Culture Wars The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter (z-lib.org)

274 THE FIELDS OF CONFLICT

signal that, depending on the fate of the culture war, such candidacies may become less exceptional. It will. be recalled that Yehuda Levin ran for Congress and then for mayor, not with any illusion that he had a chance of winning, but to make a symbolic statement about the concerns of OrthodoxJudaism. Yet even for those candidates who are not actively committed to certain cultural interests themselves, it is clear that they . must play to those interests to varying degrees in their campaigns both

in the hope of gaining a constituency and of discrediting their opponents.
___..,;	.

PLAYING OFF THE INTERESTS

Examples of how candidates have played_ off the competing interests of the contemporary culture war could be found throughout many levels of government and in probably every election year since the 1960s. The manipulation of those interests, however, was especially apparent in the presidential campaigns of the 1980s. ,What follows is not comprehensive, by any means, but merely illustrative of these dynamics. ·

Carter and Reagan

In the 1980 contest between incumbent jimmy Carter and former Cal-

. ifornia governor Ronald Reagan, for· example, these interests of the culture war had a decisive and, at least in the case of the family issue, an unanticipated effect. As seen earlier, it was the Carter administration more than any other previous administration that transformed the family from a private institution into a public policy issue: Carter's future vicepresident, Senator Walter Mondale, initiated the influential 1973 Subcommittee on Children and Youth hearings on "American Families: Trends and Pressures," and Carter himself, during the New Hampshire primary, pledged to hold a White House conference on the family. But by the time of the conference and, in part because of it, Carter lost control of the issue. His own moderately progressive views were drowned out in the clamor of the extremes and the· debate over the family acquired a life of its own.

Perhaps because it was no longer exclusively their issue, the family received little attention in the Democratic platform in the 1980 campaign. Only one section was devoted to family concerns and that consisted of only one sentence: "The Democrati~ Party supports efforts to make federal programs more sensitive to the needs of the family, in all

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-its diverse forms" (emphasis added). Consistent with the progressive tone of the platform, Carter himself, though an Evangelical Christian and personally opposed to abortion, played ini::reasingly to the interests of the progressivist vision of the family. Of the ERA he declared that it was "the last remaining need in our nation to realize the popes and ambitions of our original founders, that people would have equal op-

~rtunity."2

It was Reagan and the Republican party, of course, that gained the advantage from Carter's fumbling of the family issue, largely because they could draw on the grass-roots activism of the newly mobilized (and largely Evangelical and ·conservative Catholic) pro-family coalition. In contrast to the Democratic platform, three sections of the Republican platform focused exclusively on the family. Both in general and in detail, these paragraphs pledged unequivocal "support for legislation protecting and defending the traditional American family against the ongoing erosion of its base in our society." Reagan's message from the stump was consistent with this theme. He pledged to seek federal judges "who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent life," and declared himself to be for equal rights for women although against the ERA ("I cannot believe that there are some who think that I would in

.anyway restrict the freedom and rights of women").' He also spoke against abortion ("I notice that everybody who's for abortion has already been born'').4

The family, of course, was by no means the only or even the most important issue of the 1980 campaign. It was simply one of a collage of symbols 'Vi.th which the candidates had to contend. Cynically or sincerely, each candidate articulated his broader vision for America in the language provided by opposing sides of the culture war. Thus, Reagan aligned his own candidacy with the vision ilnd aspirations of the culturally conservative side of the cultural divide by proclaiming that "America is a land of destiny created by some divine plan"; by recognizing that there is "a great hunger in America for a spiritual revival"; by sharing its belief "that law must be based on a higher law"; by identifying with its quest to "return to traditions and values we once had."5 At the same time, he sought orthodox support by encouraging the participation of this typically apolitical sector of the U.S. population in political discourse. As he said a month and a half before election day, "I have thought for a long time that too many of our churches have been too reluctant to speak up ·on behalf of what they believe is proper in government and they have been too lax in interfering in recent years with government's invasion

276	THE FIELDS OF CONFLICT

of the family itself."6 He was speaking, of course, to churches of orthodox commitment.

In Jimmy Carter's view, Reagan offered nothing less than a "fantasy America" built upon policies that were "outrageous and irresponsible." The Republican future, Carter argued in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, was a future of"despair," "surrender," and "risk," and that stood in sharp contrast to the Democratic future of "security, justice and peace." He aligned his own candidacy with the vision and aspirations of liberals by voicing compassion "for the troubled Americans-the poor, the jobless and afflicted," and by declaring that he was "proud to run on a progressive and sound platform." This was reaffirmed by his vice~presidential nominee Walter Mondale, who described the Republican convention as "isolated in a bubble of privilege" with only "token" representatives of women, workers, and minorities, compared to the Democratic convention which was "a mirror ofall Amer- ica-all of it: black and white, Asian and Hispanic, native and immigrant, male and female, young and old, urban and rural, rich and poor."7

Reagan and Mondale

Symbols that were prominent in the 1980 election resurfaced in the 1984 Reagan-Mondale contest. After four years, Reagan continued to press the same vision and invoke the same symbols that had first put him in the White House. "We're going forward," he proclaimed just over a month before the election, "with values that have never failed us when we lived up to them: dignity of work, love for family and neighborhood, faith in God, belief in peace through strength, and a commitment to protect the freedom which is our legacy as Americans." In line with this theme, Vice-President Bush identified the Republican platform with the "preservation of values" including "freedom, f~mily, work and faith."8

By Mondale's lights, Reagan's political philosophy was not classical conservatism but a conservatism that cynically courted the Religious Right. "Both [party] platforms were prepared by Jerrys," he claimed, "ours under the leadership of Geraldine Ferraro and theirs by Jerry Falwell. There's a big difference."9 Mondale's resentment of the novel political role of Evangelicals and other conservative religious groups and for Reagan, who continued to encourage this activism, was not well disguised. It surfaced again and again throughout the campaign. "What makes America great," he stated in a speech in Tupelo, Mississippi, "is that our faith is between ourselves, our conscience and our God, and

	ELECTORAL POLITICS		277
we don't have to clear our faith by passing muster with some politician
who happens to be running against us." "Politicians," he continued,
"should keep their nose out of religion."10			~~~~ ' n~na'-
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	Mondale and the Democratic party continued to press their agenda
through the emblems of progressive cultural commitments: economic
justice (')obs and employment are the center of Democratic thinking"),
women's rights ("a top priority of a Democratic Administration will be
ratification of the unamended equal rights amendment"), abortion rights
("reproductive freedom [is] a fundamental human right"), and so on. It
was on this latter issue that the tensions of the cultural conflict flared
up again. In this situation, it was between Archbishop john J. O'Connor
(who stated that he did not believe a Catholic "in good conscience" could
vote for a political candidate who approved of abortion or favored leav-
ing the decision to women, and who chastened the Democratic vice-
presidential candidate for "misrepresenting Roman Catholic teachings
on abortion") and New York's governor Mario Cuomo, Senator Edward
Kennedy, and vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro (who
chided the archbishop for not respecting the separation of church and
· state). 11
	One might be tempted to attribute the remarkable success of the
Reagan campaigns in 1980 and 1984 to the exceptional persona of Ron-
ald Reagan himself and his ability to communicate. Liberal political com-
mentators throughout the decade did precisely this. How else, they
reasoned, could one explain the popular success of a man who was so
obviously feeble-minded and philistine if not for some earthy charisma
that appealed to the plebs. That being the case, the "Reagan magic" was
purely idiosyncratic-not likely to be repeated again. Such a logic may

be appealing but it rather misses the point. Democrats consistently maintained that Reagan's policies were antithetical to his rhetorical affirmation of "God, family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom." One will recall on this point that Geraldine Ferraro went so far as to question the sincerity of Reagan's Christian faith because his economic policies were, in her view, "so unfair." Protest they did, yet they could not deny Reagan's ability to establish a link between the ideals he espoused and himself. Even Mondale conceded at the end the 1984 campaign that

278	THE FIELDS OF CONFLICT

"when the true story of this election is written, I suspect it will not be about me or Mr. Reagan-but about you [the American people]," and "th.e kind of people we are." 12 Or rather, the kind of people we, as Americans, choose to be. The competing ideals of the culture war promised to be prominent in campaigns·fong after 1984 and after Reagan would step down from office.

Bush and Dukakis and Others

In the 1988 presidential campaigns, the culture war was more than just a backdrop for the race. The candidacies of two Baptist ministers through· the primary season, each of them a prominent leader on opposing sides of the cultural divide, brought the symbols and issues of the culture war directly to the campaign trail. Both Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson called for moral and spiritual leadership and both invoked the language of biblical revelation in their speech. At this very general level, their rhetoric was nearly identical. For Robertson, the "American people were crying out for basic moral leadership."13 Jackson could not have agreed more, for such leadership, he maintained, could "part the waters and lead our nation in the direction of the Promised Land."14 The content'of that moral and spiritual leadership, of course, was vastly and predictably. different for the two men.. For Robertson, it meant "bringing God back into the public schools," returning to "the faith of our fathers and the traditional standards of family life in America," limiting "gross pornography," stopping the slaughter of unborn children, opposing communism, and defending democracy around ~ world, and so on. For Jackson, it meant "meeting the needs" of the poor, "the dispossessed of this nation," and creating a coalition of "the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised," by seeking 'justice, peace and jobs."

Perhaps it was the candidacies ofJackson and Robertson that heightened the visibility of national identity as an implicit campaign issue affecting other candidates as well, especially in the campaign oratory of the two final contenders. As George Bush put it, "When a person goes into that voting booth, they're going to say, who has the values I believe in?" 15 Bush himself was acutely aware of the role of "values" (or more accurately, symbols or symbolic expressions of values) in the election and he invoked them regularly and directly. To Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis's claim that this election was not about ideology but about competence, Bush responded: "Competence makes the train run on time

ELECTORAL POLITICS

279

but doesn't know where they're going. Competence is the creed of the technocrat who makes the gears mesh but doesn't for a second understand the magic of the machine. The truth is, this election is about the beliefs we share, the values that we honor and the principles that we hold dear." But Bush went much further than this. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, for example, he put it this way:

An election that's about ideas and values is also about philosophy. And I have one. At the bright center is the individual. And radiating out from him or her is the family, the essential unit of closeness and of love. For it's the family that communicates to our children-to the 21st century-our culture, our religious faith, our traditions and history. I am guided by certain traditions. One is that there's a God and He is good, and His love, while free, has a self-imposed cost: we must be good to one another.

Generalities they might have been, but. they were generalities that fit with a particular vision of America. And Bush elaborated upon them in a litany of other symbols of the contemporary culture war recited throughout the campaign:

Should public school teachers be required to lead our children in the pledge of allegiance? My opponent says no, and I say yes. Should society be allowed to impose the death penalty on those who commit crimes of extraordinary cruelty and violence? My opponent says rio, but I say yes. And should our children have the right to say a voluntary prayer, of even observing a moment of silence in the schools? My opponent says no, but I say yes. And should free men and women have the right to own a gun to protect their home? My opponent says no, and I say yes. And is it right to believe in the sanctity of life and protect the lives of innocent children? My op-

. ponent says no, and I say yes. 16

'.i;'

A slightly different litany could be heard in the televised debate with his opponent Michael Dukakis. After identifying Dukakis as "a cardcarrying member of the ACLU," Bush stated that he did not agree "with a lot of the-most of the positions of the ACLU.... I don't want to see my 10 year old grandchild go into an X-rated movie. I like those rating systems. I don't think they're right to try to take the tax exemption away from the Catholic Church. I don't want to see 'under God' come out

280 THE FIELDS OF CONFLICT

from our currency. Now these are all positions of the ACLU and I don't agree with them."17

For his own part, Dukakis (like Carter and Mondale before him) invoked the symbols of an alternate vision of America, one in which the symbols of economic justice were most prominent. "If any one tells you," Dukakis said, "that the American Dream belongs to the privileged few and not all of us, you tell them the Reagan era is over and that a new era is about to begin." He and the Democratic party "identify with and care for struggling, working families." 18 As Dukakis put it elsewhere, "This election is not about overthrowing governments in Central America; it is about ~reatingjobs in middle America." Prominent in this vision of America were. the symbols of personal liberty, the most prominent issue being abortion. On this, Dukakis affirmed the right of "the woman in the exercise of her own conscience and religious beliefs" in making that decision, contrary to Bush who, he claimed, was "prepared to brand a woman a criminal for making the decision to abort." 19

My point in all of this has not been to provide an exhaustive review of campaign oratory. Nor has it been to suggest that the debates of the culture war are the only or even most consequential of all these elections. This brief journey through the rhetoric of the presidential campaigns of the 1980s illustrates how the contemporary cultural conflict provides the ideological context within which political campaigns must negotiate and make their claims.

Realignment in the Electorate

The contemporary culture war is not just ideological scenery. In fact, it has consequences in tg_e YQting behavior of thf! electorate. At the pres-

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~·flere, too, are signs that the more orthodox Catholics voted conservative Republican while the more progressive Catholics voted liberal Democrat.20

The abandonment of traditional party loyalties by these groups since the 1980s has generated much interest on the part of professional political scientists. It was thought that Southerners-Southern Evangeli-

,ELECTORAL POLITICS

281

cals-could be counted upon to vote with the Democratic party. So too, Northern and Midwestern Catholics were also believed to be Democratic party loyalists. As Archbishop John Whealon said, "I [was] a somewhat typical example of [the] link between U.S. Catholics and Democrats. In my childhood home, God and Jesus Christ wer.e first, the Catholic Church second, and the Democratic Party was third."21 Yet both Southerners generally and Southern Evangelicals in particular switched to the Republican party en masse. Likewise, Catholic voters could no longer be relied upon as a voting bloc. Political scientists have looked upon this with astonishment, as though a shift in party affiliation and voting behavior in itself meant something important. Their assumption is that the electorate changed in a meaningful way. In fact, the substantive change was not with these voters (who at least on cultural issues were always conservative and remain so to this day), but with the parties that presumed to represent them. Archbishop Whealon put it succinctly when he stated, "The nation needed FranklirRoosevelt and the Democrats to bring legal power to the trade unions, security for the elderly, subsidies to the farmers, and special help to the poor. But by its repeated stance in favor of abortion, the Democratic Party has abandoned the Catholic Church and fragmented a Catholic bloc.... Therefore, reluctantly, I am unable in conscience to remain a registered Democrat. Feeling abandoned, I hope that the Democratic Party regains its moral principles and its soul." Mae Duggan and other orthodox Catholics would agree wholeheartedly.22

THE EMERGENCE OF "RHETORICAL LEADERSHIP"

The objection can be anticipated. No, the identification with and use of potent cultural symbols is nothing new in A.merican electoral politics. Certainly one can recognize this phenomenon in nearly every election in U.S. history, although it is especially pronounced in a few. A few illustrations are instructive.

In the election of 1860, for example, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas squared off over the issue of slavery. Lincoln invoked the symbols of the abolitionist movement (for whom slavery was nothing less than "a great moral, social and political evil"-a "national sin"). Douglas invoked the symbols of peace, national unity, and the preservation of the status quo. Claimed Douglas, "I care more for the great principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for all the

282 THE FIELDS OF CONFLICT

Negroes in Christendom. I would not endanger the perpetuity of this Union, I would not blot out the great inalienabl~ rights of the white

man, for all the Negroes that ever existed."23To this, Lincoln responded, "Many of our adversaries are anxious to claim that they are specially devoted to the Union, and take pains to charge upon us hostility to the Union.... we put to them this one proposition: What ever endangered

. this Union, save and except Slavery?"24

The election of 1896 also witnessed lofty rhetoric. In this election, William Jennings Bryan represented the interests and ideals of Midwestern populism against William McKinley, who championed the interests of the East Coast establishment. The central issue of this election was whether to have a silver or gold standard for currency. Bryan described the crusade for a silver standard at the Democratic National Convention as nothing less than "a cause as holy as the cause of libertythe cause of humanity." For Bryan it was "the issue of 1776 over again." "We will answer [our opponents'] demand for a gold standard," he passionately declared, "by saying to them: 'You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.' " Bryan's chief rhetorical antagonist in this election, Bourke Cockran, responded on behalf of McKinley and industrial labor by saying, "In the name of humanity you shall neither press a crown of thorns upon the brow of labor nor place scourge upon his back." Indeed, "when this Populist assault upon common honesty and common industry shall have been repelled, the foundations· of this republic will remain undisturbed ... resting forever upon the broad basis of American patriotism, American virtue, and American intelligence."25

In the 1928 election contest between Republican Herbert Hoover and (Catholic) Democrat Al Smith, the issues were national prosperity, prohibition (the continued viability of the Volstead Act), and Smith's own religious faith. Smith was repeatedly referred to as the "rum-soaked Romanist," and the "candidate of Tammany," and it was widely rumored that he would transform the East Wing of the White House into the pope's summer home. As for Hoover and the GOP, they were "the party of 'pillage and privilege,'" and the ones who had injected "bigotry, hatred, and intolerance" into the campaign.26

That candidates for public office would invoke and thus become. themselves symbols of the contemporary culture war, then, is not terribly surprising. Nevertheless, there is something new and exceptional about the relationship between culture and contemporary electoral politics. Apart from the ·issues and symbols themselves, what is unique has to do with the

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283

context and method of leadership in late twentieth-century America. What is novel is the disposition of a democratic leadership, especially the presidency, to attempt to speak to the voting public directly-to inspire, persuade, and sway them through a popular or mass r~etoric that sets forth idealistic images of the republic and ennobling images of

the American people. What is singular, in a word is a form of national / l~ership predicated upon popular oratory.27 • ...C.:... ~ ,

Through the decades of the nineteenth a d early twentieth centuries, popular leadership through rhetoric was fairly uncommon.28 Aside from the inaugural address (which was presented orally and intended for a broad audience), the State of the Union message, special presidential recommendations and veto messages (which were originally intended as messages to Congress), very few personally initiated addresses to the larger public (such as Washington's Farewell Address and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address) or policy speeches were ever delivered by presidents.

It was not sloth that kept these leaders from facing the American public. It was, rather, the fear held by the framers of the Constitution and their nineteenth-century successors, that mass oratory would "undermine the rational and enlightened self-interest of the citizenry which their system was designed to foster and on which it was thought to depend for its stablity."29 A leadership premised upon popular oratory would be a form of governance vulnerable to the shifting winds of public opinion, all of which would undermine the prudentialjudgment integral to effective statesmanship.30

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~~:J@~J,~;C!Ji~~~~1t~~ On this his dictum was simple and new: "There is but one national voice in the country and that is the voice of the President." (In fact, Wilson was the first president since Jefferson to deliver the State of the Union address before Congress in person!)31 And now, of course, presidents have come to believe that they are not effective leaders unless they exhort the public directly on a regular basis.32 And so it is that the executive branch employs a large band of ghostwriters who provide the president with something to say for every possible circumstance and occasion. Importantly, the pressure to say something is not just in the mind of the president. It has become, rather, an institutionalized feature of that office's public function.

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