I entirely (well, almost entirely) agree with Terry Teachout. The election has confirmed, even dramatized, the cultural divide in our nation—a cultural divide, as he points out, that now coincides with a geographical divide (that L-shaped swath of the country) and a political divide (“Republican Nation” versus “Democratic Nation”). I also agree with him that cultural issues have become more prominent even as political ones (prescription drugs, tax cuts, and the like) have become less so. How else explain the fact that at a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, half the electorate was prepared to turn out the party in power? Or that the “religion gap,” the “gender gap,” the “marriage gap,” and other cultural gaps have become so conspicuous? (They are even more conspicuous than the statistics cited by Teachout suggest: 70 percent of Republican voters are married; 52 percent of Democratic voters.)

Long before the actual election, the primary campaigns alerted us to these developments. In an article in COMMENTARY at the time (“The Election and the Culture Wars,” May 2000) I spoke of a renewal of the “culture wars”: within the Republican party in the resurgence of religious conservatism; and between the parties, with polls showing George W. Bush and Al Gore running dead even, while born-again Christians (among Catholics as well as evangelicals) favored Bush by more than two to one. Still other evidence surfaced in the course of the electoral campaign and, now, in the results of that election.

During the campaign, the sociologist Alan Wolfe, the stalwart proponent (as the title of his 1998 book put it) of the “one nation, after all” thesis—that is, one nation, one culture—belatedly discovered that America is so “bitterly divided over morality” that something like a policy of “moral federalism” should be adopted to allow states and localities to deal with those divisive moral issues. The choice of Senator Joseph Lieberman as Vice President Gore’s running mate was an obvious attempt to dispel the aura of our “morally challenged” President, as was the extraordinary effort of the Vice President to distance himself from the President (and from his own complicity in that presidency). Even the rhetoric of public discourse changed, as commentators revived talk of the “culture wars” and newspapers spoke of a new “morality-based politics,” with each party seeking to capture the “moral high ground.”

And now the election itself, with its cliff-hanger ending, has brought to the fore still more evidence of the cultural divide. Confronted with an intensity of feeling on both sides of the divide, far surpassing that exhibited even at the time of the Clinton impeachment, analysts have been driven back into our history to recall similar outbursts of moral passion—most obviously the culture wars of the 1960’s (or the 1970’s, as one commentator prefers), or further back still to the elections of the 1880’s and 90’s, which are said to have reflected the “values gap” of an all too real and bloody Civil War. “Two Countries, One System” read the headline of a recent article describing an America “of two minds, profoundly divided over the culture.” Indeed, the term “cultural divide” has become the accepted shorthand phrase for that syndrome of values—concerning religion, marriage, family, abortion, work (the “Puritan ethic”)—which, many analysts now agree, were more decisive in the election than the ephemeral political issues and which help account for the bitter aftermath of the election.

The election also demonstrates that the tradition-minded “dissident culture,” as I have called it, is probably larger than I estimated when I wrote my book two years ago, although even then I called attention to the fact that that culture was growing, especially among the young. It is an encouraging sign of the times (and a good omen for the future) that young people are more conservative on most cultural and moral issues than they had been. While they voted for Gore by a narrow margin, it was a very much narrower one than their vote for Clinton four years earlier.

If I still resist the “two nations” formulation that Teachout proposes, it is for the same reason that I resisted it in my book (having earlier used that phrase in essays and lectures). It is too easily mistaken for Disraeli’s famous “two nations”—i.e., the rich and the poor; or for that other much-publicized “two nations,” black and white. Nor are Teachout’s “Democratic Nation” and “Republican Nation” entirely satisfactory. As he himself says, neither “nation” is as culturally homogeneous as those labels suggest.

There are Republicans who are that for purely economic reasons and who have no interest in, let alone quarrel with, the dominant culture itself. And there are Democrats, including many African-Americans and some religious Jews, who are that for traditional or political reasons, in spite of their cultural dissidence. It is an impressive fact that 63 percent of those who go to church more than once a week voted for Bush; but there is that 36 percent or so who voted for Gore. And while most religious conservatives vote Republican, as many as 40 percent in the congressional elections of 1998 voted Democratic.

My “one nation, two cultures” formula cuts across those categories (or “nations”) of rich and poor, black and white, Republican and Democratic; cultural conservatives may be found in all of them. It also places those conservatives firmly within “one nation,” thus dispelling any suggestion that they are at all wanting in patriotism, public-spiritedness, or civic-mindedness; theirs is not a segregationist or militia mentality. “Two nations” strikes me as too stark, too intransigent, too fatally divisive—which is perhaps why Teachout concludes his essay by reminding us that America may be two nations, but “it remains one country.”

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