What 'culture war'?

At the conventions, they'll try to stir up red-blue divisions. But most Americans hold un-partisan views.
By Dick Meyer
LATimes

August 27, 2008

As the nation's attention reluctantly turns to the political parties' conventions, with their scripted suspense and stage-managed sentiment, it is important to keep in mind that these are phony representations of American political life. But the slick video profiles, the teary appearance of a beloved party elder -- these are not what is most phony about the conventions.

This gathering of America's civic tribes -- and the reporters who love them -- in separate cities for days of synchronized cheering and jeering is the embodiment of a great American myth: that the nation is divided into "two Americas," polarized between "red" and "blue" camps that have fundamentally different values and moral outlooks. Each of the nominees will tell our allegedly divided country that he, and he alone, can manage to unite America for the next four years.

The idea that there is vast war over the moral and spiritual compass of the nation is a dramatic narrative, and it has dominated popular political analysis for nearly two decades. It makes for potent, inflammatory political commercials. It just doesn't have the added virtue of being true.

In 1991, a scholar at the University of Virginia named James Davison Hunter coined a term that has haunted us ever since in his provocative book, "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America." His argument was that America's history of religious pluralism had devolved into two antagonistic movements, one progressive and the other orthodox or fundamental. But Hunter also noted, "In truth, most Americans occupy a vast middle ground between the polarizing impulses of American culture." That was and remains the case.

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