Red plus blue equals purple
THIS TIME last year -- just after George W. Bush had won his second term -- you would have thought the second Civil War was about to break out. I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase "a country divided."
At first sight, last week's elections seemed to furnish further evidence that the red-blue divide is deepening.
None of the four propositions Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger backed was radically conservative. They were mainly designed to weaken the entrenched opposition he faces in California from the Democratic Party machine and the public-sector unions. That not one of them passed tells you something obvious but important: A majority of Californians are Democrats. So while it seemed like a nice idea two years ago to have another Republican movie star as a blue state governor, what worked for Ronald Reagan in the 1960s now looks hopeless.
Add to this the looming battle over President Bush's second-choice nominee for the Supreme Court, Samuel A. Alito Jr. -- a judge whose conservative record is already causing liberal pressure groups to prophesy a return to the antebellum South -- and it looks like the U.S. cultural cleavage is deepening.
Or does it?
One of the most striking things to a newcomer to the United States is how very like one another these allegedly divided Americans appear to be. If you fly the 2,588 miles from San Francisco to Miami, as I did last week, the thing that hits you is how fundamentally the same these two places are.
To prove my point, ask yourself where you would end up if you flew the same distance eastward from London. The answer is Baku, Azerbaijan. If an Australian flew 2,500 miles north from Perth, he'd be just short of Kuala Lumpur. Only consider the immense cultural differences that separate these places and you realize at once that the most amazing thing about the United States is not its polarization but its homogeneity.
That's also borne out by serious scrutiny of public opinion. In their book, "Culture War: The Myth of a Polarized America," Morris Fiorina, Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope comprehensively debunk the notion that American society is deeply divided. On numerous issues, which just don't get debated because consensus is taken for granted, Americans have quite similar views. Even on the issues about which the political class gets excited -- abortion, homosexuality, religion -- it's amazing how much middle ground there is.
