How deep the divide?
Scholars and pundits don't agree on the meaning of red and blue--or whether the nation is deeply split
Thanks to the power of the image--namely, those brightly colored maps used by TV analysts--the 2000 presidential election has come to be seen as the birth of two nations, one red and one blue. But what do those colors really tell us about American voters and the election that lies just ahead? The answers range from "almost everything" to "almost nothing." For even on the question of our divided condition, Americans, it seems, are strongly divided.
To many pundits, scholars, and activists, red and blue unquestionably delineate the two sides of a deep chasm running through the middle of American society, a geopolitical fault line created, most say, by differences in cultural and religious values. Red folks are NASCAR-lovin', gun-ownin', God-fearin' Republicans who mostly inhabit the rural, suburban, and small-town heartland stretching from the Deep South through the Great Plains and into the mountain states. Blue types, by contrast, are highly secular, latte-sipping, diversity-embracing Democrats concentrated in the urban areas on the two coasts and around the Great Lakes.
Conflict. These portraits are crude, of course--even caricatures. The "populist" reds are often hard to distinguish from the "elitist" blues in their deepest beliefs and values as well as in their more superficial consumer styles, and the two groups live more geographically intermingled lives than any bicolored electoral map would suggest. Then, too, some two-nation proponents say that economics and class are deeper causes of what only appears to be a predominantly cultural conflict.
Whatever their differences, though, all red-blue theorists believe that the divide is a deep and significant political reality. The most recent addition to this school of thought is the lavishly marketed, liberal manifesto The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, by Arizona entrepreneur John Sperling. While the book is at least partly an exercise in creative rebranding--red is dubbed retro; blue is renamed metro--the author has a much bolder agenda: to show why and how Democrats should regain control of the American political landscape by playing forcefully to their natural metro constituency and ignoring the retros. If his politics are decidedly liberal, though, Sperling speaks with the certainty of most red-blue theorists: "The electorate," he says, "is deeply divided."
But listen to Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina, and you hear a very different story. American voters may be divided quite evenly along electoral lines, Fiorina argues in his new book, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, but the divisions between most Americans on even the most hot-button cultural issues, including abortion, are not that deep. "That divide," says Fiorina, "is usually exaggerated."
Confusion. Facts on the ground do little to settle the matter. On one hand, as the Austin American-Statesman reports, "By 2000, about half of the nation's voters lived in counties where one party or another won the presidential election by 20 percentage points or more." So the geopolitical blue-red divide rules? Well, only if that quarter of the electorate called the swing voters--who inhabit both weakly and strongly partisan counties--is as unimportant as Sperling and others would have us believe.
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.
Yet Fiorina sees the lost liberal hegemony of the Democrats and the emergence of an evenly divided electorate as less the product of a winning Republican strategy than the result of the transformation of the political process, including party reform and the rise of ideologically driven purists in both parties and, again, the sorting into parties of more rigidly aligned partisans. His analysis of the data on, for instance, voters' attitudes toward abortion (particularly when broken down into situations when the respondents think it should be permitted) and gay marriage shows fewer strong differences than commonalities among the vast majority of Republicans, Democrats, and independents. In other words, most voters are out of sync with the absolutist positions of the highly polarized party elites. The conclusion would seem to be that culture warring alone will not lead to a solid Republican majority coalition.
The Democratic Party's efforts to rebuild a majority coalition also run up against problems raised in the two-nations debate. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton tended to rein in progressive federal programs and trim bureaucracy, sensing Americans' growing distrust of "big government." But if Clinton's "reinvention" of government seemed popular enough to secure his re-election, many traditional liberal critics argue that "new Democrats" have steadily chipped away at those policies and programs that once made the party attractive to the majority of working- and middle-class Americans. "The difference between Clinton and other DLC [Democratic Leadership Council] Democrats and Republicans is very small compared to differences between the DLC Democrats and the Democrats they replaced, such as Hubert Humphrey," says Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. By becoming Republican Party Lite in social and economic policies, Frank adds, the Democrats have basically allowed the Republicans to seize the populist mantle simply by appearing more folksy and standing for the traditional cultural values that most red Americans are drawn to.
Frank's solution to the great divide--return to the populist-progressive policies of the FDR Democrats--is one that Sperling takes up with a vengeance. But Sperling isn't worried about the voters in Kansas or any of the other retro states. They are, in his view, on the down slope of history, demographically and economically. Metro America, by which he means all the blue states in the last presidential election plus a few other ought-to-be blues (Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Virginia), are the future. The economic engine of the nation, they put more into the federal till than do the retro states, whose residents get more back from the government they complain about than metro-state folks do. "America receives huge subsidies, and it exports huge amounts of agricultural products," he says, "but industrial metro America doesn't receive a dime of support." Democrats, he argues, should not only advocate increased support for industries in metro states (including reasonably protectionist "fair-trade" policies); they should also be bold about standing for the progressive values, including gay marriage and abortion, that most metro Americans support.
This embrace-the-divide-to-conquer strategy receives, at best, mixed reviews from prominent neoliberal and centrist thinkers. "The trends in secularism and education might give metro Americans a political advantage over the long run," says Stanley Greenberg, a former Clinton pollster and now an adviser to the Kerry campaign. But Greenberg strongly rejects Sperling's strategy both as a flawed political strategy for the Democrats and as a bad prescription for America. "The problem is that metro areas contain many diverse worldviews," he says. "The assumption that metros will all come together is a stretch."
Contention. And as a presidential election strategy, he notes, Sperling's approach seems to wish away the fact that the Electoral College has a bias for rural states. "We can keep replicating 2000, coming out 49/49 with his strategy," Greenberg continues, "but most of what he would hope to achieve would take a long time and still divide the nation." Greenberg would rather see the Democratic candidates play down cultural issues, abandon interest-group pandering, and accentuate innovative policies that maximize opportunities for all Americans.
Ted Halstead, president of the New America Foundation and coauthor of The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics, believes that Sperling's remedy would only aggravate the extreme partisanship that already turns off so much of the alienated center of the electorate. "I think it's not only overly simplistic but a mischaracterization of what some of the most dynamic parts of the country are, and it's certainly not a very encouraging strategy for Democrats," he says. The great, disenchanted center, Halstead believes, would like to hear more about those kinds of innovative policies that Greenberg alludes to. The winning formula, he believes, is to blend flexibility and fairness, whether in healthcare policy or in future Social Security plans.
Whether the promotion of such innovative policies would allow one party or the other to forge a new and lasting majority coalition may not come to a fair test in this election. Concerns about foreign policy and national security will very likely trump economic and social policy issues. And if the foreign-policy debate can be framed within the broad terms of the existing culture war--and particularly around the question of the character of the leader--it is doubtful that the great divide will even begin to be closed. America's two nations, red and blue, real or largely chimerical, are likely to be with us for some time yet.
This story appears in the October 25, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.