America Divided? It's Only the Blabocrats

People are really hating right now," Jim Lehrer, public television's lion of civility, said a few weeks ago. "Our e-mails and our phone calls reflect not a lot of open minds out there." Well, it certainly seems so--and especially last week, as the friends and fanatics of John Kerry and George W. Bush mobilized themselves for the general election. A flying squad of Vietnam veterans--not directly related to the Bush campaign--launched a slime attack on John Kerry's war record. A flying squad of pop musicians--not directly related to the Kerry campaign--announced that they would launch a massive October concert tour to save the nation from President Bush. The people of Missouri voted overwhelmingly against gay marriage. And, of course, there was the usual array of screechers and squawkers polluting the airwaves, dominating public discourse, drowning out any stray hints of moderation or reason.

We are a divided nation, it is said. There is a cultural chasm between the red states and the blue, between the religious and the secular, between Michael Moore's America and Rush Limbaugh's. The "culture war" has become a pillar of the conventional wisdom. But is it real? Is it possible that the great partisan divide is a media-induced mirage, little more than an exaggerated case of squeaky-wheelism? There is plenty of evidence that the very real disputes pushed by political activists and chair-throwing media yakkers--call this the Anger-Industrial Complex--are being carelessly extrapolated to include a far less vehement populace.

Take the Moore/Limbaugh divide. A new Annenberg poll shows that the two infotainers are little more than postmodern tribal leaders: an estimated 8% of Americans saw Fahrenheit 9/11 in July, and an estimated 7% listened to Limbaugh. Their tribes are hilariously antithetical on a range of issues--83% of Rushites support the way Bush is handling Iraq, 87% of Mooreists are opposed; 85% of Rushites support Bush's handling of the economy, and 82% of Mooreists don't. And yet, these extremist clumps throw disproportionate weight in the public square. Dick Cheney appears on Limbaugh's show; Moore appears in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic Convention. But even if you generously double their numbers--as some experts like Andrew Kohut of the Pew poll do--that leaves 70% of the public unaccounted for. What about the rest of us?

Maybe we're just busy living our lives. A new book by the Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina, Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, argues that a closely divided nation isn't necessarily a deeply divided nation. Fiorina cites polling data that show minuscule differences between red-and blue-state voters on most issues (for example: 64% of blues and 62% of reds believe corporations have too much power). Even on ballistic issues like abortion, the "never" and "always" believers tend to be a distinct minority; the vast American middle says, reluctantly, "sometimes." And while gay marriage may still be a bridge too far, as the results in Missouri demonstrate, Fiorina and Kohut agree that attitudes toward homosexuality (anti discrimination against gays) and racial issues (pro interracial dating) have become far more tolerant over the past 20 years.