Will the Culture War Matter on Election Day?

October 2, 2008

For much of the presidential campaign, it has appeared that moral values issues would play only a small role in the November election. Indeed, at various points both Barack Obama and John McCain shied away from talking about abortion, same-sex marriage and other "culture war" issues. If the candidates focus more on these issues, will it help or hurt them with voters? Will the national and global economic difficulties introduce new definitions of the culture war? Just a few weeks before Election Day, the Pew Forum invited two culture war experts and a group of leading journalists to explore these questions in depth.

Speakers:
Todd Gitlin, Professor of Journalism and Sociology, Columbia University
Yuval Levin, Hertog Fellow and Director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program, Ethics and Public Policy Center

Moderator:
Luis Lugo, Director, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Read the full transcript at pewforum.org.

TODD GITLIN: The culture wars matter in American politics because it's the norm for them to matter. They don't always matter decisively, and the sides don't always line up in the same way. In fact, the outcome of politics frequently hinges on who succeeds in defining what will be the sides this time.

But the culture wars always matter because Americans vote not simply, and not even necessarily first, for what they want but for whom they want. And whom they want is a function, in part, of who they are and how they think of themselves -- how they want to think of themselves. In a word, what kind of culture they embody. So a presidential system, in particular, brings this out [and] the deeply anti- or apolitical culture in which we live -- appearances to the contrary notwithstanding -- accentuates this tendency.

French philosopher Ernst Renan famously said that a nation was a daily plebiscite. In America, we have a quadrennial plebiscite: Who are we? Remember that America was defined from the start as the fruit of an ideology, not a nationality. Therefore, America is particularly prone to culture wars. There is no American nationality. So the question of what holds the nation together, of who belongs here, of what this stands for, is a matter open to debate. America is a way of life, in other words, a culture. So culture wars are as American as egg foo yung and tacos.

In general, the culture war in its continuing incarnations is an ongoing fight, in my view, between the enlightenment and its enemies. This is not always and not mainly, actually, a war between religion and irreligion. But it is always a fight between a certain order and a certain disorder; between warring authorities and warring values. In the 17th century -- to just hop, skip and jump through a few examples -- it was a fight between the theocratic totalists of Massachusetts and the tolerance politics of Roger Williams -- all Christians, mind you, all devout Christians.

From 1776 through '83, it was a fight between revolutionaries, who were in alliance with deist enlightenment intellectuals, and religion awakeners, adding up in total to maybe two-thirds of the population. And those other people, the Tories, numbered probably one-third of the population of the time. The issues change. The structure of resentment does not change. The structure is essentially bipolar: not exactly between tradition and modernity -- which is the way it's usually depicted -- but between two traditions. In shorthand, though, it is generally understood as a fight between forces of modernization and forces of tradition.

In the 20th century, it has often been a fight between -- surprise -- small towns and cosmopolitan centers, not necessarily literally. For example, the forces of cosmopolitanism in the '90s were lead by a certain guy from Hope, Arkansas. But in 1925, it was between Dayton, Tennessee, and on the other side, the Chicago of Clarence Darrow and the Baltimore of H.L. Mencken. In 1974, the fight over school textbooks¹ in Kanawha County, West Virginia, where political fundamentalists won, pitted them against the cosmopolitan modernizers in what has been called the pivotal moment in the right-wing recovery movement.

The 1960s, where our contemporary culture war vocabulary comes from, intensified culture war cleavages. There were three revolts in progress that tended to map onto each other: the revolution in rights for African-Americans, the revolution in rights for women and the revolt against the Vietnam War. I want to appreciate the depth of these superimposed cleavages. Here are some poll items I got recently from my colleague Robert Shapiro in the Political Science department at Columbia.

May/June 1961, here's a poll question: "Have you heard or read anything about the freedom rides taking place in the South?" Sixty-three percent said yes. They were then asked: "Do you approve or disapprove of what the freedom riders are doing?" Disapprove, 64 percent. "Do you feel demonstrations by negroes have helped more or hurt more the advancement of negro rights?" The percentage who said hurt more: 1963, 45 percent; 1965, 58 percent; September 1966, 80 percent. Consider for a moment that 1965 figure. This is the canonical moment of civil rights activism: when Martin Luther King is retroactively sanctified. He is identified properly with the great voting rights march in Selma. Selma march: 58 percent said demonstrations by negroes -- not riots -- hurt more [than helped] the advancement of negro rights.

Here's another one. "Suppose all other methods have failed and the person decides to try to stop the government from going about its usual activities with sit-ins, mass meetings, demonstrations and things like that. Would you approve of that, disapprove or would it depend on the circumstances?" November 1968: disapprove, 74 percent. That's in the month that Richard Nixon was elected.

Now, my view is that each change in the cultural status quo results in or is the product of a culture war. Six years after Barack Obama Sr. and Stanley Ann Dunham married in Hawaii, U.S. News railed against the Supreme Court interracial marriage decision in Loving v. Virginia, 1967.² I owe that discovery to historian Rick Perlstein. The South Carolina state constitution of 1895 prohibited, and I quote, "marriage of a white person with a negro or mulatto or a person who shall have one-eighth or more of negro blood." That provision was not repealed until 1998.

In the early 1960s, after a period of removal from the public domain, evangelicals began to move into politics in order to beat back what they saw as the expulsion of God from the public domain -- [including] the school prayer decision and others of the Warren court. Later in the decade, there was "white flight" from schools that had been ordered to integrate. This gave an institutional base, white-only schools, to what was on its way to becoming Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority.

The feminist movement cracked open another fault line. In the '70s, the abortion war became a surrogate for the feminist-anti-feminist war. My former colleague Kristen Luker's research on pro-choice and anti-abortion activists demonstrated that the fight over abortion mapped rather neatly onto the fight over where a woman was getting her identity: whether in the family or in the public world.

Now, I think finally what gives shape to the culture wars of the last half century is not only ideological cleavages about ways of life but also a party decision. Beginning in the late 1960s, the Republican Party became skilled as the party of resentment: skilled at the mining of nuggets in the form of wedges. And today, it also benefits -- or I should say, it has, perhaps, for many years, benefited -- from mapping foreign policy stances onto other cleavages in turn. So American politics begins to look like the fight between -- I'll call it here -- the belligerent, masculine complex of John McCain and Teddy Roosevelt, his hero, and the -- we'll call it, invidiously, maybe -- the feminized, thoughtful complex embodied, at this point, by Barack Obama.

But again, the structure, the body if you will, remains the same even as the issues which are the cells change. Culture war is a fixture. So, to the question of how the culture wars will matter this time? -- well, we have all the usual dimensions: abortion, gay marriage. We have, I think, an accentuation of the city versus country theme, which is a perennial. We have Barack Obama, of Honolulu, New York, Cambridge and Chicago versus John McCain of Sedona and Sarah Palin of Wasilla. Obviously, the impact of all of these will be muted by the financial and economic crisis to the great benefit of Sen. Obama and the chagrin of Sen. McCain.

But of course, even the financial crises are colored by imagery and values. Think about the metaphorical cleavage that's cropped up so vigorously in the last couple of weeks -- but so intensely that it seems as if it's always been there: Main Street versus Wall Street. There's a full-page ad in the Times this morning from New York Life [the insurance company]: "We're Main Street, not Wall Street." I thought when I read this: Roll over Sinclair Lewis. The legacy of the culture war, in other words, is well nigh inescapable -- whatever's the ostensible object of attention.

I would add only one thing that is a drastically under-publicized dimension of the culture wars this time around. And this is the issue of vote suppression: voter purges, disenfranchisement of legal immigrants, the maintenance of felon lists, the Indiana Supreme Court decision³ that places the burden of proof on voters to offer ID in the absence of any showing of significant vote fraud and so on. The Brennan Center at NYU, just this week, came out with a round-up report on voter purges that is well worth looking at. Now, I ask you to keep in mind that vote suppression is also, in an interesting way, a battlefield in the culture war between a political culture of inclusion and a political culture of exclusion.

And the question that that issue joins is the perennial question: What kind of a country is this? What is our moral core? Who deserves standing? And attached to that, which elites deserve power and how do you get into one? The populism of today's right is very far from the populism of the 1890s: the regulate-the-railroad, cheap-money, free-silver, small-farmer's populism -- that in some of its moments, tried to cross the color line that was hardening in the South. Today's culture war pits what Saul Alinsky called the have-a-little-want-more people against those who have less. And the party of resentment, obviously, has capitalized on that and is devoted to it and I think requires it. This faux populism -- the populism of Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity and company -- is a populism whose hallmark is exclusion. It entails, among other things, reduction of the franchise. What is this if not a culture war between two stories of America: of who is properly an American and what the country stands for. Is it an embodiment of democratic possibility or a rollback?

Finally, finally, the strange difference -- and this requires much more thought than I have been able to devote to it. What is very peculiar and interesting is that in one of its dimensions, the current culture war is a revolt of the masses. This is a phenomenon that would have horrified and perhaps amused, if he had any sense of humor, James Madison. He was the slave-owning elitist -- to use a word I don't normally use but in this case, it is strictly true -- whose dread of the masses, which was widely shared by the likes of his neighbor, Thomas Jefferson, led to a Constitution that dispersed power and made it very difficult for government to govern. Perhaps, the ongoing collision between the open door of rights and the closing of doors against those demanding more rights is the battleground for the next engagement in our continuing culture war, period.

YUVAL LEVIN: I'll start in a similar place because I agree with an important beginning premise that Todd laid out: that the culture war in our politics is not fundamentally about issues, discrete issues. If it were, this probably wouldn't be much of a culture war election because neither candidate is particularly interested in what we think of as the culture war issues. So I agree that the culture war on our politics is really a set of opposing attitudes and dispositions. But I wouldn't describe it in the same way that Todd did. It seems to me that the culture war actually takes place within what Todd described as the party of resentment. I think that both parties in our politics, both sides in our politics, actually want to be the party of resentment. You know, no one wants to be the elite in American politics; they just have two very different ways of understanding what elite means and what there is to resent. And the culture war is a war of two populisms, what we might call in very broad terms, cultural populism and economic populism. For that reason, I think that this election is definitely, and has been and will be, a culture war election because, in fact, in this particular election more than most, we see the war of cultural populism defining the two candidates.

The Republicans have nominated a candidate who is a populist of a sort that they really haven't seen in a very long time. He's a populist not as much on cultural terms, in fact, as on what we normally think of as economic populism, at least in attitude, in disposition. While the Democrats have nominated a candidate who is -- I would argue, and I will try to lay this out now -- more of a cultural elitist than we've actually seen from them in the past. I think both of these will probably give you some pause so I want to lay them out.

Certainly, many people would argue that it's silly to call Barack Obama an elitist. He grew up relatively poor and he was even once on food stamps. He didn't come from a prominent family; he made his own way in the world; he made his own name. And John McCain is the son of a fairly wealthy family [from a] kind of American military aristocracy. He married an heiress; I don't know where these senators find these heiresses these days, but somehow they do. In that objection to calling Obama an elitist, in a nutshell, we have a picture of why the Democrats have so often done so poorly in Middle America and have handled so clumsily the question of cultural populism. What we have in the objection is a confusion of cultural and economic populism, a confusion of cultural identity with class identity.

I think it's fair to say that these two are quite distinct in our politics; the Republicans have generally been very good at cultural populism and the Democrats at economic populism. In normal times, the Republicans are the kind of traditional values, unabashedly patriotic, anti-cosmopolitan, non-nuance sort of Joe Six-pack Americans. The Democrats are much better, as I say, at economic populism. They're more naturally the sort of righteously indignant, out for fairness, anti-corporatist, people against the powerful, and defender-of-the-little-guy type. When these two things are combined into one, they can be very powerful. I don't think we've really seen it happen since Ross Perot in 1992. Ross Perot -- it's amazing to think now, won 20 percent of the vote in a presidential election when he was basically insane and he overcame that -- what would normally be a pretty serious disability -- by being a very effective populist, a true populist.

In normal times, the two parties divide populism into these two portions; and in America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has generally been a lot more powerful than economic populism. Americans don't resent success; they don't assume that corruption is the only way to the top, but they do resent arrogance and especially intellectual arrogance. And so while economic populism can certainly be very potent, it is almost never a match for cultural populism. And the Republicans generally do well -- better than the Democrats on the elitist versus populist question. They win that game almost every time -- doesn't mean they always win elections, but it helps them.

It doesn't really matter, I think, who's actually more rich and who's less rich. The guy that asks for a fancy European cheese on his cheese steak is the elitist. We've seen that especially in the last two elections. You can actually, literally have a guy whose parents are both descended from Mayflower pilgrims, whose family has been wealthy and prominent since before American independence, whose grandfather was a senator, whose father was a president. And he is the Joe Six-pack in the election, and easily so, almost naturally so. Again, the cultural question so often and so easily overrides the question of economic populism.

It's impossible for me to overstate how badly the Democrats have handled this problem. The nation's cultural elite is, of course, very liberal. And in the minds of many Americans, certain elements of the left-wing worldview have just become synonymous with cultural elitism. But the Democrats have not helped themselves on this front. I think Bill Clinton was an exception -- and very self-consciously an exception -- but Al Gore and John Kerry and before that, too. Their candidates for president have just been walking disasters on this front. And I would actually argue that Barack Obama, in some important ways, has been even worse.

He literally said, out loud, where people can hear him, that he thinks that people in small-town Pennsylvania cling to God and guns because they're bitter -- an unbelievable statement. It's what the cultural populists think that people in San Francisco think about them. And he said it. He said in a speech that Americans just drive big cars and eat what they want and set their thermostats to 72 degrees and expect that other countries won't say anything about it. He said in a campaign event that he's embarrassed that Americans don't speak more languages. You can't even imagine John Kerry saying these things. I think Obama is a walking, talking example of the way in which economic and cultural populism are not the same thing.

He is a classic representative of the cultural elite. And yes, his mother was on food stamps. She was on food stamps at a time when she was a graduate student getting a Ph.D. in anthropology. His elitism didn't come out of nowhere. And if you read his book, his first book, which is really a wonderful book, you get the picture of where he came from. He came from a loving family that was on the left fringes of American cultural politics. And he stayed there. He stayed there through college and as a community organizer and in Chicago politics and since then. It's not the worst thing in the world to be; but it is what Barack Obama really is, it seems to me.

And Obama has been badly hurt by this in certain ways. I mean, he almost lost the primaries when Hillary Clinton discovered this weakness of his and swiftly transformed herself into some kind of a beer-chugging, smoking, bowling steelworker -- very effectively. And she won just about every significant primary after she started doing that. It's perfectly imaginable that the last month of this election will be a little bit like the last few months of the primaries were for Obama -- where this is made an important issue by his opponent and where it hurts him. I don't think it'll be unfair to do that, and I don't think it's hard to imagine the McCain campaign trying to do that.

So that's the sense in which I'm saying that Obama may well be the most elitist candidate that the Democrats have nominated: a cultural elitist in the extreme on the one hand and also someone who finds it a little bit difficult to actually turn himself into an economic populist. He tries and he does do it, but it doesn't come quite as naturally for him.

John McCain on the other hand is, by his nature and his disposition, an economic populist as well a cultural one -- and the way that Republicans usually aren't. McCain is most animated, most alive when he talks about cleaning up corruption, when he talks about fighting abuses of power and excess. He's a natural anti-corporatist even if he's not a substantive anti-corporatist. He has the disposition and the instincts and that kind of ready Tom-Joe moralism of a union agitator. And his cultural populism actually takes a similar spirit: it's patriotism more than it is religious piety. It's service more than tradition. It's honor more than it's family values. And here again, his populism is more like a kind of Midwestern Catholic than it is Southern evangelical. In that sense, also, I think it's more populist.

So McCain, in this regard, is a very unusual Republican, and I think his campaign realized this. They realized also that they had an opening, given whom they were running against. And so they have tried to run on this attempt to play both sides of the populist card. They seem to have in mind, as I see it, a kind of three-step approach to Obama. In general terms: cultural populism, first; sort of economic populism, second; and cultural populism, again.

So beginning in the late spring and early summer, after it was clear that they'd be running against Obama, they began to attack his strength, his ability to draw crowds and make a stirring speech. And they attacked it precisely on populist grounds: they called him a celebrity, they called him a creature of Hollywood, a pompous pop star. And he helped them, of course, by going on a European tour and all that. And it also helped them make the case against his lack of experience -- his lack of a resume. It was all wrapped up in what was really a very populist message, and I think a pretty effective one.

What they tried to make the next step was to begin in their convention to focus a bit on a certain sort of John McCain economic populism. They portrayed McCain as a maverick, as an opponent of corruption and excess, a reformer who kind of shakes up the big boys in the back rooms. And McCain began to make the case for himself in this way in his convention speech. The third stage -- which I'm only postulating and it's still to come and we don't know what the final stage of this election will look like -- could well be a return to cultural populism. Attack Barack Obama not on his strength, but on his weakness: that he has a very liberal voting record, and one that in some important ways, on cultural questions, will make him seem very different from many American voters -- especially in the states that count most.

The Sarah Palin pick suited this approach very well. The basic logic of it was to complement McCain's reputation for reform, for anti-corruption and for a kind of anti-pork. You can see what he would've liked in her attitude and in her record. Palin also contributed to the cultural populism of the campaign in ways that I think went far beyond what the McCain campaign could have possibly expected. Her nomination certainly energized cultural conservatives who saw her as coming from where they were coming from. And that, the campaign certainly did expect.

But even more than that, much more than that, her nomination sent the cultural elite reeling into a kind of uncontrolled fit. The first few days after the announcement of Palin, I really think are going to look like a kind of dark blot on the history of American journalism. Reporters became, more explicitly than we're used to seeing them, direct conduits for some of the darkest and ugliest features of our cultural elite. There were rumors about her family and personal history swirling around on mainstream news shows, on the front pages of all the major newspapers. I think it did largely pass; but in the process, it cemented a connection between Palin and the cultural right that very powerfully strengthened McCain's campaign for a while at a time when they really needed it.

I think that the turn they were trying to make to economic populism, to his version of it, hasn't really gone all that well. The economic crisis that we're in, which might, in theory, have advanced his case -- mostly in practice -- has put Republicans on the defensive. McCain's own flailing performance at the beginning of it hurt his image too. The actual substance of his economic populism is probably inadequate for the task. It's really mostly atmospheric. There's a kind of gnashing of teeth, but there's not actually a middle-class agenda for the most part under there. At least they haven't made it clear. I do think that anger helps him in this period, that he would've been worse off if he had Mitt Romney's CEO confidence or even Barack Obama's very cold reserve. But it hasn't been enough to make him the real economic populist in the race.

But as I say, I do think there will be a further turn to a cultural populism that can be pretty powerful. There's quite a story to tell about Obama. There's not been a lot of journalism done on Obama so a lot of it will be new to voters. And it could be quite powerful. Will it be enough? Obviously, that remains to be seen. This is a very Democratic year and any Republican candidate would have had to sail against some stiff winds. But to the extent that cultural issues have played a role, I think they've helped McCain. I think they've probably helped him significantly and could well help him a lot more.

E.J. DIONNE, The Washington Post: I think McCain is having trouble as an economic populist because he isn't one. I think he's more Andrew Mellon and Phil Gramm in a Huey Long costume, and he's had trouble making that work. That's a light point, but I actually think it's a substantive point for the long haul.

I guess I wanted to dissent and say that, in fact, while we always have a culture war to one degree or another, there are signs that it is actually waning in this campaign. There are many different ways of looking at the culture war. My way of looking at it, which is closer, say, to Alan Wolfe's or to James Hunter's⁴ : There is a culture war between the 10 or 15 percent of us who are most culturally and religiously conservative and the 10 or 15 percent of us who are most secular and culturally liberal. But there is a vast middle ground where people have complicated views: conservative on some things or at some times -- like when their kids are teenagers -- and liberal on other things and at other times.

When issues, particularly economic issues, present themselves, the culture war recedes. I think that's what's happening now just as it happened between 1928 and 1932. In 1928, it was a culture war election with prohibition announcements, Catholicism; 1932 was an economic election. And as evidence of this, I think Sarah Palin is not in trouble because her cultural views offend the left. She's in trouble because of her lack of substantive knowledge and grounding. And she's in trouble with the middle, not the left. Yes, there will be some voting along cultural lines; yes, right-to-lifers still will vote Republican; yes, white evangelical Christians will remain Republican for a whole variety of reasons. But this just doesn't feel like a culture war fight to me unless Yuval is right, and McCain somehow pulls the culture war rabbit out of the hat between now and Election Day. I'm just curious for your reaction.

GITLIN: Here's the difference between elite and elitist. Obama stands for an elite which anyone can get into, but you have to work your way into it. It's not hereditary. It's not George H.W. Bush's elite. It's an elite that anybody can work his way into. This is an American elite. And if Obama can actually succeed in illustrating that he stands for the mobilization of knowledge in behalf of popular good, I think this would be an enormous achievement. Seriously, America has to outgrow this childish negation of reason. And that's why it is the party of enlightenment.

A the risk of hyperbole here, I would say we have a precedent in the history of American presidential politics for somebody who exhibits elite quality and is not elitist. And, believe it or not, he is the past president from Illinois, Abe Lincoln. He's a guy who grows up in a log cabin, learns to read with Shakespeare and the Bible, writes the English language the way no one else in American history has ever written it, could not have been smarter and so on. Was he accused of being an elitist in his time? I don't know. My historical knowledge isn't deep enough to know.

LEVIN: Okay. I'll begin with E.J. I actually don't disagree that the culture war occurs between two relatively narrow slivers of our population. But when presidential elections are as close as they have been for a while now - and I don't just mean the last two - that narrow sliver matters a lot. And it also happens to be that these are folks who live in states that matter especially a lot. Fifteen percent is quite a lot when the election comes down to 27 people and even when it comes down, as 2004 did, to one state.

Todd, I guess I would define elitists as just simply the people that the populists hate. And that is one of the reasons why cultural elitism is more powerful than economic elitism in America: because it's a little bit easier to resent a certain sort of intellectual arrogance than it is to resent economic success in our kind of culture.

I think, more importantly, is the question of whether the elite is who is suited to govern. Obviously, elitism has a rich tradition in conservatism. If we say that conservatism began with Edmund Burke, then it began as an elitist approach to governing. Burke argued that the elite in his day were formed in a way that made them especially prudent and so especially able to govern. If that were the case now, then I think that there would be a lot more conservative elitists. But I think the ways of gaining and keeping elite credentials in our society and in our time do not lend themselves to producing prudent people - that is, people who govern in a kind of sensible, level-headed way. There are other ways of making prudent people, but our cultural elite is not well-suited to govern.

Read the full transcript a pewforum.org

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Notes

¹ See The Kanawha CountyTextbook Controversy
² Read the arguments and decision in Loving v. Virginia.
³ See, "Supreme Court Upholds Voter Identification Law in Indiana," The New York Times, April 29, 2008.
⁴ Wolfe, Alan and James Hunter, Is There A Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life.