When George W. Bush took office, half the country cheered and the other half seethed," while some months later The Economist wrote that "Such political divisions cannot easily be shifted by any president, let alone in two years, because they reflect deep demographic divisions . . . The 50-50 nation appears to be made up of two big, separate voting blocks, with only a small number of swing voters in the middle."

Mr. Fiorina's article takes a centrist perspective. He is undoubtedly correct when he states that the large majority of Americans do not subscribe fully to either the secular humanist culture of the American left and worldview or the largely evangelical Christian culture and worldview of the American right.

There are geographic areas of the country that are predominantly supportive of one group or the other: the San Francisco Bay area for the left, the Texas Panhandle and High Plains for the right. Most American areas do not offer such broad contrasts. What distinguishes "Blue" Illinois from "Red" Indiana? Mainly the presence of a very large, liberal metro area with a mostly minority central city in the former state. The impact of Gary, Hammond, South Bend, etc., is minimal in comparison. Neither is any area entirely monolithic. Texas, a very "Red" state, has a state capital (Austin) that is sometimes considered Berkeley on the prairie. New York City, the Holy City of liberalism, is home to National Review, Rush Limbaugh, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, the American Catholic Civil Rights League, Sean Hannity, etc.

What the author fails to account for are those times when polarization occurs and sides are taken. There have been three times in our history when this has occurred: the War for Independence, the Civil War, and the New Deal. All of these were revolutionary epochs. It's hard to imagine homosexual unions triggering a 21st Century Lexington and Concord or Fort Sumter. An issue like, say, Mexican-Americans attempting a "Reconquista" of the Southwest, a leftist government in Washington mandating firearms confiscation in Appalachia, the Plains states, or the Mountain states, or a rightist government attempting to impose a draft in the big cities and college towns might be a trigger.

One of the best books on politics I have ever read is James Davidson Hunter, Before the Shooting Begins (Free Press, 1994). (He is the author of the book Culture Wars.) He examined the rhetoric on abortion to show how both sides talk past each other and do not understand each other's positions and beliefs. He thought that this was ominous because of the beginning of violence (ten years ago) over this issue; he thought that political conditions in the country were beginning to resemble the abolitionist era in the decade or two prior to the Civil War.

One of the reasons the book made a big impression on me is that while the author indicated he was making an effort not to reveal his own position on abortion, he dissected the pro-abortion arguments in a rather devastating way. The pro-aborts kept trying to open a dialog with their opponents to arrive at some sort of a "middle ground" (that would accommodate abortion), but the pro-aborts only succeed in demonstrating an abysmal ignorance of the foundations of the pro-life position. I was still rather liberal in those days but Hunter actually changed my attitudes on abortion.

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