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CIAO DATE: 8/01
Politics in an Era of Good Feeling
On The Issues
July 2000
Peace and mass prosperity are transforming American politics.
Never in living memory has American politics been so unfocused as today. In the past fifty years, we have developed a methodological approach to the study of electoral politics that is subtle, sophisticated, and more than superficially enlightening. One can get a Ph.D. studying it, and it is, in fact, one of the more respectable Ph.D.'s in the social sciences. Journalists are at least familiar with its procedures and findings, and many are quite expert as amateur scholars in the field. All candidates have such people on their staffs, as do all the media that take politics seriously. It is therefore a shock today to discover that they are, for the most part, at sea without a functioning compass—or with many compasses in excellent shape that seem to have oddly lost their sense of direction. Some political analysts simply reiterate yesteryear's findings—perhaps believing (or hoping) that, magically, this will give new life to yesteryear's realities. This at least permits them to give confident advice to "their" politicians, the media, or the public. Presumably little harm is done. The politicians and the public can stumble along in the real world—they are survivors, after all. As for the media—well, mistaken analysis can be just as "interesting" as the valid kind, and eventually no one remembers anyway.
Political Detachment
Much intellectual energy, of course, is still focused on "the issues"—specifically Social Security and education reform, which the polls point to as the leading ones. Leading, that is, if the poll is constructed in such a way as to reflect the politicians' sense of possible options. With an open-ended poll, those who cite education as a major concern are 13 percent; for Social Security it is 10 percent.
Every other imaginable issue is even lower on the scale. Do the people know something that the politicians do not? That is possible. Two recent reports from two very respectable Washington think tanks argue that the conventional statistics on the economic conditions of the aged are misleading and that projections for the future open the possibility of no crisis for the current Social Security system. As for education, everyone wants Americans students to do better on standardized tests, but no American parent can be persuaded that his (or her) children are among those who are destined to be academic duds. Our parents want tests their children will not fail, or even not do too badly on. So that is what they will get. This helps explain the fact that American parents say education reform is desirable, while asserting at the same time that their own local school is a good school. They don't even much like a reform that requires more homework for their kids. American parents believe, above all, that students at all ages should enjoy school.
As for the conservative program writers, they cannot give up on their favorite issue: tax cuts of various kinds. But since the public response has been feeble, the campaigns will mute their tones. And they will also mute their tone on affirmative action, abortion, immigration, and other controversial issues—whose controversiality has "lost its legs," that is, quickly bores. The Democrats, always an issue-oriented party, will find it far more difficult to restrain their ideological fervor, but it really won't matter. "Gun control" looked like a sure winner only a few months ago, what with all those school shootings, but the polls show neither party gaining an advantage on the issue.
Today, public-opinion polls show that Bush and Gore are thought to be equally acceptable on practically all issues, and are running neck and neck in the presidential polls. (This, however, disguises an interesting inequality: women voters lean to the Democratic side, while the men lean to the Republican side—in some polls, lean so dramatically to the Republican side as to give Bush a six-point lead.)
There is fascinating ground for speculation here. Karlyn H. Bowman, the polling specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, reports: "What we seem to have here now is a race for student council president, rather than president of the United States." As one of her liberal counterparts puts it: "It may come down to who we like more and who we trust most."
With an unprecedented level of prosperity and the end of the Cold War, the American people say they want change—it is practically un-American for someone to say he does not want change—but it is clear they will not be dismayed if they don't get it. Ordinarily, this is to the advantage of the incumbent in the White House, who partakes of the manna that flows from his office. (The imperial presidency is now a fact in our democracy.) But this situation is now complicated by the nature of the two parties and their candidates. The Republican candidate has now reverted to a more classical American conservatism—cautious in his commitments to the reform of the welfare state and its allied institutions, emphasizing civil concord rather than the discord of the Newt Gingrich period. At the same time, the Democratic Party is moving to the Left, in deference to the trade unions, which have themselves moved to the Left, and is today more populist, more polemical, sounding more and more like the party of the dispossessed rather than the party of peace and prosperity. So it would not really be surprising if, in the upcoming presidential campaign, it is the Republican Party and its candidate that captures the ethos of an "era of good feeling" and benefits therefrom.
Multicultural Myths
The liberals have nevertheless won several major victories in the past years in the cultural wars, but those have been rhetorical victories for the most part. Thus, the liberals have persuaded the country (and, of course, the media) that something called "multiculturalism" has become an American reality. Even so staunchly conservative a journalist as Andrew Sullivan declares, en passant, that "subcultures have replaced a national culture" in the United States today. This is a case of mistaking media-imposed and government-sponsored "virtual reality" for the real thing. Those subcultures do not exist. They are a myth created and nourished by the Left, which tries to "actualize" it in university and school curricula—but it remains a bookish myth whose roots are in academia, not in any social reality.
Yes, the country today is experiencing a very high rate of immigration, with Hispanics in the lead, followed at a distance by Asians. But "Hispanic" is simply a linguistic term, little more. Cubans and Mexicans in the United States express their detestation of one another in Spanish, and both tend to like Latin American food and popular music—that's about it. Since Latin American immigrants are, by traditional standards, geographically closer to their countries of origin, they tend to hold on to their native tongues longer than did the Jewish, Italian, and Polish immigrants of earlier generations. But language is not the same thing as culture. Hispanic immigrants continue to speak "kitchen Spanish" and "street Spanish," but their children are much less fluent in the tongue, and their grandchildren still less so.
They go to American movies and watch American television, after all. And the popular novels they read are likely to be translations of American popular novels. The major Latin American novelists sell quite well in the United States—in English, not in Spanish, and to readers of European descent.
As for Asians, that is a meaningless geographic term. Koreans, Chinese, Indians, and Pakistanis leave their national cultures behind when they make the long trek to the United States. Their cultures and their languages just don't fit easily into the American paradigm. The immigrants' children quickly slide away from them, their grandchildren know not a word of the language, and, in general, this meets with approval within their immigrant communities. They came to America to become Americans.
And they are doing so at a dizzying pace. Critics who point with alarm to our new large immigrant population ignore the astonishing degree to which this population is intermarrying with the nonimmigrants. Talk about assimilation and the melting pot—we have seen nothing like this before. The intermarriage rate for the native-born children of Asian immigrants is somewhere between 30 and 50 percent. This minority increases through immigration and just as steadily decreases through intermarriage. A similar process is taking place among the children of Hispanic immigrants, whose intermarriage rate is also in the 30—50 percent range. The official statistics are misleading about this, since they add the new immigrants to the old but don't subtract the intermarried. It is methodologically impossible to be accurate without inventing dozens of new "ethnic" categories for our statistics. And this is politically difficult to do, since the simple ethnic and racial categories are the basis for "affirmative action" in all areas of American life, a program which is vigorously defended by the self-appointed leaders of the various ethnic organizations, who are defined as spokesmen for the entire group. And so we end up with a set of "positive" Nuremberg regulations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services whereby if one of your grandparents is in the preferred class, you qualify for the benefits of affirmative action. As one might imagine, there is an awful lot of lying going on.
The Left itself has come to realize that "multiculturalism" has less and less appeal; even departments of "cultural studies" in the university rarely ask the student to learn a foreign language. So the old mantra has been replaced with the new: "diversity."
The idea is that diversity—racial, sexual, ethnic—not only connotes tolerance as against bias, but actually generates tolerance rather than bias. At the moment and in practice, "diversity" is mainly to the advantage of women and homosexuals, and who wants to argue with them? So diversity is now, in effect, noncontroversial. When the secretary of the treasury declared June 9 to be Diversity Day for all his department's employees, urging them to "actively engage in diversity activities," the media ignored him, while the male and female employees were already "actively engaged" in their own ways.
The controversies engendered by the culture wars continue, but mainly at the local level, not the national. Yet even here one senses a marked decline in the passions that are evoked. It's not just that people are weary and bored, though that is true enough. What has happened is that the ground under the conflict has shifted and the landscape has changed—though the media haven't bothered to notice. One respect in which the landscape has changed is sociological. The Left, securely in control of all cultural and educational institutions, has won the culture wars, and the Right has left the major battlefields—but not to sulk, instead to "do it their way."
Religion and "Spirituality"
The liberal Left controls the public schools, but it turns out that controlling the schools and controlling the students are not necessarily the same thing. There are now over one million students enrolled in "homeschooling" by parents who disapprove of either the secular ethos of the public schools or the intellectual level of the curriculum—the latter a minority, though not an insignificant one. These students, upon graduating from their home schools, turn out to perform better on the standardized tests than the American average. They then go on to one of the Christian colleges—there are well over a hundred now—or to a secular institution, public or private. On the latter campuses, Christian students form Bible-study clubs, lead prayers by athletes and onlookers before sporting events, and take the initiative on all sorts of activities that are giving pain to the secular administrators and professors, while posing headache-inducing problems for the courts that have to figure what is or is not a violation of the separation of church and state provision of the First Amendment or the free speech provision of that same amendment.
The country is a lot more visibly Christian today than at the height of the culture wars, while the Christians are far less visible in American politics. Public-opinion polls all agree that the American populace as a whole is considerably more religious than it was twenty years ago. But it is profoundly misleading to talk about American religiosity as if it were a replay of the older secular v. religious polarity. The most interesting things that are happening to American religion are happening within the religious denominations and even within secularism itself.
It is hard to give this process a precise definition, for it is a many-hued thing. Essentially, we are talking about a new "inwardness," a new "spirituality," a new religious individualism that is spontaneously generated not only within the formal, official religious communities but also among secular individuals who find "New Age" religiosity so attractive that bookshops now have large sections devoted to it. It is easy to be dismissive about this phenomenon, because, like all previous American religious revivals, it is a feature of the nation's popular culture, not its high culture (its "highbrow culture"), and it has none of the solemnity that Europeans think appropriate to religion. It is an individual religiosity that fits very neatly into our "consumerist" and "entrepreneurial" society. It is very much at home in a capitalist ambiance, with self-appointed preachers launching initial public offerings of their particular variety of religious beliefs.
In America, individualism always triumphs over any species of communalism. One may sneer at it and say that what we have is an individualism without individuality (which is largely true), but that is merely another way of saying that American individualism is democratic individualism. The new "transcendental individualism," as we may call it, is already working its way through American society, and so quickly and efficiently that significant changes occur without anyone paying much attention.
Thus, it cannot be unimportant that the very term "religion" has been discarded by the Evangelicals and most mainline Protestant denominations, with Catholics and Jews in the process of grudgingly going along. What was once a "religion" is now a "faith community," whose focus is "spirituality" rather than belief or behavior. The "search for identity" is now a sacred quest with which nothing should interfere. Everything that is not a matter of "choice" is a violation of one's personal integrity. This sounds like anarchy, but in a mass, affluent democracy like the United States it isn't. The choices turn out to be limited—though with unpredictable social and political consequences. "Choice," after all can be conservative as well as radical—though a conservatism that is nothing but a matter of choice has to be something new under the sun. For that matter, so is a radicalism. Political ideologies as consumer goods? Why not?
New Religion, New Politics
What is certain is that this metaphysical dissolvent, transcendental individualism, will have a profound impact on American politics. Terms like Left and Right, along with liberalism and conservatism, are already beginning to seem anachronistic. The welfare state is becoming open to changes that are utterly unthinkable in Europe. Marriage and the family will never be the same. All established educational institutions look like bureaucratic anachronisms. Our young students are astonished to learn that our foreign policy is supposed to be made by a State Department.
It is all very perplexing and more than a little scary. Fortunately, all of this is happening during an era of good feeling, produced by peace and unprecedented prosperity. Otherwise, the psychological tensions might be intolerable, even explosive.
Irving Kristol is a senior fellow at AEI. A version of this article appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on May 26, 2000.
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