How deep the divide?
Scholars and pundits don't agree on the meaning of red and blue--or whether the nation is deeply split
Faced with such conflicting facts, political analysts and observers of all partisan hues not only argue over how deep and sharp the divide runs but disagree about whether it's a good or bad thing. They also come to strikingly different conclusions about what should be done about it, for the good of each party and even for the good of the nation.
The great divide, whether real or illusory, didn't begin with the 2000 election, of course. Neither national party has been able to forge a lasting majority coalition since the late 1960s, when the one FDR built finally came undone. But something about those brightly colored maps the TV folks kept pointing to throughout Election Day 2000 fixed the image in Americans' minds.
After the votes were in, the analysts started going at it, chart and graph. "It was almost as if two different Americas were voting," wrote U.S. News columnist Michael Barone in his comprehensive Almanac of American Politics 2002. In his view, the results of the George W. Bush-Al Gore race had foiled political expectations that had begun to form in the mid-1990s, when leaders of both parties "had reason to believe they could forge majority coalitions by 2000." But what kept 49 percent of Americans voting one way and 49 percent the other? Not differences in income, primarily, or any other economic factor. Not gender or generation gaps, either. No, according to Barone, what divided people was to some extent race and, to an overwhelming extent, religion. The numbers spoke clearly: Conservative Christians (Protestant and Roman Catholic) and regular churchgoers in general went decisively for Bush. Liberal religionists and unchurched folk leaned far more toward Gore.
Does that mean that all the kulturkampf theorists were right then? Well, maybe. While most of the pundit class took up that theme, one of the more successful pieces of pop sociology dealing with the two-nation thesis, David Brooks's 2001 Atlantic Monthly essay, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," complicated the picture. Published only three months after 9/11, the piece actually concluded that while "there are some real differences between red and blue America, there is no fundamental conflict." But that point was either widely ignored or quickly forgotten. Instead, Brooks's essay, rich with humorous anecdotes and details emphasizing how different the worlds of red and blue Americans were, came to be thought of as the definitive two-Americas story. Even more curious, Brooks himself came to believe that Americans were more strongly divided than he had said in his Atlantic essay, though not so much along cultural fault lines. "In culture and policy, there is a big center," Brooks now says. "But in partisanship, there are stronger divisions." As a result of lining up with either party, big parts of the electorate, he believes, have become, or are becoming, more deeply polarized. "It's like when people become fans of a team," Brooks says. "Over time, they become even more devoted to it."
Conviction. Which becomes more interesting in the context of the political strategies and developments that have been remaking the body politic in the past 30-odd years. Republicans, particularly since Ronald Reagan, have been aggressively and unapologetically exploiting cultural wedge issues, whether abortion, school prayer, or gay marriage, to win votes. And since their triumphs at least helped undo the FDR-built majority coalition, it is hard to say they didn't hit on a winning strategy.
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