If you could erase one moment from Sen. Barack Obama\u2019s White House campaign, which would you choose?<\/p>\n\n
That\u2019s an easy question for evangelicals, Catholics and other religious believers who back Obama. Most would happily erase all evidence of his speech last spring to a circle of insiders behind closed doors in San Francisco. For those who have ignored national news in 2008, Obama talked about meeting voters in rural Pennsylvania, where hard times have crushed hopes and fueled resentments.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cSo it\u2019s not surprising then that they get bitter,\u201d he said, that \u201cthey cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren\u2019t like them \u2026 to explain their frustrations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
Welcome back to the \u201cculture wars,\u201d all you politicos who hoped and prayed that talk about \u201cvalues voters\u201d and \u201cpew gaps\u201d would disappear. Instead, Republicans have been chanting this mantra \u2014 \u201cbitter,\u201d \u201ccling,\u201d \u201cGod\u201d and \u201cguns\u201d \u2014 for months.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cIn small towns, we don\u2019t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren\u2019t listening,\u201d said Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as she hit the national stage. \u201cWe tend to prefer candidates who don\u2019t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
It\u2019s crucial to know that this kind of cultural warfare has evolved throughout American history, said Todd Gitlin, who teaches journalism and sociology at Columbia University in New York City. The issues change from campaign to campaign, along with the fierceness of the fighting. But cultural and religious issues always matter.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cThe 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 \u2026 want to think of themselves. In a word, what kind of culture they embody,\u201d said Gitlin, during a pre-election forum sponsored the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.<\/p>\n\n
These battles over symbols and substance are rooted in the fact that America was created \u201cas the fruit of an ideology, not a nationality.\u201d Thus, he stressed, \u201cAmerica is a way of life, in other words, a culture. So culture wars are as American as egg foo yung and tacos.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
But what are these \u201cculture wars\u201d really about? From Gitlin\u2019s point of view, the fighting is not a simple standoff between \u201creligion and irreligion,\u201d because there are religious voices on both sides. Most would agree, he said, that these clashes pit \u201cforces of modernization\u201d against \u201cforces of tradition.\u201d Often, this seems to pit small-town values against cosmopolitan culture, or red-zip-code preachers against blue-zip-code professors.<\/p>\n\n
From his perspective on the left, he said, all of this looks like an \u201congoing fight \u2026 between the Enlightenment and its enemies.\u201d Seriously, he said, \u201cAmerican has to outgrow this childish negation of reason.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
For Americans on the other side of the \u201cculture wars,\u201d that kind of talk sounds rather condescending, said Yuval Levin, who leads the Bioethics and American Democracy Project at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center.<\/p>\n\n
From the right, this cultural warfare resembles a \u201cwar of two populisms, what we might call in very broad terms, cultural populism and economic populism,\u201d said Levin.<\/p>\n\n
As a rule, the American left has been effective when it comes to appealing to the economic passions and resentments of average Americans. The right, meanwhile, has been stronger \u2014 especially since the earthquake that was the 1960s \u2014 when appealing to old-fashioned values of faith, family and unashamed patriotism.<\/p>\n\n
In this election, economic fears may certainly triumph over concerns about traditional \u201cculture wars\u201d issues such as abortion, gay rights, the role of religion in public life and the moral content of popular entertainment.<\/p>\n\n
Nevertheless, stressed Levin, Obama\u2019s \u201cbitter\u201d speech proved that cultural questions are always lurking in the background. The candidate said, right out loud, what heartland conservatives truly believe San Francisco liberals think about them.<\/p>\n\n
That mistake may not matter this year, but it isn\u2019t a wise long-term strategy for a president.<\/p>\n\n
\u201cIn America, unlike in Europe, cultural populism has generally been a lot more powerful than economic populism,\u201d said Levin. \u201cAmericans don\u2019t resent success. They don\u2019t assume that corruption is the only way to the top, but they do resent arrogance and especially intellectual arrogance.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you could erase one moment from Sen. Barack Obama\u2019s White House campaign, which would you choose? That\u2019s an easy question for evangelicals, Catholics and other religious believers who back Obama. Most would happily erase all evidence of his speech last spring to a circle of insiders behind closed doors in San Francisco. For those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,280,615,1544,671],"class_list":["post-1513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abortion","tag-culture-wars","tag-obama","tag-politics","tag-populism"],"yoast_head":"\n