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In the end, cultural disputes and widespread dismay over the country’s moral state overshadowed the economic optimism that was expected to put Al Gore in the White House, allowing Bush to eke out a victory.
All this goes to confirm that, to borrow a title from an earlier First Things article, "It’s the Culture, Stupid" (April 1994).
How would greater turnout have affected the election results in 2000? The conventional wisdom is that greater turnout helps Democratic candidates, but this chestnut is not necessarily true. Although nonvoters tend to be centrist on issues, perceive fewer differences between the candidates, and care less about the outcome than voters do, these generalizations apply within the context of particular religious groups. For example, evangelical nonvoters fall between their brethren who voted for Bush or Gore on such measures, but they were closer to Bush on moral issues, and closer to Gore on social welfare questions.
As political scientist Walter Dean Burnham has suggested, such complex party coalitions are best described by geological metaphors. Today the ancient ethnoreligious bedrock of vote choice has been eroded by rising tides of disengagement, while simultaneously being fractured by the upheavals of cultural politics. Indeed, the religious formations we saw in 2000 have been developing for some time and have now solidified. This fact has vital ramifications for governance. In the future Republicans will remain solicitous of traditionalists, and evangelical traditionalists in particular, while Democrats will privilege the concerns of religious minorities, secularists, and modernists. Regardless of well-meaning admonitions to both parties to "move to the center," ignoring such large core constituencies would be political suicide.
What is needed is "bridging" social capital: activity that reaches beyond the religious group itself to work with others on causes that involve "loving thy neighbor," but are not purely sectarian in nature. Traditionalist Protestants and Roman Catholics are remarkably generous in donating their time and energy to worthy causes: we find (as Putnam did) that they are much more engaged on the whole than religious liberals or secular people. But they are also more likely to volunteer in ways that bond them with one another, serving the needs of people within the community of faith, rather than connect to the needs of others beyond the fold. In this respect, the declining number of mainline Protestants is particularly disturbing, for this group
You're so right. The battle between true conservatives and laissez-faire libertarians for the soul of the American Right has begun. Those of you who don't believe me, check out the David Horowitz threads for proof. The libertines hate social conservatism as much or more than they hate economic liberalism.
A good many posters on FR have mistaken narcissistic hedonism and crass libertarianism with true conservatism, when in actuality the two have little in common. In the end, each of us will be forced to decide which worldview we will support. Those who choose to stand behind the humanistic principles of the so-called enlightenment and its egocentric core values of Materialism, Reason, and Freedom will count as libertarians; I myself stand firmly for traditionalist conservatism -- that philosophy that seeks to preserve and promote our common Western, Judeo-Christian culture and its bedrock values of Family, Property, and the Common Weal.
57 posted on 05/28/2003 2:23 PM EDT by B-Chan (Catholic. Monarchist. Texan. Any questions?)
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