Republican Nation, Democratic Nation?
Terry Teachout
ON THE day after the presidential election?shortly before it became clear that the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore was to be decided not at the polls but in the courts?I lunched at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that is popular among those who participate in what a friend of mine calls ?the sacrament of brunch.? As the tables in such places are invariably placed too close to each other, I ended up listening to the conversation of two gay men seated next to me, one of whom was lamenting the fact that he had just broken up with his ?partner.? Before long, though, they turned to discussing the presidential race?if a conversation whose participants are in complete concord can be called a discussion.
Gore, said the first man in tones of utter certainty, was ?obviously more qualified? to be President than Bush. ?Of course,? his friend replied unhesitatingly. ?Bush reminds me of those dumb rich boys I used to see all the time at Yale.? It was inconceivable, they agreed, that anyone of more than modest intelligence would even momentarily have considered voting for Bush over Gore.
Such comfortable certainty has long been common among right-thinking Manhattanites. After the 1972 presidential election, Pauline Kael, then the film critic of the New Yorker, famously wondered how Richard Nixon could have won, since nobody she knew had voted for him. But as the much-maligned exit polls revealed on November 7, many Americans of more than modest intelligence had once again insisted on making up their own minds.
Most post-election analyses have stressed the fact that Bush and Gore split the popular vote almost evenly. Some observers believe this split was caused by the movement of both parties toward the center of the political spectrum. Thus, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ?there is no great ideological chasm dividing the candidates?each one has his prescription drugs plan, each one has his tax-cut program?and the country obviously thinks one would do about as well as the other.? Others, taking a different tack, have criticized the two candidates for failing to galvanize the electorate. Writing in the Weekly Standard, David Brooks pointed to the strangling of the political process by powerful special-interest groups?what he called, borrowing the term from Jonathan Rauch, ?demosclerosis.? This condition, by making it all but impossible for candidates to energize voters with ?idealistic calls to arms,? has induced a ?stagnant equilibrium? into our politics.
O N THE day after the presidential election?shortly before it became clear that the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore was to be decided not at the polls but in the courts?I lunched at a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that is popular among those who participate in what a friend of mine calls ?the sacrament of brunch.? As the tables in such places are invariably placed too close to each other, I ended up listening to the conversation of two gay men seated next to me, one of whom was lamenting the fact that he had just broken up with his ?partner.? Before long, though, they turned to discussing the presidential race?if a conversation whose participants are in complete concord can be called a discussion.
Gore, said the first man in tones of utter certainty, was ?obviously more qualified? to be President than Bush. ?Of course,? his friend replied unhesitatingly. ?Bush reminds me of those dumb rich boys I used to see all the time at Yale.? It was inconceivable, they agreed, that anyone of more than modest intelligence would even momentarily have considered voting for Bush over Gore.
Such comfortable certainty has long been common among right-thinking Manhattanites. After the 1972 presidential election, Pauline Kael, then the film critic of the New Yorker, famously wondered how Richard Nixon could have won, since nobody she knew had voted for him. But as the much-maligned exit polls revealed on November 7, many Americans of more than modest intelligence had once again insisted on making up their own minds.
Most post-election analyses have stressed the fact that Bush and Gore split the popular vote almost evenly. Some observers believe this split was caused by the movement of both parties toward the center of the political spectrum. Thus, according to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ?there is no great ideological chasm dividing the candidates?each one has his prescription drugs plan, each one has his tax-cut program?and the country obviously thinks one would do about as well as the other.? Others, taking a different tack, have criticized the two candidates for failing to galvanize the electorate. Writing in the Weekly Standard, David Brooks pointed to the strangling of the political process by powerful special-interest groups?what he called, borrowing the term from Jonathan Rauch, ?demosclerosis.? This condition, by making it all but impossible for candidates to energize voters with ?idealistic calls to arms,? has induced a ?stagnant equilibrium? into our politics.
Viewed from another perspective, however, the 2000 election turns out not to have been close at all. Consider these exit-poll data:
? The more regularly you attend church, the more likely you were to vote for Bush. Sixty-three percent of voters who go to church more than once a week voted for him. Sixty-one percent of voters who never go to church voted for Gore.
? The much-discussed ?gender gap? turns out to have been a marriage gap. Although a majority of men voted for Bush, and a majority of women for Gore, the more interesting statistic is this: Bush took the votes of 53 percent of married Americans, Gore of 57 percent of unmarried Americans.
? Of the 4 percent of voters who identify themselves as homosexual, 70 percent chose Gore.
? Of the 16 percent of voters who belong to unions, 62 percent chose Gore.
? Blacks voted nine-to-one for Gore, while 60 percent of white males voted for Bush.
? Among voters who own a gun (almost half of those polled), 61 percent voted for Bush; among those who do not own guns, 58 percent picked Gore.
Such statistics recall Gertrude Himmelfarb?s assertion, in her 1999 book of that name, that postmodern America consists of ?one nation, two cultures.? The left-wing counterculture of the 60?s and 70?s, she argued, has become the dominant culture, proudly and aggressively secular, while religious believers and moral traditionalists have coalesced into a ?dissident culture? that ?coexists somewhat uneasily with the dominant culture.?
But here is a difference: not so long ago, the members of these two cultures lived more or less in proximity, and they were also bound together by a common national ethos that sought to transcend group identities and partisan divisions. In recent years, however, the common culture has all but disintegrated, and those who once willingly took part in its rituals are separating themselves not only culturally, but physically and geographically.
Look at a national map. Except for Alaska and New Hampshire, all 29 of the states won decisively by Bush are geographically contiguous, forming a vast L-shaped curve that sweeps down from the Rocky Mountains across the Great Plains, then through the Midwest and South. By contrast, except for California and Washington, most of the states won decisively by Gore are bunched tightly around the urban and industrial centers of the Northeast and the Great Lakes.
As the presidential and congressional races demonstrated in spectacular fashion?for the House and Senate, too, emerged from the election narrowly divided?the voting populations of these two geographic entities are, taken together, almost identical in size. Yet they are very different places. On one side of the fence is an urban- and suburban-based congeries of government employees, union members, blacks, and those highly educated, comparatively affluent ?knowledge workers? known to political scientists as the New Class. On the other is the contemporary equivalent of what H.L. Mencken dubbed the Bible belt?the political analyst Michael Barone calls it the ?country-music belt??in which rural and small-town America have joined forces with the fast-growing group of Americans who live in ?exurbia,? the new middle-class communities that are springing up beyond the rim of the older suburbs. In a widely discussed essay published in U.S. News & World Report shortly before the election, Barone pointed out that under Bill Clinton, Democrats had made significant gains in the ?vast suburban sprawls? of America?s major metropolitan areas. At the same time, he added, the ?fast-growing counties beyond metro-edge cities, with [their] family-size subdivisions and megachurches,? were becoming ?heavily Republican.?
Seen in the light of America?s changing demographic makeup, then, what the recent election indicates is that Himmelfarb?s ?one nation, two cultures? is splintering still further, this time into two geographically and culturally distinct units?call them ?Democratic Nation? and ?Republican Nation??that are competing for political control of the country as a whole.
A NATION, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary , is ?a large aggregate of people so closely associated with each other by factors such as common descent, language, culture, history, and occupation of the same territory as to be identified as a distinct people, especially when organized or potentially organizable as a political state.?
The clarity and specificity of this definition are one reason why political scientists have been reluctant to use the term to describe the cultural aggregates I have called Democratic Nation and Republican Nation, much less to contend that America might be in the process of splitting into two such ?nations? (especially at a time when intellectuals of a progressive bent have come to regard the very idea of ?nationhood? as positively repugnant). Another, equally important reason is that those who have suggested such a thing over the past century have proved to be both hysterical and wrong.
In The Big Money (1936), the final volume of his fictional trilogy USA , the left-wing novelist John Dos Passos, recalling the passions aroused by the executions in 1927 of the Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, summed up what he took to be the country?s anguished mood in the phrase, ?all right we are two nations.? This assertion has passed into what remains of the common stock of literary reference, and is still something of a catchphrase among leftists of a certain age. But the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti failed to lead to the installation of a socialist government in Washington, much less a second American revolution. Even in the most desperate years of the Great Depression, the United States remained one nation, indivisible.
Are we still one nation, indivisible? In her book,Gertrude Himmelfarb did not minimize the seriousness of the cultural chasm she was describing. On the contrary, she was emphatic in acknowledging the profound differences between America?s dominant and dissident cultures, placing special emphasis on the growing alienation of the latter?the culture, that is,
not of the three-quarters of the public who redefine family to include ?significant others? but of the one-quarter who abide by the traditional definition; not of the 55-60 percent who think that premarital sex is acceptable, but of the 40-45 percent who think it is not. Such people do not think of sexual morality as a ?personal matter? that can be ?boxed off,? as it is now said, from the rest of life. Nor do they think of religion as a ?private affair? that should not encroach upon the ?public square.?
Yet even so, Himmelfarb insisted, the two cultures had remained a single nation, split but not sundered. Her argument seemed convincing at the time. Why, now, think otherwise?
ONCE AGAIN, the most compelling reason canbe seen in a glance at the electoral map. Democratic Nation and Republican Nation are, literally, two different places. In addition to being largely separate cultures, they occupy largely separate territories, and are dominated by two different parties. Moreover, each contains roughly the same number of people.
This last fact contradicts Himmelfarb?s assertion that America?s ?dissident culture? of moral traditionalists is, numerically speaking, a minority, and one that defines itself less in its own terms than in terms of its reactionary relationship to the dominant culture. It is true that Democratic Nation controls the elite media, both entertainment and news. (According to the Hotline , a web-based digest of political journalism, CNN staffers had to be warned by executives on election night not to cheer when the network?s anchors announced that Gore had been declared the winner of a state, lest their cheers be heard by viewers.) But despite this control, and despite the proliberal, prosecular bias that arises from it, fully half of the electorate persisted in voting for George W. Bush.
In the days and weeks following the election, the two-nations thesis was taken up by a number of commentators?all of whom, however, disparaged it. Paul Begala, a Clinton spokesman turned TV commentator, blandly dismissed Republican Nation as ?vast expanses of lightly populated terrain.? In a post-election commentary written for the American Spectator?s website, John Corry jokingly suggested that the electoral split suggests ?a practical course of action: give the Democrats their own country, or countries, and we can be done with all the squabbling.? Peter Applebome also treated the split lightly in a parody published in the ?Week in Review? section of the Sunday New York Times: ?Would it be inherently destabilizing,? he wrote, ?to have the entire pundit class in one country and all the missiles and space technology in the other??
More seriously, Andrew Sullivan, in a piece for the New York Times Magazine, went so far as to claim that a look at a county-by-county map of the 2000 election disproved the two-nation idea altogether:
What?s that blue [i.e., Democratic] sliver meandering up the Mississippi? Look at the bluish enclaves in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Check out the red inland counties of California. . . . In Bush?s highest margin of victory in any state, in Wyoming, Al Gore still got well over a quarter of the vote; in Gore?s biggest statewide blowout, Rhode Island, Bush still won about a third of the vote.
But what the county map actually shows is that, in line with Michael Barone?s demographic analysis, Democratic Nation consists almost exclusively of cities, their surrounding suburbs, and liberal-voting college towns (the latter constituting many of Sullivan's ?bluish enclaves?), plus a small number of rural counties where black and Hispanic voters are concentrated. Nor can Republican Nation be written off as a mere assemblage of unpopulated prairie states: Bush ran ahead of Gore in about 2,400 counties with a total population of 143 million, while Gore ran ahead of Bush in only 680 counties with a total population of 127 million. In short, Gore won in urban and suburban America, Bush nearly everywhere else.
To be sure, one must be cautious in ascribing uniform ideological views to the citizens of Democratic and Republican Nations. Neither nation, as Sullivan correctly pointed out, is by any means completely homogeneous. Moreover, half of all eligible Americans do not vote, and their nonparticipation in the electoral process poses a distinct problem to anyone seeking to sort the citizenry into two kinds of people. Are nonvoters disillusioned, or merely apathetic? Do they resemble their voting neighbors in cultural allegiance, or do they differ? In the absence of solid answers, it is not possible to say with certainty that the two nations are as different as they appear to be. (In their customary difference-splitting style, the editors of the New York Times declared that this election revealed the existence of not one and not two but ?three Americas?one Republican, one Democratic, and one that seems to seek a balance point in the broad middle ground.?)
Nevertheless, the exit polls tell us a great deal about the sharply varying cultural allegiances of those Americans who do vote, and thus about why, in a country where the political parties that reflect these allegiances are themselves equal in size, one can no longer speak of a ?dissident? culture, any more than one can properly speak of women as members of a ?minority? group. Nor is Republican Nation a counterculture: it is, rather, a separate but fully equal entity, capable of competing on essentially equal terms with Democratic Nation for the power to shape America?s future.
HOW DID two cultures become two nations? John Podhoretz, writing in the (London) Times , has attributed the fierceness of partisan division in America to the fact that ?the voting population can indeed be divided into two camps: those who have a direct or indirect financial interest in government and those who wish to be protected from government encroachment.? Other conservatives are more inclined to blame the rise of identity politics. Both analyses are valid up to a point, but other factors are at least as significant, if not more so.
The first of these factors is the transformation of the old Democratic party into a left-liberal enterprise driven as much by ideological fervor as by the desire to win votes. This was not always the case. In the southeast Missouri of the 1960?s, where I grew up, there were no Republicans (save for the occasional eccentric), only Democrats, some liberal and others conservative, who ran against one another in party primaries that were tantamount to general elections. Such one-party enclaves were not the norm in postwar America, but they were common enough to force both major parties into accommodating a fairly wide variety of ideological views in order to survive. Even well-known politicians often found it necessary to work both sides of the street: Senator J. William Fulbright, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who opposed the Vietnam war, looked the other way when it came to racial segregation in his home state of Arkansas.
All this began to change in the 70?s, and not only in the formerly ?solid? Democratic South. The nomination of George McGovern in 1972, and the subsequent reorganization of the national party structure along ideological lines, shocked conservative Democrats everywhere, and though the long-term effects of these developments were initially slow to take hold, they proved to be far-reaching. Year after year, conservative Democratic politicians have either been defeated by Republican challengers or switched parties in order to remain in office. The result is the great L-shaped swath of states that is Republican Nation, many of which used to vote Democratic?including Tennessee, Al Gore?s home state, and Arkansas, the home of Bill Clinton. Indeed, in November Gore lost the seventeen-county Tennessee congressional district he had represented in the House for eight years. As for Missouri?s Scott County, my old one-party home, it went for Bush by 57 percent.
No less significant has been the simultaneous transformation of America?s elite colleges and universities into instruments of meritocratic change. The Ivy League portrayed in the novels of John P. Marquand and Louis Auchincloss, a handsomely appointed men?s club dominated by the well-dressed sons of affluent alumni, has long since become an achievement-obsessed sparring ground where the ?gentleman?s C? is a thing of the unlamented past. (The mean score of Harvard?s entering freshman class on the verbal portion of the SAT test jumped from 583 in 1952 to 678 in 1960.) Instead of serving as finishing schools for the Northeastern upper class, these institutions now act as search engines that locate and recruit bright young men and women from all across America, indoctrinating them in the process with the cultural assumptions of the New Class.
The sorting process is neither universal nor perfect: not everybody with good grades can go to Harvard or Yale or Stanford. But it has already been effective enough to alter the ideological makeup of large parts of America. For, instead of returning whence they came, there to leaven the cultural loaf and in turn to be influenced by local opinions and customs, successful products of the meritocratic machine typically migrate to New Class-dominated cities and suburbs, where seldom is heard a contradictory word.
This process, by the way, holds true for both nations?though Democratic Nation, being far more densely populated than Republican Nation, is more capable of exerting peer pressure on dissenting residents. Although many people have the idea that political correctness is imposed from above, Soviet-style, in fact it is a manifestation of growing cultural homogeneity. In coherent environments, the citizenry needs little prompting to obey the unwritten laws.
Finally, American culture has been reshaped by information-age capitalism. As Michael J. Weiss explains in The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What It All Means About Who We Are (2000), corporations no longer market new products to the American people as a whole, but to carefully calculated combinations of 62 demographic ?lifestyle clusters? with names like ?Red, White, & Blues? (small-town blue-collar families) or ?Boomers & Babies? (young white-collar suburban families), whose members are known to prefer gourmet coffee to Coca-Cola, or Dodge pick-ups to Chevrolet Camaros. Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each ?narrowcasting? to a tiny sliver of the viewing public. By maximizing and facilitating choice, information-age capitalism has fused with identity politics to gut the common culture?and thereby to widen the gap between Democratic and Republican Nations.
Political candidates, too, armed with new techniques borrowed from the commercial marketplace, are targeting ever-narrowing segments of the population ever more effectively. According to Weiss, Bill Clinton was the first presidential candidate to use these techniques to maximum effect. In 1995, he commissioned the Democratic consulting firm of Penn & Schoen to determine what positions would appeal to those ?clusters? that contained the largest number of swing voters, and tailored his speeches accordingly.
This has had a paradoxical effect. As each of the two major political parties refines its pitch so as to maximize its appeal to swing voters, it moves closer in practical terms to the center of the political spectrum. Hence the oft-repeated assertion of commentators like Andrew Sullivan that the distinctions between the various policies advocated by Bush and Gore ?were, on a cosmic level, trivial. . . . Only the emphases were different.? But this in turn serves to throw the residual cultural differences between the parties into higher relief. And these underlying differences are inherently the ones most difficult to paper over: like most Americans, most politicians find it far easier to compromise on prescription-drug plans and tax cuts than on abortion.
As a result, an individual voter?s decision to choose one party over the other is now prone to be not arbitrary, but culturally ?correct.? Today, a young voter who opposes gun control, or supports public-school vouchers, will quickly see that there is no place for him in Democratic Nation, no matter how his parents may have voted in bygone days. So instead of choosing a party out of familial loyalty, as once was generally the case, he will end up choosing it out of cultural convictions?just as he is more likely to settle in a community where his next-door neighbor shares those convictions.
Hence the gradual segregation of the electoral map into two geographically discrete belts that share a shrinking pool of common cultural assumptions?Dos Passos?s ?two nations.? And hence the most ambiguous and destabilizing outcome in the history of American presidential elections.
ASIDE FROM the question of legitimacy posed by the extreme closeness of the Bush-Gore presidential race, just how dire is the larger situation?
After all, it has been said, the two parties have been moving toward the middle of the road for some time now. It is even arguable that the reason Gore did less well regionally than Clinton (he lost several states that had been won by Clinton) is that he chose to position himself as a more liberal candidate in order to secure his left-wing base. Clinton himself claimed in a November interview that the election results demonstrated that ?about two-thirds of the people want a dynamic center that pulls the people together and moves us forward.?
Nevertheless, the cultural polarization of the electorate remains a real and documentable phenomenon. What it indicates is that earlier conceptions of national unity?and earlier methods of appealing to the interests of the country as a whole?are becoming obsolete. This is even more the case given the advent of the deliberately divisive ?permanent campaign? tactics that, perfected by the Clinton-Gore administration, now seem to have become a permanent part of American political life. All too characteristic of the rhetoric of Democratic Nation's ?spinmeisters? was this post-election comment made on the website of MSNBC, the cable news channel, by Paul Begala, who disingenuously claimed after the fact to have been offering ?a more sophisticated, nuanced view? of the values prevailing in Republican Nation:
Tens of millions of good people in Middle America voted Republican. But if you look closely at that map you see a more complex picture. You see the state where James Byrd was lynch-dragged behind a pickup truck until his body came apart?it?s red [i.e., Republican]. You see the state where Matthew Shepard was crucified on a split-rail fence for the crime of being gay?it?s red. You see the state where right-wing extremists blew up a federal office building and murdered scores of federal employees?it?s red. The state where an Army private who was thought to be gay was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat, and the state where neo-Nazi skinheads murdered two African-Americans because of their skin color, and the state where Bob Jones University spews its anti-Catholic bigotry: they?re all red, too.
Given such inflammatory talk?and the fact that it is considered perfectly acceptable discourse in the elite media?it is reasonable to expect that the distance between the two nations will continue to grow. Not only are most of the issues that separate them cultural in nature, they partake of an essentially religious character. This holds true for militantly secular citizens of Democratic Nation as much as it does for Bible-believing residents of Republican Nation. An unmarried, sexually active TV producer in Los Angeles for whom the preservation of Roe v. Wade by any means necessary is the highest of political priorities is fully as ?religious? in her own way as a Southern Baptist mother of three who backs school vouchers in the hopes of being able to send her children to a Christian academy. In this fusion of religious with regional factionalism lies a recipe for national disunity of the most destructive kind.
Is it possible to forge a cross-cultural consensus? Some Republicans have thought so. George W. Bush not only presented himself to the American people as a staunch advocate of bipartisanship, but deliberately tailored his campaign rhetoric in such a way as to appeal to Democratic Nation. This was the meaning of ?compassionate conservatism,? and of last year?s relentlessly inclusive Republican convention. Did it succeed? Once again, the electoral map and exit polls supply the dispiriting answer: Democrats consolidated their hold on blacks and unmarried women in 2000, and increased their vote totals in the suburbs. As for the Hollywood wing of the Democratic party, it is more committed than ever to mass cultural demagogy as a way of political life. (Tune in to any episode of The West Wing.)
This hardly means, however, that Democratic Nation will prevail over Republican Nation. ?Maybe there are fewer of us than I thought,? the conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh told his listeners the day after the election. In fact, exit polls show that conservatives still outnumber liberals by 29 percent to 20 percent, with 50 percent of voters describing themselves as ?moderate.? Fifty-three percent say they prefer less government to more government.
The seemingly equal balance between Democratic Nation and Republican Nation in the 2000 election may thus have been an artifact, as much a function of union-led Democratic turnout efforts as anything else. Over time, such efforts are likely to be swamped by the sheer weight of demographic change. To quote Michael Barone again, ?major metro areas are casting a declining share of the nation?s votes?Republicans won the House in 1994 with big rural gains and have held it since despite losses in major metro areas.? And the trend appears to be continuing: the counties Bush won in November are growing in population at a rate of 14 percent, as opposed to a 5-percent growth rate in Gore?s.
Whether these trends are good news or bad news for the prospects of consensus is another question. Ironically, there may be modest grounds for optimism in certain of the very changes in American political life that helped to make Democratic Nation possible. Conservatives and neoconservatives really did succeed in changing public attitudes toward the welfare state, and Bill Clinton responded to that change, however cynically and grudgingly; had he not done so, he would not have been elected President. Despite the short-term failure of Bush?s image-building, the process of reaching out is just that: a process.
THIS BRINGS me back to the two Upper WestSiders on whose lunchtime conversation I eavesdropped last November. Having excoriated George W. Bush to the maximum extent possible in the compass of a single lunch hour, the first said to the second, ?You know, Ronald Reagan was actually better than Bush, in a way.?
?Oh, come on,? his friend said.
?No, no, let me explain,? came the reply. ?At least he got one thing right?he was right about the Soviet Union. About the cold war. I mean, you?ve got to admit it: history proved him right about that, if nothing else.?
Indeed it did. Which might lead one to hope that if two members of the New Class could come to such a heretical conclusion, chatting over soup and salad in a popular brunch spot on the Upper West Side of Manhattan the day after the most contentious presidential election in modern times, then perhaps it is still possible, if only on an issue-by-issue basis, for reasonable members of Republican Nation to make some kind of common cause with reasonable members of Democratic Nation.
But, of course, much will depend on the willingness of moderate Democrats to disavow the poisonous rhetoric that has lately become a staple of their party's political discourse. Much will also depend on the issues: some (tax cuts, prescription drugs) seem bridgeable, others (abortion, guns) may not be. The rancorous intensity with which the Bush and Gore camps disputed the outcome of the 2000 election all too clearly reflected the magnitude of their cultural differences, and it may be that the tone of that dispute will characterize American politics for the foreseeable future. Still, one would like to think that it is not too late?and that even if, at the moment, America is two nations, it remains one country.
TERRY TEACHOUT, who writes widely on culture and the arts and is COMMNTARY?s music critic, served as an editorialist for the New York Daily News from 1987 to 1993. He is finishing H. L. Mencken: A Life.
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