THERE'S STILL SOME LIFE IN THE RED ARMY FACTION:

Blue Movie: The "morality gap" is becoming the key variable in American politics (Thomas Byrne Edsall, January/February 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors-and better indicators of partisan inclination-than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic). [...]

The demographic reality is that as currently constituted, liberal Blue America is growing and conservative Red America is in decline. Take church attendance. Exit polls in 2000 showed that the more often a voter attended religious services, the more likely he or she would be to cast a ballot for the Republican Party. But long-range trends in religiosity (the term sociologists use for "depth or intensity of religiousness"), as measured by the National Election Studies polling series on church attendance, do not favor the Republicans. From 1972 to 2000 the proportion of voters who said they attended services every week dropped from 38 to 25 percent. The proportion who said they went "almost" every week remained nearly constant at 11 to 12 percent, and the proportion who attended "once or twice a month" rose only slightly, from 12 percent to 16 percent. The proportion who attended just "a few times a year" dropped from 30 to 16 percent. The one group that has grown dramatically consists of those who never go to church or synagogue. This group, which has become a mainstay of liberal politics, made up just 11 percent of the population in 1972 but 33 percent in 2000.

Thus if the Republican Party hopes to build on its 2002 gains, it must continue to mute its social conservatism when speaking to the public. President Bush did just that at a press conference right after the November election, when he pointedly ignored a question about whether social conservatives should "push for new restrictions on abortion," instead focusing on issues of national security. In that press conference he used the words "war," "threat," "terror," "terrorism," "terrorists," and "nuclear" a total of forty-five times.

Many House and Senate Republicans, however, are eager to revive a conservative social agenda. In order to keep his party ascendant Bush will have to hold in check both the Senate conservatives, who have already promised to bring to the floor legislation banning so-called partial-birth abortion, and the House majority leader Tom DeLay, an adamant opponent of abortion rights. (Currently, congressional conservatives are seriously promoting at least three anti-abortion bills.) Bush and his strategists are fully aware that positioning the Republican Party as the party of sexual repression would be devastating to its electoral prospects-but the conservative right is not likely to accede to further delay of its agenda after years of waiting for action under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. For this reason judicial appointments will also present a major challenge for Bush, because social conservatives consider the federal judiciary to be the prime vehicle for reversing the sexual revolution.

As long as al Qaeda, Iraq, and North Korea dominate the news, the Republicans will be able to maintain their slight advantage. But should war fade into the background, or as soon as emboldened congressional Republicans begin moving to restrict Americans' sexual autonomy, the currently weakened Democratic Party will be positioned to push back with the kind of vitality that propelled Bill Clinton to victory in 1992 and 1996. Lest 1996 seem like ancient history to Republicans, they should recall that more-recent elections demonstrated the power of the electorate's new morality quite vividly: in both 1998 and 2000 (the former a midterm election, when the presidential party traditionally loses ground in Congress) the Democrats gained seats in the House. And these gains came despite-and perhaps because of (insofar as they represented a reaction against the Republican-led drive to impeach Bill Clinton)-their following soon after the most explicit sex scandal in the history of the Oval Office.

As a rule of thumb, any time you read an essay by somebody where they argue that the ideology of the winning party in an election didn't matter you should approach it skeptically. This one is particularly nonsensical. I'm aware of no one who would fail to acknowledge that Bill Clinton won in 1992 by running to the Right on moral issues. From executing even an imbecilic inmate to promising to make abortion rare to confronting a rapper in front of Jesse Jackson to taking on George Bush Sr. on the issue of Tienanmen Square, half of his campaign--the half that wasn't "the economy stupid"--was an intentional blurring of the moral lines between the two parties. In fact, it's a conspicuous fact that the only two Democrats elected president in the last third of a century were born-again Christian Southerners. Indeed, in the nine elections since Barry Goldwater lost to LBJ the candidate who made the greatest effort to position himself as the champion of traditional morality has won.

Meanwhile, Mr. Edsall seems not to have noticed that since the Republican Revolution of '94, which was largely based on moral issues, the GOP has held the House for six straight cycles and would have maintained control of the Senate through that period were it not for Jim Jeffords. We can argue about how conservative the Revolution actually turned out to be, but there's no question that in the popular media the Republicans were portrayed as near Victorians, right down to the orphanages. If their position as the party of morality has hurt them it's awfully hard to see how.

Mr. Edsall's dismissal of the war is also strange. War is after all a moral pursuit. the very fact that it's benefitting the GOP suggests that the loss of any claim to the mantle of morality has devastated Democrats. Recall that WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam were all Democrat wars. In fact, except for two years, the entire Cold War was waged with Democrats running the House and for most of that time the Senate too. It is a recent phenomenon that voters find it absurd to consider trusting Democrats with our national security, and it's not a phenomenon to be taken lightly.

Lastly, Mr. Edsall seems to have mistaken one sociological trend for another, very different one. He's noted that people are bowling alone and leapt to the conclusion that they've stopped bowling. In a society where folks have stopped doing much of anything together, it's hardly surprising that church attendance has declined. However there seems to be only minor slippage in the numbers of people who consider themselves to be either religious or spiritual. Not only that, but the irreligious are unlikely to a growing demographic in and of themselves. They may stand to gain members as portions of the culture become more secular, but since these people tend to be relatively affluent and socially liberal they tend not to have many kids. They are a self-limiting group. Meanwhile, if Mr. Edsall's proposed "gap" is accurate, and it seems to be, over time you'd expect Democrats who take morality seriously to gravitate towards the GOP and the demographic group that's actually growing quickly--Hispanics--tends to be predominantly religious and morally conservative. If American politics is dividing over morality them why won't Hispanics trend Republican?

The most difficult poll number for Mr. Edsall to overcome though is that the period of decline in Americans' church attendance has seen a spectacular shift in the relative numbers who identify themselves as Republicans and conservatives and a corresponding decline for Democrats and liberals, so that Republicans are now evenly matched with Democrats among voters and far more people self-identify as conservative than as liberal. It is perhaps too easy to forget what a monumental change this is in a country where Democrats dominated Congress for over sixty years and where conservatism was thought to be dead as recently as 1964.

To take just one issue: if you are arguing that staking out a moral position against abortion is dangerous, it would seem to be significant that more Americans consider abortion to be immoral than consider it moral and that large majorities support numerous restrictions that would fundamentally reshape the practice of abortion in America. It can be argued that people are willing, even eager, to set their moral qualms aside on this issue, but that's an argument you need to make and you probably need to explain why pro-life candidates won in races this November where their opponents made abortion a primary issue. Similarly, it's all well and good to imagine that Americans support something like gay rights, but an 85-14 Senate vote against gay marriage suggests that view is divorced from political reality. And, though it must make liberals cringe to contemplate, polling that shows only one in ten Americans believe in evolution is hardly a ringing endorsement of secularism.

As a conservative, and therefore a pessimist, I'd acknowledge that Mr. Edsall may be right in the long run. I regret the likelihood that my grandchildren will live in a place indistinguishable from France. However, I don't necessarily think that's inevitable; it for damn sure isn't imminent; and we should do everything in our power to prevent it.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 25, 2003 1:25 PM