Angry in America
This election is rubbing some folks raw...but maybe that's not all bad for democracy
The bad feelings began bubbling over just before dinner. Gathered at Tom LaLiberte's house near Minneapolis for a family reunion a few days before the first presidential debate last month, the five brothers and sisters in the LaLiberte clan tried in vain to hold their tongues through an unusually awkward annual get-together.
All 40-somethings, the siblings grew up in a close-knit, politically moderate household in the working-class suburb of Crystal, Minn. But the three youngest members of the LaLiberte clan, Tom, Mary, and Ann, became George W. Bush supporters in recent years, a decision their older siblings, Kathy and Mark, found increasingly hard to stomach in the wake of the last election's vote-counting fiasco and the war in Iraq.
Trying not to ruin an otherwise glorious fall afternoon, the family members endured a round of small talk as they sipped wine on Tom's back porch. But when Mark, 45, spied a copy of conservative TV host Sean Hannity's book Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism (which Tom had placed on a coffee table for fellow Republican Mary to take home and read), he just couldn't help himself.
"Can you believe Tom's reading this?" Mark asked eldest sister Kathy, 48, a card-carrying liberal herself.
Kathy was incredulous, too. "How can they read, much less believe in, this garbage?" she wondered aloud. "How can my own siblings be against healthcare and affordable housing and environmental protection and education?"
The book went back on the coffee table and the family sat down to dinner. But things only grew more uncomfortable, the stilted conversation marked less by what was said than by what wasn't. "It was just awful," recalls Mary, 43, who decided to keep mum through the meal. "Every time Mark and Kathy looked at me, I felt like they were thinking, 'How can you be so stupid?' And I was like, 'How can you be so judgmental?' It used to be that we could agree to disagree and still have a great time together. But now it's gotten so personal."
Caught up in one of the most divisive election seasons since the Vietnam War (when Richard Nixon edged Hubert Humphrey by less than 1 percent of the popular vote), the LaLibertes are hardly the only ones who've seen politics begin to sour some of their closest relationships. Egged on by campaign rivals who have all but called each other liars and emboldened by partisan shout shows like Fox's Hannity & Colmes and movies like Michael Moore's finger-pointing Fahrenheit 9/11, America's angry electorate has found it increasingly difficult to stop political disagreements from flaring into outright relationship-breakers. The depth of the nation's polarization is the subject of considerable scholarly debate (story, Page 42). But with just a couple of weeks to go until the election, there's little doubt that the atmosphere around America's lunch counters and dining-room tables has grown downright prickly.
"There's this roiling anger that people don't know where to direct or how to deal with," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently watched a fellow airline passenger ask to be moved after seeing his seatmate reading a book by Moore. "I was astonished. Until then it hadn't occurred to me just how personal we've made politics, that you can't even sit next to someone just because they're reading a book you don't like."
She and other political analysts say the bad blood stems, in part, from the infamous hanging-chad debacle of 2000, which fostered deep resentment among some Democrats who still believe the election was stolen. Although the 9/11 tragedy pulled the country together, Democrats' outrage returned as the Iraq body count grew and the search for banned weapons turned up nothing.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have had their own torches to carry. With the party largely transformed over the past two decades into a full-blown conservative movement, many have taken on an almost missionary zeal, led by conservative Christian members whose stands on moral issues--reinforced by President Bill Clinton's antics--have become keystones of the Republican platform. "There's a sense among many Republicans that their stands on the issues aren't just about better policy choices; they're matters of personal morality and principle," says Bill Chaloupka, a political scientist at Colorado State University. "So anyone who disagrees with you isn't just disagreeing, they're insulting your core values and threatening your way of life."
Pollsters note fundamental differences in those core values between voters in so-called red and blue states. Nearly twice as many red-state voters attend weekly religious services as do blue-state voters, and 50 percent more red staters say they want their president to worship a higher being, according to a Values Poll conducted by pollster John Zogby earlier this year. "The overwhelming majority of red-state voters define that higher being in morally absolutist terms, good versus evil," says Zogby. "But in blue states, the overwhelming majority define that higher being in terms of morality writ small, live and let live, God loves everyone."
Polarizing. Their contrasting viewpoints have only been sharpened by the rising tide of fear that has gripped the nation since 9/11: fear of terrorism, fear of war, fear of judicial appointments that could sway the courts on fractious moral issues like abortion and gay marriage. President Bush's strong stands on such topics have made him "a polarizing figure," notes Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, galvanizing the president's supporters while simultaneously enraging his opponents.
Take, for example, his policy of preemptive military action, which has nearly as much support today as it did before the Iraq war, according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Center. The reason: While Democrats' support of the policy has fallen by 14 percentage points to less than half since May 2003, Republicans' approval has surged to nearly 90 percent. "The divide has grown deeper as people have become more entrenched in their positions on the war and on terrorism," says Kohut. "They don't want to hear anything but what they want to hear. And when they do, they get hostile."
That's certainly what happened after Pete Thompson convinced his pal Alex Prywes to attend a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11 last summer. The two friends from San Francisco had sparred over politics in the past, "but we'd never really taken it too seriously," Prywes says. That changed, however, as they emerged from the movie.
"So what did you think?" asked Thompson, 31.
"I don't really know, I fell asleep," responded Prywes, 28, who had promised himself before the movie that he wouldn't get into an argument.
Thompson was appalled that anyone could doze off in the face of such incendiary content. "I looked at him and thought, 'How can I have a conversation with this guy if he won't even look at the facts?' " says Thompson, who hasn't spoken to Prywes since. "Fundamentally, he's a good guy and stuff. But it's just not worth the aggravation."
Prywes says he, too, has grown frustrated. "When I try to present contrary evidence for why I support Bush, rather than engaging in an intelligent discussion about the issues, I instead have to defend my own moral character," complains Prywes, "as if there was something defective about me." Of their fractured four-year friendship, he says, "It's no loss on my part. I actually felt like I was getting dumber every time I had to listen to him."
Throwback. Such contemptuous partisanship represents a stark contrast to Americans' long-running inclination toward political apathy and post-Watergate cynicism, which has fed a steady decline in voter turnout (51.3 percent in the 2000 election), as well as a marked decrease in party affiliation.
Indeed, today's sharpening partisanship represents a throwback to the raucous political days of the late 19th century, when voters wore their party allegiances on their lapels and party bosses assured healthy turnout by promising goodies like jobs and Christmas turkeys. "Your party defined who you were and who your family and friends were," says political historian Michael McGerr, author of The Decline of Popular Politics. "You lived together and worked together. You read the partisan newspaper that was loyal to your party, and you accused the other one of lying."
Yet for all their intense partisanship, our political predecessors didn't take things nearly as personally as we do today. While there were clashes with political opponents, they rarely involved personal animosity between rank-and-file partisans. Instead, "the opposing sides would make these absurd bets. 'If your candidate wins, I'll push a penny across the town green with my nose or shave off one side of my goatee.' It was a way of taking something deeply partisan and making it possible to deal with amicably," McGerr says of such rituals. But with political allegiances so intensely intertwined with identity today, "people just don't know how to be partisan without getting personal," adds Colorado State's Chaloupka.
That's what happened when Al Salmon, 69, recently emerged from his house in Moorestown, N.J., wearing a hat bearing the logo "USS Abraham Lincoln," the aircraft carrier where President Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq last year.
"Oh, the 'Mission Accomplished' ship?" his next-door neighbor Kevin Aberant, 34, said sarcastically when he saw the ex-marine's hat. "Isn't that the hundreds-more-are-going-to-die ship?"
"Would you rather that Saddam was still there?" Salmon shot back.
The two had traded barbs in the past, and Aberant had posted a Kerry-Edwards sign in his front yard to compete with Salmon's IM4W sign and a bumper sticker reading, "Ten Reasons I Don't Vote For Liberals: The Ten Commandments." But when Salmon donned the hat, Aberant says he "just lost it." Realizing things could turn nasty, "I had to walk away so we would stay friends."
Yet with so much at stake this time around, some feel they have little choice but to stick their necks out. That's how Margie Gilmore, 39, felt when she brought her 3-month-old daughter to visit her parents last month on Maryland's Eastern Shore. She had already come out to them as a lesbian, but the family rarely discussed their political views. "We just don't go there," she says.
But when she pulled into her parents' driveway and saw a Bush-Cheney sticker on their best friend's car, "I knew I had to say something," she recalls. "I'm afraid to ask who you're voting for because it would be so painful if you're voting for Bush," she later told her father over breakfast. "Don't you see that there's discrimination [against gays wanting to marry] and that by voting for Bush you're supporting the perpetrator?"
"I haven't heard Kerry say anything very constructive about what he would do to support you," her father responded defensively.
"Well, he wouldn't try to change the Constitution," she said, starting to cry.
The heated conversation left a pit in everyone's stomach. So much so that Gilmore's father, Jack, thought hard about it that night and then told her that he and his wife had decided to switch their votes. "I was leaning toward the Republican because I'm one of the guys who think the Democrats are really tax and spend," he admits. "But Bush's push for a constitutional amendment [on marriage] is wrong. And because it's such a passionate thing for Margie, that was enough to swing our vote. Family members aren't always going to agree on politics. But for the parents not to go with the feeling of their child on such a personal issue, well, I feel sorry for them."
The younger Gilmore couldn't be more pleased. "I just got two votes for Kerry," she says proudly. "And those were hard votes to get."
Analysts on both sides think that such passion could lead to a more energized electorate and higher voter turnout--both potentially positive developments. "To the extent that all this gets people more engaged in the political process, that's really not such a bad thing," says modern American historian Ellen Fitzpatrick. That's how the matriarch of the LaLiberte family sees it. Although mother Carol, 70, is concerned about the rift between her children, "I can't get too upset because I raised them to think for themselves," she says. "If some of my kids vote for Bush, I say go for it. If the others vote for Kerry, go for it. I just hope and pray that when this is over that they say, 'let's work together,' because we desperately need to take care of our country."
With Robert Zausner
This story appears in the October 25, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.