On Divided America

Billmon:

If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government…

The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.

But this too puts a premium on hot button politics -- in order to pull what would otherwise be a diverse collection of individuals with diverse interests and opinions (conservative on gun control, for example, or liberal on the environment) into one politico-cultural camp or the other. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the biggest political success stories for the traditionalists lately has been the rise of the megachurches, which often draw from a broad cross section of suburban society, generally offer an extremely generic brand of Protestantism, but indoctrinate their members in a very specific brand of conservative politics, usually built around abortion, homophobia and hyper-patriotism.

The result of all this is a political conflict that grows steadily more vituperative, uncivil and tinged with overtones of violence -- a dynamic which, given the emotional and philosophical tendencies of the two camps, definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists.)

Go read the whole thing.

This jives very closely with two experiences I’ve had recently discussing politics with people in the late-Boomer demographic. In the first instance, the man to whom I was speaking is a NYC conservative, which makes him generally quite liberal socially and economically conservative. We spoke about a variety of issues, and what I found was that he started out from a position of conservative talking points, but was actually quite amenable to compromise. For example, he was in favor of the House’s hardline immigration reform, but when I explained why I thought that a road to citizenship was imperative, he said, easily, “Yeah, I could go along with that.”

My impression was that, in this “political conflict…[which] definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists),” he was granted greater access to conservative policy proposals and ideas, and, identifying as a conservative, he de facto supported them. The dearth of coverage of alternative ideas (whether from liberals or moderate conservatives), combined with the pervasiveness of the erroneous notion that progressives are unhinged and dangerous for America, left him little alternative. I also had the distinct impression that had he was rather surprised at how reasonable liberals could be.

In the second instance, the woman to whom I was speaking is a small town, red-state religious moderate, who I suspect generally leans slightly left. She may have been somewhat sympathetic to Bush brand conservatism on issues of national security, but lost all regard for this administration during the Katrina debacle and absolutely could not tolerate the GOP crusade for a Federal Marriage Amendment. The extremism of the Right has pushed her, at least in terms of her own self-definition, if not her actual politics, further Left.

In both cases, people who would be, by Billmon’s construct, “people in the middle,” have found their way further Right and further Left, respectively, because the current dynamic favors the traditionalists. If it didn’t, the man to whom I spoke would not be exposed almost exclusively to the furthest Right policies and ideas, which he supports largely by default, and the GOP would not be able to get away with things like wholly ignoring the country’s infrastructure and social safety net or using homobigotry as a campaign issue, leaving the woman to whom I spoke feeling more Left by virtue of reaction.

That the traditionalists are favored by this political conflict, and exploit it at every turn, will continue to polarize those in the middle for precisely these reasons. And that should give us all pause—particularly as we gaze upon the maps Billmon provides for our consideration.