Back on Tax Day, I posted this over at MyDD under the title Maybe It Is a Battle Of Civilizaitons
Once again, Howard Dean has hit the nail on the head. Republicans are the White Christian party. In fact, whether you are looking at demographics, leadership or policies, that is the best possible way I can think of to describe Republicans.
Back in December, MyDD diarist Descartes
quoted Edward Said:
How finally inadequate are the labels, generalizations and cultural assertions. At some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary not only between "West" and "Islam" but also between past and present, us and them, to say nothing of the very concepts of identity and nationality about which there is unending disagreement and debate. A unilateral decision made to draw lines in the sand, to undertake crusades, to oppose their evil with our good, to extirpate terrorism and, in Paul Wolfowitz's nihilistic vocabulary, to end nations entirely, doesn't make the supposed entities any easier to see; rather, it speaks to how much simpler it is to make bellicose statements for the purpose of mobilizing collective passions than to reflect, examine, sort out what it is we are dealing with in reality, the interconnectedness of innumerable lives, "ours" as well as "theirs."(...)
Then there is the persisting legacy of monotheism itself, the Abrahamic religions, as Louis Massignon aptly called them. Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successor haunted by what came before; for Muslims, Islam fulfills and ends the line of prophecy. There is still no decent history or demystification of the many-sided contest among these three followers--not one of them by any means a monolithic, unified camp--of the most jealous of all gods, even though the bloody modern convergence on Palestine furnishes a rich secular instance of what has been so tragically irreconcilable about them. Not surprisingly, then, Muslims and Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both of them eliding the Judaic presence with often sublime insouciance. Such an agenda, says Eqbal Ahmad, is "very reassuring to the men and women who are stranded in the middle of the ford, between the deep waters of tradition and modernity."
But we are all swimming in those waters, Westerners and Muslims and others alike. And since the waters are part of the ocean of history, trying to plow or divide them with barriers is futile. These are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis. "The Clash of Civilizations" thesis is a gimmick like "The War of the Worlds," better for reinforcing defensive self-pride than for critical understanding of the bewildering interdependence of our time.
This is the sort of article I would usually resist writing. I wrestled with it for hours this morning and afternoon, even for the past two days (which is an eternity for a blogger). However, after
my series of posts about demographics and religion from earlier this week, I kept looking at the numbers. Something really stood out, and I had to write about it. Maybe there is a clash of civilizations taking place. At least there are a lot of people fighting a battle between, in the words of one conservative commentator, "civilization identities." The role of the contemporary progressive, both now and for the next forty years, is not to enjoin this battle, but to end it. Though perhaps too pedantic, the above passage from Said, or least its sentiments, can serve as our touchstone, our center for this struggle.
Democrats have not won the majority of the white vote in this country since 1964 (and before that, since the 1940's), but that does not mean they do poorly among all whites. In particular, Kerry won the white non-Christian vote (14-15% of the total electorate) 66-33, which was slightly better than Gore's 61-30 margin (also among roughly 14-15% of the electorate). Without question, the white demographic where Democrats do the best are non-Christians. Interestingly, Kerry's margin among non-Christian whites is almost exactly the same margin by which he won the non-white vote (70-30).
I think readers can see exactly what I am getting at here. The quickest way to summarize the developing demographic trends of the two coalitions is a white Christian coalition versus a non-white and / or non-Christian coalition. The voting habits of non-whites and white non-Christians are rapidly approaching parity, just as the voting of white Protestants and white Catholics are doing the same. Further, race and religion are now far better at determining how someone will vote than region, income, union membership, or pretty much anything else you could name.
Although I hope it does not happen and we should work to make sure it does not happen, as time goes on I fully expect that white Catholics will continue their Republican trend until their voting habits are nearly indistinguishable from those of white Protestants (who are also turning sharply Republican). If they do not, Republicans will be in a world of hurt at the voting booth. Winning 60% of a rapidly shrinking 60% of the electorate is not enough when your opponent is winning 70% of a rapidly growing 40% of the electorate. Further, white Christians make up less than 40% of the under-40 population of the United States, so the change will only accelerate in the coming years. Already, nearly 60% of Democratic voters are non-white and / or non-Christian. By comparison, less than 25% of Republican voters fit that description. That is a shocking difference in diversity.
It wasn't always this way. If white Christians had always voted for Republicans to this same degree, than past Democratic nominees would have lost by, well, what Mondale lost by in 1984--18%. However, I have already documented the dramatic decline of Christianity within the United States over the past fifteen years, and when you combine it with the fact that whites have shrunk from 89% of the electorate in 1976 to just 77% in 2004, you can get a sense of just how quickly the white Christian percentage of the population is shrinking. As they shrink in size, they have voted more and more for Republicans.
As this coalition, which was first forged under Reagan, has shrunk in size and trended Republican, it has also begun to declare war on a number of things. First, there was a War on Drugs, which is really a war on minority youth. Next, there was a Culture War, which really is a war against modernity. Now, we have the War on Terror, which could easily be characterized as a war against interdependence and pluralism. The clash of civilizations that conservatives have regularly visualized as one of the main justifications for their "war on terror" is being carried out at least as much in America as it is outside of America. Is the anti-liberal rhetoric that Curt Matlock quotes in his recent diary really all that different from what we have all regularly heard from the Christian Right about Islam since September 11th? Are the proclamations we hear from conservatives about the end of the family as a result of gay marriage really that different than statement like "they hate us because of our freedom?" Both are viewed as equally threatening attacks against a perceived cultural tradition.
A large faction of America's shrinking white Christian population has coalesced into the dominant political force within the conservative political coalition in our country. As time goes on, they are winning more and more white Christian émigrés from the liberal coalition, a process that shows no signs of slowing. They are using this newfound unity and the power it brings with it to repeatedly declare war on all those who they feel threaten their culture and identity: gays, liberals, seculars, judges, immigrants, Muslims, scholars, entertainers, northeasterners, west coasters, you name it. You know this list of enemies already because you hear them listed, by name, on a regular basis by conservatives in America. They do not shirk from using the identity labels of the identities they despise, and they remember every time when someone uses an identity label as a slur against them. This is because, at least in their idealization, they are fighting a battle of civilizations, a battle in which all of those listed above are the enemies.
By contrast, the liberal coalition in this country is rapidly becoming more and more pluralistic. Already, there is no majority ethnic-religious identity group within the coalition, nor one even approaching a majority. This coalition is repeatedly criticized by pundits for not taking national security seriously enough, not taking faith seriously enough, and not knowing what it stands for. You know this list of complaints by heart as well. Though caricatured by the Right Wing Noise Machine, these criticisms are probably at least somewhat accurate. How can they not be, at least when compared to the other coalition, which is waging what amounts to a war of identity against those it finds threatening? Of course they are going to talk more faith, since they have a far more singular view of faith to discuss. Of course they are going to take national security as a higher priority, since they view the world as a clash of identities rather than as pluralistic and interdependent. Of course, they are going to have clearer positions, since they are way, way more homogeneous. The liberal coalition has become so diverse that it is almost already living in a post-identity world, and it is becoming more diverse all the time. No wonder we love Obama so damn much: he is almost the physical embodiment of the new liberal coalition. His political viewpoints are almost a natural extension of having lived within that world.
The clash of civilizations is thus being fought asymmetrically. One side considers itself the "us" in a battle between "us vs. them," while the other side is trying to destroy the notion of both "us" and "them" in order to end the battle. One coalition wins when the clash of civilizations is being fought, since its existence is predicted upon at least the visualization (if not the realization) of identities that fight such a battle, while the other coalition wins when the clash of civilizations ends or is at least sputtering, since its very existence is predicated upon the possibility of a world without "civilization identities." The end of the clash of civilizations will also result in the end of the two coalitions, as what is currently the main difference between the two coalitions will cease to have any meaning. At that point there will be a major realignment.
But that won't happen for a while. While less than 40% of the national population under the age of 40 is both white and Christian, roughly 70% of the national population over the age of forty is both white and Christian. At some point over the next few decades, the white and Christian population of this country will no longer be a majority, or even close to a majority. It will take forty years for that to thoroughly happen, but when it does the two coalitions as we know them will cease to exist. In the interim, which will form the majority of the rest of our lives, the role of progressives and of the Democratic coalition will be to bring about an end to the current order of identity as visualized by large segments of the country and the world. We will win where identity ends, and our children will thank us for it. Maybe there is a clash of civilizations, a clash we need to end. Maybe that is our role in the world.