One nation, fairly divisible, under God
Jan 18th 2001 | WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition
Americans are divided about whether their country is itself divided. Some see a yawning culture gap between conservatives and liberals. Others see a soggy moderate centre. Both are right
IN DECEMBER 1999, as George Bush entered the Republican primaries, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a distinguished social historian, published a book entitled “One Nation, Two Cultures”. In it, she argued that America was becoming two countries. One, rooted in the 1960s, is hedonistic, individualistic and secular. The other, grounded in the 1950s, is puritanical, religious and family-centred. Such distinctions go back a long way. In 18th-century Britain, Adam Smith called them the “loose” and the “austere”. Michael Barone, a commentator for US News & World Report, calls their current embodiment “the Beautiful and the Dutiful”.
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Multiple melting pots
A single election is a slender base on which to argue how a country has changed. Nevertheless, there are other reasons for thinking that the patterns of the 2000 election may be valid for the longer term.
They come from the new census. For decades, two broad trends have been reinforcing one another to redraw the demographic map of America. These are, first, the internal migration of Americans from the north and mid-west to the South and south-west (“the Sunbelt” at the broadest definition of that over-used term); and, second, immigration from outside, mostly from Latin America, to those same states. The two have worked together to produce a booming Sunbelt and a brisk new stirring of the ethnic melting pot.
Both trends are continuing. But research by Bill Frey of the University of Michigan suggests that they are now going in different directions. This finding gives more credence to the argument that America is becoming more deeply divided.
Between 1990 and 2000, the combined voting-age population of Hispanics and Asians rose by almost 10m to 30m: 10% of the population, almost twice what it was in 1980. That is an acceleration of an old trend. What is unusual now is the concentration of the growth. More than 60% of the increase occurred in just four states: California, Texas, Florida and New York. Mr Frey calls these the new melting pots (he adds Hawaii, New Jersey and New Mexico, which have similarly high levels of immigration).
Meanwhile, other states are getting whiter. The white voting-age population rose by more than 22% in the western states of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona and Colorado during the 1990s. Most of the white migrants came out of California. In the South, Georgia, North and South Carolina and Tennessee also saw their white voting-age populations increase by more than twice the national average. These too are Sunbelt states. They are still growing economically. The difference is that the new Sunbelt is attracting whites (and blacks) from elsewhere in America. The melting pot is attracting foreigners. The Sunbelt is splitting in half.
This has profound political implications. The states gaining white populations form the spine of Mr Bush’s band of victory, running down the Rockies and through the South. With three exceptions (Oregon, Washington and tiny Delaware), Mr Bush won every fast-growing state outside the melting pots. With two exceptions, Mr Gore won every melting-pot state. His exceptions—Florida and Texas—are revealing. Both had governors called Bush. And they are the two states with the largest absolute number of white migrants (as well as large numbers of Latinos). They thus complicate but do not contradict the basic link: there is a close overlap between the short-term trends of the 2000 election and the longer-term figures from the 2000 census.
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