Bottom-Up Culture Wars
By Alan Wolfe
DLC | Blueprint Magazine | January 8, 2004
Some cultural issues are top-down, like affirmative action and gay marriage. Others come up from the grassroots, like faith, family, and country. That's where Democrats could have an advantage.
Although Americans tend not to like culture wars, political activists invariably do. Issues such as abortion, affirmative action, and prayer in public places mobilize political bases, help raise money, and inspire political passion. And with some exceptions -- such as the effort to impeach and convict President Clinton -- cultural issues typically benefit the Republicans, helping them to energize their base and to paint liberals as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people.
But before President Bush breaks out the champagne, we ought to recognize that there are two different kinds of cultural issues in American politics -- as well as two different sets of beneficiaries. Let me call them top-down and bottom-up cultural issues.
Top-down cultural issues rarely emerge from the lives and concerns of ordinary people but are of deep importance to political, ideological, legal, theological, and fund-raising elites. Affirmative action is the quintessential top-down cultural issue. Most Americans are not sympathetic to quotas. This even includes African-Americans, as the political scientists Paul Sniderman and Thomas Piazza have demonstrated. Their study showed that, "forced to make a choice between two applications for college, one black and one white, blacks overwhelmingly believe that the one who did better on the admission test should be the one that is admitted."
But university admissions officers, African-American politicians, and liberal foundations, while denying that affirmative action involves quotas, are in favor of admissions procedures that allow colleges to accept African-American applicants whose grades and SAT scores are lower than those of many white applicants who are rejected.
This gap between elite opinion and popular sentiment creates enormous political difficulties for the Democrats, for it puts them in the position of choosing between the activists in the party base and the concerns of large voting blocs. Whenever an issue like this takes front stage in a political campaign, Republicans can run as populists and accuse their opponents of being elitist.
Yet affirmative action will not be an issue in 2004, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court generally and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor specifically. In Grutter vs. Bollinger and Gratz vs. Bollinger, the court rejected mathematical quotas but allowed race to be a factor in college admissions, thereby discovering the common ground on affirmative action that political elites have been unable to find.
The political importance of this fact can hardly be exaggerated. Race, after all, was the first wedge issue of contemporary politics, the one that could -- and did -- swing white Democrats over to the Republican Party. Now that Republicans appeal to diversity as much as Democrats, neither party in the 2004 presidential election is going to engage in racial demagoguery.
As the courts take away, however, the courts also give. While matters involving race are unlikely to be wedge issues in 2004, those involving gays inevitably will be. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts offered the Republican Party a gift by ruling that the state is barred by its constitution from prohibiting marriage between homosexuals. This is not a Republican Party in the habit of turning gifts down.
Whatever the legal and constitutional merits of the court's decision -- I find its reasoning compelling, even eloquent -- there are at least three ways this issue can benefit the Republican Party. The first is that it enables Republicans to mobilize conservative religious believers. Even while national leaders like Bush will avoid language that reeks of intolerance in reacting to the Massachusetts decision, the Republican influence industry of talk shows, magazines, and Christian commentators will claim that the decision threatens the future of Western civilization.
Second, the issue of gay rights enables Republicans to appeal to culturally conservative minority groups, especially African-Americans and Latinos. The former not only tends to register strong opposition to homosexuality, it also often resents comparisons between the struggles for civil rights and the arguments made on behalf of gay rights. And Latinos, overwhelmingly Catholic, may be inclined to follow the Church's teachings on homosexuality, which unambiguously condemn gay marriage.
Third, the fact that it was a Massachusetts court that issued this ruling will remind both parties of the red state/blue state divide in the 2000 presidential election. Massachusetts has an all-Democratic congressional delegation, is the home state of Sen. Ted Kennedy, and is the only state that voted for George McGovern for president in 1972. (McGovern also won the District of Columbia.) Republicans will be sure to tell the country that a state so liberal cannot be allowed to make policy for the rest of America, especially if other states find themselves forced to recognize homosexual marriages conducted in gay-friendly Provincetown.
The gay rights issue is not a completely free gift for the Republicans. If they use the issue, they will have to argue against marriage for those who want it, oppose the right of states to experiment in matters of public policy, defend governmental interference with private decisions, and allow Democrats to raise the specter of intolerance that showed itself during the Clinton impeachment. Still, the issue reminds us that top-down cultural concerns still matter. (Not only will gay rights be an issue in 2004, abortion may well be one as well, given the passage of a bill outlawing "partial-birth" abortions.)
At the same time, however, alongside the old issues in the culture war has arisen a set of concerns that do not easily fit into the political patterns with which we have become familiar. Bottom-up issues, as I call them, touch on matters individuals care about greatly: their faith, their families, their country. And while each of those issues sounds like it belongs on Republican terrain, Democrats, in fact, have major advantages because of Republican extremism.
Consider families first. Unease with Clinton's adulterous behavior certainly helped Republicans appeal to family values in the 2000 election. But in the past year or so, we have seen enough examples of Republicans engaging in less than perfect moral behavior to undermine any lingering sentiment that one party is more moral in its choice of leaders than the other. Charges of improper behavior toward women did not hurt Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign for California governor, but having a Republican governor of the country's largest state whose views on hot-button moral issues are moderate and even liberal will make it difficult to charge Democrats with abandoning traditional values.
And the fact that William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh experienced problems with gambling and drugs led a number of conservatives to argue that we should be tolerant and understanding toward them. Perhaps we should, but once the language of forgiveness enters politics, the language of finger-pointing blame exits. Bush himself, no doubt, will continue to be perceived as a good family man in 2004. But assuming that the Democrats also nominate a man who loves his wife and cares for his children, it is hard to imagine anything like the 2000 Clinton subplot repeating itself in 2004.
There is further cause to believe that family issues need not work against Democrats in 2004. Americans worry that widespread divorce and a decline in the authority of parents make it difficult to bring up children. They are right to worry. But a lack of jobs, the pervasive appeal to sex and violence in the mass media, widespread gambling, and easy access to drugs, including abuse of the pharmaceutical variety, also increase the difficulty of parenting. Republican policies that give tax breaks to the wealthy at far greater rates than the middle class, allow the media free rein to dominate the airways as they choose, and weaken the ability of government to engage in responsible regulation are not family-friendly.
Why would Republicans, who claim to stand so strongly on behalf of the family, advocate policies that weaken the ability of parents to raise healthy and well-balanced children? The answer, interestingly enough, is that they have put themselves in a position strikingly similar to Democratic exposure on yesterday's cultural issues. Intent on rewarding contributors to their campaigns, Republicans have chosen to side with elites over the concerns of ordinary citizens. Whether Democrats can take advantage of the resulting policy distortions is a political question, but there is no doubt that the opportunity to do so exists.
Much the same is true of issues involving faith. Americans, compared with the citizens of any other wealthy liberal democracy, believe in God in overwhelming numbers. As writer Amy Sullivan has persuasively argued, the failure of Democrats to honor the faith commitments of Americans often puts them at a disadvantage. At the same time, however, the God in whom most Americans believe is not in exclusive possession of the truth, is tolerant toward people of other faiths, and is rarely severe in his condemnation of sinners. Not even evangelical Protestants, who form the core of Bush's electoral base, resemble these days the ignorant and dogmatic Christians portrayed in a film like "Inherit the Wind."
Alas, American society has in recent months witnessed public figures who act as if they had just stepped out of the script of that movie. None is more important than Lt. General William Boykin, deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who denounced Muslims for their belief in a false God. Although Boykin's intolerance is clearly harmful to U.S. efforts to win friends in the Muslim world, Bush, while criticizing his remarks, refused to remove him from his sensitive and important position.
Just as Democratic politicians in the past worried about negative reaction from pro-choice groups like NARAL, Bush has to be concerned that doing the right thing for our foreign policy would cost him support among those ideological extremist interest groups or newspaper columnists that claim (often without evidence) to represent the views of ordinary church-going evangelicals.
Boykin's extremism, and the failure of Republican politicians to distance themselves meaningfully from his bigotry, will undermine efforts by the Republicans to appeal to Muslim voters, whose support they generally won in 2000. Such extremism, however, can and should increase Republican vulnerability among all people of faith.
Although many liberal Democrats tend to forget it, evangelicals, even very conservative ones, believe in separation of church and state; among Baptists, for example, such separation is a founding doctrine of the faith. It is, moreover, a crucial feature of the ways evangelicals evangelize that one can never force another person to discover the joy of Jesus; conversion must, to be authentic, also be voluntary. Democrats should remember that we live in a nation under God, not a nation under Jesus, Allah, or any other specific deity. They should use the 2004 election as an opportunity to bring religion into politics and to kick intolerance out.
Finally there is, as there has to be, the question of country. After Sept. 11, Americans are unlikely to vote for a presidential candidate they perceive as insufficiently patriotic and unwilling to deploy American troops in defense of their security. But Americans are also mature enough in their patriotism to recognize that wars can be costly, both in terms of lives lost and in terms of money spent. There is no question that, whatever the costs, Americans do not want their leaders to cut and run from a place like Iraq. Yet Bush, in his approach to global security, rarely asks for sacrifice, fears acknowledging the difficulties he encounters, and tries to cover up his mistakes.
Now Democrats have an opportunity to make the case for national security by claiming that Republicans have not gone far enough. If security proves to be expensive, as it no doubt will, Democrats have to be prepared to argue that their approach to fiscal policy is more morally and culturally responsible, and more likely to find ways to pay for it.
The deep cultural divisions in our country can be troubling, especially when they are shrilly aired on cable television and in books with inflammatory titles. When our cultural issues were put on the table from the top down, there was all too little national debate. Knowing that their positions on affirmative action or abortion were unpopular among wide swatches of the electorate, liberals relied on the courts to achieve what they were unable to win in the court of public opinion. Gay marriage fits snugly into this pattern.
In retrospect, this approach was a mistaken strategy for which Democrats suffered greatly, for in relying on the courts to make policy, Democrats lost the fine art of convincing voters through the democratic process of the validity of their beliefs.
Now the shoe may be on the other foot. With cultural and moral concerns trickling up from ordinary people and not down from ideological elites, Republicans are the ones who find themselves reverting to their extremist base. Knowing full well that their views, if fully aired, would offend the centrist and moderate instincts of the American people, the administration nominates judges like Miguel Estrada, who never allowed his views to appear in print.
For the same reason, the administration has developed a fetish for secrecy in government and, when secrecy is impossible, it hides its true intentions by making claims that have little relationship to reality. Like the efforts of liberals of a previous era to rely on courts and administrative agencies to fashion policies that had little widespread support, the Bush administration understands that the American people, if given an honest choice, would reject its ideologically extremist policies. It has thereby conceded to Democrats the center. Democrats would be foolish not to grab it.
Alan Wolfe is professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
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