Cultural divide is deeper, older than Trump

Tom Eblen presents the 2018 congressional race as a referendum on President Donald Trump. But Trump is a manifestation of the reaction to Bill and Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama’s pursuit of a new set of cultural values for the nation.

In this election season, like so many before it, the particular issues being debated are really stalking horses for the one great issue: “Who are we as a people?”

Answering that question requires an answer to what is our core set of values, what we understand to be true.

In 1991, James D. Hunter published“Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America.” He argued that a nationwide struggle to define the American people had been going on for decades and would probably go on for decades more.

Before the late 1960s, wrote Hunter, Americans had a common understanding of the definitions of the individual, the family, the community and the nation. But a new worldview arose to challenge traditional understandings of how to live together.

On one side was a commitment to external, transcendent authority. On the other, truth was a matter of the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life, there was no absolute.

Americans had divided over fundamentally different understandings of being and purpose, different concepts of the sacred. Hunter asserts that believers on either side will not tolerate the desecration of the sacred, that even the existence of the other is desecration.

Hence the easy vilification of political opponents, as occurred in the fight over the Kavanaugh appointment. Regardless of the issue, every vote for the opposition party is a vote for heresy.

Former Herald-Leader columnist Bill Bishop, argues convincingly in “The Big Sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart” that Americans did not need voting-rights laws or gerrymandering to segregate themselves at all levels — neighborhoods, churches, towns, states, regions. The progressive ethos is more common in large urban areas and the traditional culture outside the cities. By the turn of the 21st century, the nation’s two major political parties strongly reflected this sorting.

People concerned about the dire effects of such divisions have offered suggestions for easing tensions and restoring community. In an Aug. 27 column, Lexington lawyer Mike Coblenz argues that all must make an effort to be tolerant of one another. But he sees the progressive position as the only one to be tolerated. So tolerance would be a practice once the cultural war has been won.

Writer Gracy Olmstead in “Our civic institutions are self-destructing” in the Aug. 27 edition of The American Conservative laments Americans’ disenchantment with, and sense of abandonment by, public and private institutions. Since the author sees this as due to secularism and not grounded in social ties (a traditionalist’s take on conditions) her call to seriously work at associating more would not appeal to about half the nation.

Michael Kazin, co-editor of Dissent and history professor at Georgetown University, reiterates Hunter’s findings in an Aug. 24 New York Times article. “America’s never-ending culture war.” He wrote that the cultural war and all the partisan politics it generates is rooted in a profound disagreement over creeds that is impervious to compromise.

He encourages people to try understanding why those with whom they strongly disagree think as they do. Yet finding a middle ground is abhorrent to both sides. Until, writes Kazin, one side or the other wins lasting victory America will be rent in two.

Perhaps the best we can do is cherish time with friends (those that have not been sorted out completely) who see a different world than we do.