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Just a few minutes into Friday's debate and Jim Lehrer was already exasperated. The moderator wanted McCain and Obama to talk to each other. (Did he expect the candidates to banter away the next 90 minutes like two buddies in a fishing boat?) And Lehrer was convinced McCain and Obama hadn't stated their "fundamental differences" in how the two approached the financial crisis.
The differences were pretty clear to me—and fundamental was the word. In the first few minutes of Friday's debate, John McCain and Barack Obama placed themselves on either side of a divide that has defined the country for more than a century—two worldviews that are today expressed in church, party, and neighborhood.
When Obama talked about the financial crisis, he said there was a demand for new social controls. McCain spoke about the need for individual responsibility.
Obama's described the financial situation as a failure of "we." The Wall Street debacle was the result of a "theory that basically says that we can shred regulations and consumer protections and give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down." The collapse was caused by "an economic philosophy that says that regulation is always bad."
McCain lamented a society that had abandoned personal accountability. He said he would have fired the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We've got to start also holding people accountable, and we've got to reward people who succeed," said McCain. The Republican looked at the collapse of Wall Street and saw an "I" problem.
In the late 19th century, American Protestantism split. The division wasn't denominational. It was about how people viewed the world. On one side was what University of Chicago religious scholar Martin Marty called "Private Protestantism." Private Protestants promoted personal salvation and promised that individual morality would be rewarded in the next life.
On the other side was "Public Protestantism," a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society.
Private Protestants thought drunkenness was an individual failing that could be cured by faith. Public Protestants saw alcoholism as a social ill that should be addressed by "blue laws." Public Protestants confronted the new industrial age with the eight-hour day, child labor laws, and the minimum wage. Private Protestant preacher Dwight Moody witnessed the Haymarket labor riot in 1886 and concluded that either "these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known."
There were "two types of Christianity" in the country, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong wrote in 1913. The competing views were "not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage," Strong continued. "Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social."
The one staged revivals to save souls. The other pushed social reforms to save the world.
Private Protestantism guided the fundamentalist/evangelical church and, eventually, the Republican Party. It's expressed in The Fundamentals, Goldwater, Ayn Rand, the nondenominational church, Reagan, Cato and Heritage, right-to-work, school vouchers, Social Security privatization, the Great Commission, conceal and carry, free trade and the market.
Public Protestantism drove the ecumenical movement of the mainline churches and, in time, the Democratic Party. It was The Jungle, the New Deal and Great Society, the Ford Foundation, Medicare, the National Council of Churches, OSHA and the labor union.
This election was supposed to be about post-partisanship, but it's not even post-19th century. It's a contest between two worldviews that have been struggling against each other in sanctuary and voting booth for more than a century.
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Seeing the McCain campaign's advertisement claiming Obama voted to teach sex education to kindergarteners was like flipping across the radio dial and stopping on a great oldies station. Sex ed in the schools? Gosh, we haven't heard that one in a while.
The set-piece wisdom in politics is that, in general-election campaigns, candidates must run to the middle. They have to move away from their more ideological supporters in order to scoop up all those independent voters lurking in the ideological center.
But part of the big sort has been a decrease in these independent voters over the past 30 years. Moreover, there's good evidence that general-election voters are no less partisan or ideological than primary voters—and that candidates who moderate their tone risk alienating their supporters.
The Bush campaign in 2004 was the first to realize these generation-long trends. They looked at their polls in January of that year and saw that nobody was left in the middle. (Hey, how many truly undecided voters do you know?) At that point, they switched from a campaign aimed at convincing independents to one geared at turning out supporters. What the McCain sex-ed ad tells me is that the Republicans think they can win this thing by moving away from the middle. No need to compromise. Just fire up those supporters and party like it's 2004.
Sex education is an oldie but a goodie because it's about so much more than sex or education. Some of the earliest coalitions in the conservative movement were formed around schoolbook fights. In Orange County, California, anti-U.N.ers found common cause with evangelicals and small-government libertarians in late-'60s battles over what books should be used in the public schools. Sex education and books were a proxy for a constellation of beliefs that were defining modern-day conservatism.
Maybe we can see this phenomenon more clearly if we take a trip back to 1974 and the great Kanawha County, W.Va., schoolbook war.
In the spring of that year, the local school board introduced a new set of "multicultural" texts. There had been a dispute about sex education in the Kanawha schools a year or two earlier, and one of the leaders of that protest had been elected to the board. She began to talk against the books, saying they violated "traditional Christian and American values." Parents met. Then they protested. By the end of summer, they were holding mass marches in Charleston. And when school started, parents kept their children out of the classrooms. By the fall, much of the state's coal-mining industry was shut down as union miners went on strike over the books. Things got out of hand. One minister prayed publicly for the deaths of three school board members. Shots were fired at a school bus, somebody dynamited a school, and several folks went to jail.
Ten years after the strike ended, a graduate student interviewed a large group of West Virginia's schoolbook warriors. Don Goode found that pro- and anti-schoolbook advocates disagreed not just about schools but about everything.
Pro-book advocates believed in government and thought that perhaps taxes should be raised. They supported the Supreme Court's ruling that prayer be banned from schools. They thought schools should serve hot meals to poor kids and provide day care. Pro-book West Virginians went to mainline churches (Methodist and Episcopalian) and lived mostly in the city of Charleston.
Anti-book activists told Goode they disagreed with the Supreme Court's prayer decision. They thought government was too big, that tax money was wasted, and that schools shouldn't try to take the place of families. They lived in the rural areas of Kanawha County and worshipped at nondenominational churches like the Two-Mile Mountain Mission Church and the Open Door Apostolic Church.
Goode also asked the West Virginians what values they thought were most important. Those who thought the new textbooks were OK ranked a "world of beauty in nature and the arts" quite high on Goode's list of 18 values. They agreed that having a "saved, eternal life" was least important.
Those who opposed the books ranked eternal salvation first.
Talk about your two Americas ...
McCain's advertisement wasn't about sex education. It was telling people McCain adhered to a matrix of beliefs that has defined conservatives for two generations. The sex-ed ad said the candidate would maintain traditional authority, build a strong military, and appoint conservative judges to the courts. In one 30-second ad, the Republican could send a message about faith, foreign policy, the size of government, and taxes. The political message was that McCain believes he can win without expanding the party, compromising, or promising some dreamy post-partisan future.
These boys are hunkering down. And the only people who misunderstood what McCain meant were those who thought the ad had something to do with a bill Barack Obama supported in the Illinois state senate.
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