A Post-Culture-War America

Word Column                                                              Sheila Suess Kennedy

January 29, 2008                                                          811 words

 

A Post-Culture-War America?                                                                        

Okay, let me begin with an admission—I’m obsessed with the Presidential campaign. Totally, hopelessly obsessed. I spend really embarrassing amounts of time emailing back and forth with two of my sons who are equally obsessed, and equally enamored of “my” candidate.

By the time this column appears in print, the primary may well be decided. Worse, on those rare occasions when I force myself to be realistic, I have to admit that the odds are against my guy; the smart money says he isn’t going to be the candidate. The thing is, it has been so long since there has been a national candidate I could wholeheartedly support; it’s sort of like falling in love, even when you know—as my husband keeps warning me—you are likely to get your heart broken. Again.

When I sat down to write this column, I wasn’t going to write about the primary. But then I thought about why it is that I am so enthusiastic about Barack Obama, why his emergence has made me feel almost hopeful for the future of the country I love, and it seemed a phenomenon worth exploring, because his candidacy has a particular message for America’s minority communities, including the gay community.

The past seven years have been a disaster for America, and if polls are to be believed, a significant majority of Americans recognize the dimensions of that disaster. We are a sour, dispirited electorate. (My husband says I’ve been in a really bad mood since 2000.) In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, there was a rush of national solidarity and the best kind of patriotism, but it didn’t take long for this Administration to slam that window shut, and to turn us against each other. “Good Christian Amuricans” were under attack by “Islamofascists,” “homosexual deviates,” “secular humanists” and other assorted heathens—and they weren’t going to let us forget to be very, very afraid.

Fair is fair; this Administration didn’t invent the culture wars. They just used culture war issues to gain and retain power. I don’t have to remind readers of The Word how Karl Rove and his political disciples sliced and diced the electorate in order to win elections; anyone who voted in a swing state in 2004 knows just how well the cynical use of state constitutional marriage amendments worked—bringing out the haters to vote against the “queers” and not coincidentally to pull a lever for George W. Bush.

Bush and his crowd will be gone in November, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. (Hell, we can have a party! I certainly intend to.) It is certainly true that almost anyone who takes the oath of office next January will be an improvement. But we have a chance to do more than trade a sleazy, incompetent Commander in Chief for a sleazy, competent one. We have a chance to elect a post-culture-war President, and begin to put the nastiness and intolerance behind us.

When the campaign began, I’d have gladly taken any of the Democratic front-runners. (Someday, perhaps, if the sane people retake control of the GOP, I can feel that way about Republicans again…). But after watching the Clintons’ willingness to say and do anything in South Carolina—their willingness to distort, smear and shamelessly use the race card a la Karl Rove—I no longer feel that way.

The Clintons have been allies of the African-American community for decades—but they were clearly willing to throw blacks under the bus when they thought it served their purposes. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” gave the gay community a taste of how lasting their commitment to gay rights was. Hillary is running well among Hispanics, but she was quick to retreat from her statement at an early debate that undocumented workers should be able to obtain drivers’ licenses—an issue very important to that community. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Clintons’ alliances are strategic—and disposable—rather than principled and enduring.

As Ted Kennedy said when he endorsed Obama, we have a chance to make this a transformational election. We can put a new kind of candidate in office; multi-ethnic, multi-racial and post-culture-war. As Obama himself said in his South Carolina victory speech, this is not an election about gender or race or ethnicity—it is about the old politics versus a new politics. It is about the past versus the future.

I am so ready for that future.

It may be that by the time you read this column, the primary is effectively over. It may well be the case that the “old politics” has won. (There’s an old saying that goes, “age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time,” and for all I know, that’s true.) But for right now, for the first time in a very long time, I’m in a good mood.

 

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Don’t Stereotype Me!

I’ve had it. And the 2008 election system has just started.

According to the pollsters, I am one of those “older female voters” who can be counted on to support Hillary Clinton because, after all, we’re so much alike. We share a gender.

This may come as a big shock to the so-called “analysts” who like to slice and dice the electorate into “interest groups” and “market niches” based upon some wonky version of identity politics, but women—even those of a “certain age”—are not a monolithic voting bloc. Not long ago, I wrote about my irritation with negative gender stereotypes: the South Carolina (female) Republican who employed a sexist term for Clinton, and the patronizing (male) commentators who applied a gender lens to every tactic employed by her campaign. I think many women feel the same impatience with that sort of one-dimensional approach to her candidacy.

But guess what? Many of us are equally impatient with a candidate who seems to feel entitled to our votes simply by virtue of a common gender, and with pundits who give that entitlement legitimacy. When Barack Obama was asked whether he anticipated getting a major share of the African-American vote, he sensibly replied that he expected he’d need to earn every vote. He clearly recognized what the “chattering classes” seem unable to grasp, that women, blacks, Latinos, young people and all the other groups into which voters get lumped consist of individuals who are more—and more complicated—than those labels reflect.      

In both the Republican and Democratic primaries, we have seen strong signals that voters are tired to death of the poll-centered politics of the last few election cycles. Both Huckabee and McCain have based their appeals to GOP voters on straight talk; Mitt Romney, vastly better financed and clearly more acceptable to the business wing of the party, has dutifully designed (or changed) his positions on the basis of his polling. Conventional wisdom favored Romney, but so far, actual voters haven’t.  

Among Democrats, as Frank Rich observed in the New York Times, it is the Clinton campaign, led by pollster Mark Penn, that is following the older script. “In Mrs. Clinton’s down-to-earth micropolitics, polls often seem to play the leadership role. That leaves her indecisive when one potential market is pitched against another.” If those polls also tell her she can count on women’s votes, she’s in for a surprise. This election won’t be decided on the basis of gender or race. They won’t be irrelevant, but they won’t be decisive, either.

This is an election about the future, about where we are going as a nation. It is about who can best bring a sour, fractured, dispirited citizenry together again, about who can best heal the deep divisions created by wedge issues and culture wars and pandering to political bases. It’s about vision and hope—and yes, change.

It isn’t about identity politics. Candidates who think it is are part of the past we so desperately need to change.

 

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Don’t Stereotype Me!

I’ve had it. And the 2008 election system has just started.

According to the pollsters, I am one of those “older female voters” who can be counted on to support Hillary Clinton because, after all, we’re so much alike. We share a gender.

This may come as a big shock to the so-called “analysts” who like to slice and dice the electorate into “interest groups” and “market niches” based upon some wonky version of identity politics, but women—even those of a “certain age”—are not a monolithic voting bloc. Not long ago, I wrote about my irritation with negative gender stereotypes: the South Carolina (female) Republican who employed a sexist term for Clinton, and the patronizing (male) commentators who applied a gender lens to every tactic employed by her campaign. I think many women feel the same impatience with that sort of one-dimensional approach to her candidacy.

But guess what? Many of us are equally impatient with a candidate who seems to feel entitled to our votes simply by virtue of a common gender, and with pundits who give that entitlement legitimacy. When Barack Obama was asked whether he anticipated getting a major share of the African-American vote, he sensibly replied that he expected he’d need to earn every vote. He clearly recognized what the “chattering classes” seem unable to grasp, that women, blacks, Latinos, young people and all the other groups into which voters get lumped consist of individuals who are more—and more complicated—than those labels reflect.      

In both the Republican and Democratic primaries, we have seen strong signals that voters are tired to death of the poll-centered politics of the last few election cycles. Both Huckabee and McCain have based their appeals to GOP voters on straight talk; Mitt Romney, vastly better financed and clearly more acceptable to the business wing of the party, has dutifully designed (or changed) his positions on the basis of his polling. Conventional wisdom favored Romney, but so far, actual voters haven’t.  

Among Democrats, as Frank Rich observed in the New York Times, it is the Clinton campaign, led by pollster Mark Penn, that is following the older script. “In Mrs. Clinton’s down-to-earth micropolitics, polls often seem to play the leadership role. That leaves her indecisive when one potential market is pitched against another.” If those polls also tell her she can count on women’s votes, she’s in for a surprise. This election won’t be decided on the basis of gender or race. They won’t be irrelevant, but they won’t be decisive, either.

This is an election about the future, about where we are going as a nation. It is about who can best bring a sour, fractured, dispirited citizenry together again, about who can best heal the deep divisions created by wedge issues and culture wars and pandering to political bases. It’s about vision and hope—and yes, change.

It isn’t about identity politics. Candidates who think it is are part of the past we so desperately need to change.

 

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Squirelly History

Well, I see that in addition to recipes for cooking squirrels in popcorn poppers, Mike Huckabee has shared some wisdom about God’s plan for the U.S. Constitution, specifically His desire to insert provisions prohibiting abortion and same-sex marriage. As in, God doesn’t want us aborting or cavorting (with or without state sanction), and we ought to revise the U.S. Constitution to reflect God’s will on those matters.

Leaving aside the broader issue—i.e., why, if I wanted to live in a country where some people’s narrow vision of religiosity was made the law of the land, I wouldn’t just move to Saudi Arabia—I want to address one claim Huckabee made, because it is a common theme of arguments against same-sex marriage. Huckabee said, “Marriage has historically, as long as there’s been human history, meant a man and a woman in a relationship for life.”

Except that’s simply untrue. And not just untrue around the edges; it is massively, demonstrably, wildly untrue.

In Ancient Greece, marriage was important, but for entirely practical reasons. Parents chose their children’s partners for economic reasons, and the purpose was to produce children. Women were considered inferior to men, who were free to indulge their romantic and sexual desires elsewhere; as Demosthenes famously explained, “We have prostitutes for our pleasure, concubines for our health, and wives to bear us lawful offspring.” Many men also established sexual and emotional relationships with young boys, and those relationships were widely accepted. Husbands could divorce relatively easily, especially if the wife proved infertile.

In Rome, marriage was personal and optional, and evidently so widely disregarded that the Emperor Augustus found it necessary to pass laws compelling people to marry. Even then, there were three kinds of marriage: one called “usus” where the couple simply moved in together; a more formal variety that involved a ceremony with witnesses; and an upper-class version requiring ten witnesses and a priest. Divorce was common for all three types, and tended to be pretty informal.

In early Israel, a man could have several wives and concubines. You’d think that Huckabee, who is so hung up on God’s law as revealed in the bible, might recall the story of Jacob, who married two sisters, Leah and Rachel. Or that of Solomon, who had 700 wives and 300 concubines. (Solomon was evidently one busy dude!)  Divorce was permitted if you were the husband—wives weren’t so lucky. Both marriage and divorce remained entirely civil matters.

Over the following centuries, marriage came increasingly under the influence of the Catholic church, which was extending its authority over more aspects of life generally. Catholic theologians decided that marriage was for life (although there were grounds for annulment), and imposed a number of other rules. Even so, however, it wasn’t until the 12th Century that priests got involved in the marriage ceremony, and not until the 13th that they actually took charge of it. Marriage continued to be a practical, economic arrangement.

Martin Luther declared marriage “a worldly thing” that belonged to the realm of government, not religion, and the English Puritans decreed that marriage was purely secular. (When the English Reformation occurred, the religious significance of marriage was reasserted.) The Protestant reformers also allowed divorce.

Here in America, there have been various experiments with marriage. In 1848, the Oneida community cultivated a form of group marriage. They called it “complex marriage” and every woman was married to every man in the community. (They also practiced so-called “scientific breeding.”) And we all know about Mormon polygamy. While the Mormons have formally renounced the practice, polygamy persists in many parts of the Middle East to this day—among President Bush’s princely pals in Saudi Arabia, for example. (Not only that, a so-called “Christian polygamy movement,” unrelated to Mormonism, began in the U.S. in 1994.) In Senegal today, it is estimated that 47% of marriages are “plural” or polygamous.

Why this brief—and incomplete—excursion down history lane? Because it really fries me the way the radical right manufactures history out of whole cloth. They have succeeded in promulgating an ahistorical mythology in which the Founding Fathers—most of whom were Deists—created a “Christian Nation” that looks remarkably like their own version of Christianity. Like Huckabee, they blithely fabricate wholly fanciful historical “facts”—confident, evidently, that no one reads  history anymore.

Mike Huckabee knows a lot more about fried squirrel than I do. But he obviously doesn’t know  much about other countries, world history, U.S. history or the Enlightenment philosophy that guided those who drafted our Constitution.

 

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Political Will…Or Won’t

Will we or won’t we?

The Indiana Commission on Local Government Reform issued its recommendations while I was teaching a class for mid-career government employees in Southern Indiana. They applauded many of the proposals. When the conversation turned to the likelihood of action, however, they were cynical. As one said, “Ultimately, those guys in the statehouse look out for their own political interests, not those of the citizens.”

We all have a stake in proving him wrong.

Those of us who teach public administration like to use words like “transparency” and “accountability.” What those terms mean in simple English is that citizens should be able to figure out who is in charge of what, and who made what decision. It isn’t rocket science.

The Commission’s recommendations would eliminate lots of unnecessary layers of government, and that streamlining would obviously have a major fiscal impact. But important as cost-saving is, the real product of reform will be more transparency, more accountability, and greater efficiency. (How many township assessors or county coroners do we elect based upon their skills in assessing or dissecting? How many of us even know who’s running for those positions?)

The major elements of the report have been widely publicized, but other excellent  recommendations haven’t received enough attention. I particularly like Recommendation #24, which would prohibit employees of a local government unit from serving as elected officials of that unit. (Under this provision, Monroe Gray, among others, would have been disqualified from acting both as lawmaker and city employee.) As the report points out, such service is a clear conflict of interest. It undermines the chain of command and procedures for discipline, and “diminishes the faith that citizens must have that local governments act in the public interest.”  

Recommendation #16 proposes moving municipal elections to even-year cycles, when all other elections are held. Not only would this save the considerable costs involved in holding an extra election, it might improve voter turnout for these contests. In the last Indianapolis mayoral election, for example, only a quarter of those who were eligible voted. Thirteen percent of registered voters chose Greg Ballard. That’s hardly a mandate, and that reality will make it harder for him to govern.

Many of the other recommendations are equally common-sensical. Several have been kicking around longer than I have—and believe me, that is a long time!

I’m not suggesting that legislators obediently enact every single one of the Commission’s recommendations. Some will need to be tweaked. All should be fully debated and analyzed. But overall, the Commission has produced a map to the 21st Century for a state whose administrative structures mostly date from the 19th. If the bulk of these recommendations become law, we can expect the outcomes the Commission identifies: local governments that will be “more understandable, more efficient, more effective and more accountable.”  

The question is whether we have the will to withstand both vested interests and civic inertia—if we have the will to prove my cynical students wrong.   

 

 

 

 

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