Is Democracy Possible Here?: Principles for a New Political Debate

Chapter 1
COMMON GROUND
In Search of Argument
AMERICAN POLITICS are in an appalling state. We disagree, fiercely, about almost everything. We disagree about terror and security, social justice, religion in politics, who is fit to be a judge, and what democracy is. These are not civil disagreements: each side has no respect for the other. We are no longer partners in self-government; our politics are rather a form of war.
The 2004 presidential election was sickeningly divisive. Republicans said that a victory for the Democratic candidate would threaten the survival, even the salvation, of the nation. Vice President Cheney said that a victory for John Kerry would be a triumph for Osama bin Laden and America's other mortal enemies. Some Roman Catholic bishops declared that voting for Kerry would be a sin that any Catholic would have to confess the next day. Liberals declared the stakes just as high, but the dangers all in the other direction. They said that the Bush presidency had been the worst and most incompetent in our history, that its reckless wartime soak-the-poor tax cuts and horrendous budget deficits would damage the economy for decades, that the invasion of Iraq was an immoral, inhumane, and botched diversion that, so far from making us safer from terrorism, had immeasurably deepened our peril. They announced themselves not just disappointed but sickened by the election's results.
The vote was very close--decided by a relatively small number of votes in one state--and it was geographically clustered: the Republicans won the more rural Midwest, South, and Southwest, and the Democrats the urban centers, the coasts, and the industrial northern tier of states. The television networks colored Republican states red and Democratic ones blue on their electronic maps on election night, and the maps divided America into great, contiguous blocks of the two colors. Commentators said that the colors signaled a deep, schismatic rift in the nation as a whole: a division between incompatible all-embracing cultures. The red culture demands more religion in public life and the blue culture less. The blue culture wants a more equal distribution of America's wealth; it favors higher taxes on the rich and nearly rich. The red culture says that high taxes penalize the successful for their success and ruin the economy; it wants still lower taxes. The blue culture insists on less freedom for business and more freedom for sex; the red culture wants it the other way around. The blue culture declares global warming to be a grave threat and pleads for the protection of wilderness as a threatened irrecoverable treasure; the red culture believes it irrational to compromise economic prosperity to protect trees. The red culture holds that it is insane to limit in any way our government's power to fight our terrorist enemies; it is suspicious of international organizations and impatient with critics who cite the human rights of alleged terrorists. The blue culture agrees that terrorists present an unprecedented danger to the country, but it is anxious to nourish international law and support international organizations, and it is willing to run increased security risks rather than weaken the laws and traditions that protect people accused of crimes and threatened with terrible punishment.
Some commentators argue that we are more deeply and viscerally divided even than these political differences suggest; the stark political split emerges, they say, from an even deeper, less articulate contrast between two mutually contemptuous worlds of personality and self-image. Blue-culture Americans, they say, crave sophistication; they cultivate a taste for imported wine and dense newspapers, and their religious convictions, if they have any at all, are philosophical, attenuated, and ecumenical. Red-culture Americans guard a blunter authenticity; they drink beer, watch car racing on television, and prefer their religion simple, evangelical, and militant. Bush won the 2004 election, on this story, in spite of the fact that his first-term performance was unimpressive, because the red culture slightly outnumbers the blue culture at the moment and Bush managed to embrace not only the political preferences of that red culture but its morals and aesthetics as well.
It would be silly to deny that the political divisions among Americans are unusually deep and angry now and that these divisions run along a fault line that can usefully be described as separating a red from a blue political world. But the two-allembracing-cultures story that is beginning to become received wisdom is at least an exaggeration. The geographic division of the 2004 election results does suggest that regional differences played an important part. But the two-cultures story claims more: that some deep general account of character or worldview runs through each of the two sets of political positions and attitudes, some deep account that forms each set into a unified culture of conviction, taste, and attitude.