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INTRODUCTION

The Fractious Nation?

Jonathan Rieder

Throughout the last decades of the twentieth century, Americans recurrently worried about the conflicts that divided the nation. On the right and the left, mulling bitter struggles over abortion, politics, and race, people voiced concern that a certain testiness, and beyond, even fragmentation, had come to afflict our national life. The Fractious Nation? seeks to illuminate the schisms, the often anxious debates they inspired, and the powerful forces that continue to generate unity in the United States.

On the surface such political, racial, and cultural rancor seems starkly out of kilter with the feelings of shared purpose and molten outrage that appeared after September 11, 2001. That everything changed in the United States on that frightful day quickly became a great cliché, and like most clichés this one contains a kernel of truth. A book on unity and division in recent American history has to acknowledge the reverberating fact of brutal attack. Even though it has dimmed in memory, September 11 marked a break in our sense of time. Just as Pearl Harbor projected American might into the global arena and altered American politics and culture, the Al Qaeda attack has had a powerful, if not as drastic, impact on national solidarity, on perceptions of domestic and foreign enemies, on the balance of civil liberties and national security, on the debate over America's role as a global leader, on the congressional agenda, and on fiscal priorities.

Despite such undeniable changes, as well as the media's penchant for

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dramatic frames, everything did not change on that fateful day. No matter how successfully President Bush has exploited the anxieties of the moment, no matter how fecklessly Democrats have tried to articulate a rival message, the same ideological and cultural divisions that clove the electoral map into red and blue zones on election night 2000 were at work in the 2002 midterm elections. More critically, even if the kind of normality to which the United States has slowly returned after September 11 is not precisely the same normality we knew before, the nation's efforts to deal with threats are being shaped by forces that were forming right up to the moment when the two planes slammed into the World Trade Center. External threat may have mobilized feelings of internal unity, but unity did not appear out of nowhere. In short, the contrast between the time of fracture and the time of cohesion is not so stark after all.

Because The Fractious Nation? covers so much ground, it may help to preview what is to come. In the first chapter I offer a methodological prelude to the entire volume that recommends skepticism about the polemic on breakdown, in both its left and right versions. I have organized the essays that follow into three somewhat arbitrary parts that overlap in various ways: cultural clash, ethnic and racial division, and political conflict. The first part, Moral Unity, Moral Division, examines some of the moral and philosophical disputes that have divided Americans over matters of sexuality, multiculturalism, religion, family, and morality. Richard Bernstein muses on the proper balance between love of one's own ethnic or religious identity and loyalty to the larger public American identity. Shifting the discussion from nervousness about the loss of shared values, Martha Minow identifies other factors that bind Americans together, even in an age of so-called identity politics. Paul DiMaggio provides a chastening caution to fearsome scenarios of fragmentation by seeking a more precise definition of fragmentation than is common in the popular discussion. He also proposes a solution radical in its clarifying simplicity: look at the survey data to see if the evidence actually sustains the image of warring tribes, each hunkering down in its own cultural world. Jack Wertheimer reminds us that we do not come to the culture wars as abstract Americans but as carriers of distinctive religious and ethnic traditions; the split between secular modernist Jews and their Orthodox brethren, even as it participates in the broader dynamic of cultural contention, has its own distinctive accents.

The essays in the second part, Refiguring the Boundaries of Citizenship, explore how changing patterns of race and immigration have scrambled

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the boundaries of our national community. Actually, as both the Wertheimer and Bernstein essays suggest, the so-called culture war issues are not easily separated from the tensions generated by American racial, ethnic, and religious pluralism. Recent immigration, with its infusion of brown, olive, mahogany, yellow, and countless other colorations into the American mix, has radically challenged the black-white axis that has given American cleavages their shape for so long. Giving a more sociological twist to the popular query, Mary C. Waters questions whether the new immigrants are really so different from the lionized immigrants of yore. She argues that differences between them may lie in the social circumstances that shape their absorption into American life. Cecilia Muñoz documents a source of fragmentation at least as crucial as immigrants' refusal to embrace American culture: restrictions on classical American notions of citizenship, due process, and rights that characterized congressional immigration initiatives in the late 1990s. And Douglas S. Massey counters the parochialism of so much of the American discussion by placing migration decisions in their larger global context.

Black Americans, of course, remain at the center of the American Dilemma; race hasn't simply faded away, even as the new immigrants have complicated it. Jennifer Hochschild demonstrates that no matter how much they differ, ordinary whites and blacks overlap in many respects, suggesting rich areas of convergence no less than separatism and separation. Blacks, Kevin Gaines shows, continue to provoke white fears of the unassimilable black fragment, and the special history of blacks in this country complicates the efforts of black intellectuals to find the right balance of particularism and universalism.

Finally, part 3, Unity and Division in the Political Realm, analyzes political order and fragmentation. Theda Skocpol, rebutting the conservative attack on liberalism for its fragmenting tendencies, underlines the integrative functions of federal social policy and programs over the last century. Paul Starr, John J. DiIulio Jr., and E. J. Dionne Jr. examine more recent aspects of fragmentation in electoral politics. For Starr the 1996 election, and especially Clinton's victory following the 1994 Republican electoral surge, epitomizes the power of a vital popular center. DiIulio, mindful of the control that the more individualistic and heartless strains of right-wing ideology exert within the Republican Party, sketches the moral contours of a compassionate conservatism that is equally in key with the practical requirements of an American middle that hovers close to the center. Dionne's chronicle, which takes us up through the 2002 midterm elections, identifies new lines of division and disputation that overlap

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without entirely displacing the older liberal-conservative cleavages—a center-left "Third Way" that Clinton and Tony Blair crafted in the 1990s and a center-right "Fourth Way" that Bush offered, at least rhetorically, in the 2000 presidential election. In the epilogue I consider how these various forces are likely to play out in the near and somewhat more distant future, especially given the events of September 11.

Clearly, the articles vary by approach, as well as by subject. They range from spirited confession of moral commitment to dispassionate analysis of surveys. Some look at a long trend developing over decades, whereas others hone in on a more circumscribed topic or moment. But all aim to transcend the presentism that deforms so much social analysis, and all aim to place some of our most important social, cultural, and political divisions in historical and social organizational perspective. More, however, is at stake here than the abstract generalities of setting the record straight and intellectual clarity: nothing less than the character of the American nation and the resilience of its democratic culture.

FISSURES AND FRACTURES

To place the essays in context, I want to mention some of the contentious events and fractious tendencies that have raised concern about whether the center of American life is holding—and even whether there is such a thing as an American center. Surely the signs of symbolic violence have been plentiful enough. In the 1980s certain new right preachers called for stoning homosexuals to death, and white supremacists, off the Web and on, have fumed and declaimed. For a time the vituperation on talk shows and video games gave rise to fears that there was something corrosively amiss in our national life.

Verbal violence at times has spilled over into nasty political campaigns in which candidates demonize their opponents. This tendency may have reached a zenith at the 1992 Republican convention, when Pat Buchanan issued his famous call for culture war. The Clinton impeachment hearings, with their subtext of attempted coup, continued the ideological vendetta, only by other means. Once again, in the midst of the Florida electoral brouhaha in 2000, some Republicans whispered darkly about judicial usurpation by liberals on the Florida State Supreme Court, not to mention the perfidy of disloyal un-Americans who mocked the true grit of the American military, all because the Democrats challenged the military ballots from Duvall County.

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On Michael Hannady's drive-time talk show on New York City's conservative WABC radio, a marine raised the specter of junta: he would take to the streets, machine gun in hand, before heeding the orders of an ersatz commander in chief like Gore. Liberals, responding to such ominous hints, warned of the dangers to constitutionalism. And when a rightwing Republican faction of the U.S. Supreme Court seemed to seize the reins of government, handing the election to Bush on constitutionally dubious grounds, liberals, too, muttered about judicial usurpation.

The violence in recent decades has not always been verbal, and race has been at the heart of some of the nation's nastiest skirmishes. In Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in the early 1990s a mob of blacks chanting "Get the Jew" ran down Yankel Rosenbaum and fatally stabbed him. This was only one of a series of racial dramaturgies in New York City that tore at the city's social fabric—including the racial murder of Yusuf Hawkins by a gang of white toughs in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and the "wilding" incident in Central Park, in which a gang of black youths were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman. The Los Angeles riots gave us the searing picture of Korean shopkeepers staring down black rioters with their AK-47s, as plumes of smoke and fire curled into the sky. In baroque permutation of alliance a Latino rioter cried, "This one's for Latisha"—he was referring to Latisha Harlins, the black teen slain by a Korean shopkeeper—before heaving his Molotov cocktail through the air. But violence was never confined to the realm of race. The entire debate swirling about the causes of the school massacre in Columbine, with its rival versions of causality and blame, further reinforced fears of fratricide. Echoing feminist cries about the violence of imagery, conservatives saw the violence of video games, rock lyrics, and movies as triggers for murder.

Less ostentatious forms of fragmentation have been even more prominent features of the social landscape. As Theda Skocpol argues chap. 11), the long successful formula for generous public provision that bridged gaps of class, region, and religion and tied diverse Americans into shared networks of obligation and caring yielded to divisive rivalries among the races and generations. Meanwhile, observes Martha Minow, "Class divisions find expression in spatial separation, as privileged whites wall themselves off from others, huddling in suburbs and gated communities with their own security, garbage collection, and after-school entertainment" chap. 3). And neonativists, convinced the new immigrants are fragmenting the nation, have done a bit of fragmenting themselves with queries like Pat Buchanan's: "If we had to take a million

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immigrants in, say, Zulus, next year or Englishmen and put them in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia?"

Even our institutions of higher learning have not been immune to such mean-spirited and suspicious tribalism. For many critics the campuses have emerged as incubators of a broader retreat from democratic universalism. At the end of the last millennium the evidence was pervasive: anti-Semitic speakers such as Khallid Muhammad stirred black campuses, aroused students, shut down newspapers in the name of political correctness, and threatened a free press. The more common expression of the worst aspects of identity politics have been subtler but also disheartening: the refusal to engage, the timidity that masquerades as belligerent assertion of one's own kind, as the emergence of the word Twinkie among Asian-American students indicates: yellow on the outside, white on the inside. Twinkie has the same restrictive twist that is evident when blacks challenge the authenticity of other blacks by saying they are not black enough. This narrowness can take exquisitely Talmudic form, as when a convert to Orthodox Judaism at Brandeis University is rejected by the arbiters of Orthodoxy as "a jean skirt girl, " meaning she's not observant enough.^[1] Such provincialism and the dismissive separations that go with it have sometimes been validated by "left" proponents of multiculturalism in ethnic, women's, and gay studies programs. The "belief in essential group differences" of these new fundamentalists, as Todd Gitlin points out, easily converts into "a belief in superiority."^[2]

THE VAGARIES OF FRAGMENTATION

If evidence has abounded for the proposition that the United States has been vulnerable to fragmentation, a number of things suggest some restraint is in order before we rush to judgment. As we will see throughout this book, the strange career of some of these divisions—the so-called culture wars over religion and lifestyle, the great divide of race and anxieties and anger over the new immigration, and the use of divisive appeals in the political realm—defies such simplifications.

For one thing the very term is problematic. Like other charged words, fragmentation, with its ominous implications of shards flying, can easily become a form of incantation. I have adopted the term fractious, which better evokes the facts of our condition and the normality of conflict as a routine feature of social life. For another thing the very sensuousness

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of graphic conflict, its ability to transfix, should give caution. Typically, surface events mask the deeper currents swirling below them.

As a result it is not always easy to separate enduring reality from something as lambent as mood. All in all, a country obsessed with palm recorders and Survivor, Viagra and e-trading, the Internet and Sex in the City is not the same as a country convulsed by the frenzies of abortion wars, of nativist recoil against immigrant strangers in our midst, and of intense racial squabbling. And neither cluster of images captures a country nervous about anthrax and Afghanistan, Iraq and Enron, deficits and dirty bombs.

A few examples from all three realms of the culture wars, ethnic and racial pluralism, and political contention underscore the need for historical perspective. The high point of nativist declamation, seeping into the 1995 gubernatorial race in California, provoked cries of "Send them back, " and gamier cries still. Yet that very process, through a recoil in the next electoral cycle, helped elect a Democratic governor in California. Even more amazingly, the surging immigrant vote helped defeat Congressman Robert Dornan in that sacred fount of paleoconservatism, Orange County. And this presidential time around, Bush made every effort to parade his brown-skinned Latino nephew, who became the affirmative-action equivalent of a trophy wife. What really upset him about failing public education, Bush kept insisting all through the 2000 election, was that Latinos and blacks were being left behind. The party that turned its back on basic democratic principles during the civil rights revolution in the name of property rights was now testifying to its zeal for that charged and hackneyed word—diversity. And still after the election Bush kept stalking the black electorate (at least he tried to signal Republican moderates through his stalking), showing up to worship in black churches, whose prophetic black preachers knew they were among the likely beneficiaries of faith-based initiatives.

Meanwhile, new right diatribes had given way to a velvet revolution, in which sundry reverends—and even Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition—were grinning and bearing it with Bush's stealth version of prolife. Such equivocation aimed to finesse, to avoid scaring the middle-class soccer moms. Like some latter-day Cato, Jerry Falwell had retired to the cloistered life of Liberty Baptist University. Even Lynne Cheney, the wife of Dick Cheney and onetime cultural warrior at the National Endowment for the Humanities, seemed subdued enough, primly behaving through the 2000 election, in the interest of a Cheney-Bush effort to distance itself from the most demonic, potentially destabilizing,

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factions within the Republican base. In February 2001 she was able to briefly reprise her old culture warrior role in an attack on that artful, but infantile, wordsmith from the lumpen land of white Detroit, the rapper Eminem. Only this time she did so under cover of a defense of gays and lesbians against the white rapper's lurid homophobic lyrics.

A similar evolution has been evident in the realm of ethnic and racial pluralism. Not even a decade has passed since Salim Muwakkil wrote of "the nationalist moment." Capturing the black political mood in the mid1990s, he observed, "For the first time in thirty years, it appears that black Americans again are on their own in their quest for equality. Ignored by Republicans and taken for granted by Democrats, many blacks feel politically invisible to a white mainstream that seems oblivious to the misery in many of their communities.… Unsurprisingly, black nationalism is the mood of the moment in the African-American community."^[3]

But here, as in the larger political environment, that seems ages ago, and it may be more precise to describe this period as "after the nationalist moment, " at least in the sense of organized and angry political manifestations. Farrakhan, like yesterday's news, has been eerily in remission. The fading of the passions of the O. J. Simpson trial and the Los Angeles riots are further surface indicators of that shift. And there are still other signs of this turning inward toward communal self-help rather than outward toward politics and the state. In city after city prophetic black preachers like Eugene Rivers in Boston and Johnny Youngblood in East New York, Brooklyn, precociously anticipating the era of faith-based voluntarism, have set about the task of building institutions and expanding the role of civil society in the process.

The vagaries in the reputation of rap, which has often served as a primal indicator of white race panic, nicely track this dynamism. From the outset the bardic element that was part of old-school hip-hop aimed to chronicle an earthier, plebeian reality that was denied by the smooth middle-class crossover of 1970s fusion soul and disco. But such storytelling was always eclipsed in the imagination of whites by their fixation on cop killers and West Coast thuggishness, not to mention the juvenile, lewd antics of groups like 2 Live Crew. But over the course of the 1990s, rap music underwent cultural rehabilitation, purging itself of its sordid connotations by snuggling under the blanket of hip-hop and mutating into something more cuddly—and crossover too. Time magazine heralded Lauryn Hill on its cover as the latest American diva. Hip-hop not only lost the cache of "alternative" music; it's no longer a sign of black separatism, a depoliticized version of the street slogan that used to appear

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on black teenagers' T-shirts, "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand." Symbolizing the complex and changing process of cultural exchange, hip-hop has become a transracial genre open to Korean-American, Gujarati-American, and Filipino MCs, not to mention the so-called "wiggers, " or "white niggers, " who can scratch a turntable or handle a mike.

The career of rap impresario Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs embodies this familiar trajectory and may stand for one integrative dynamic that is alive in black life. Despite his various encounters with the law, he has been refigured—has refigured himself—as a society celebrity who mingles with Martha Stewart in the Hamptons. Combs has even held up as his models the Jewish businessmen from DreamWorks—Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. Indeed, the paeans to "living large" featured in one strain of rap music, much like the celebration of the "thug life, " not only evoke "What Makes Sammy Run" but place this generation of tough guys in a longer lineage of Irish, Italian, and Jewish gangsters. In a sense, the rap moguls may be analogous to the garment-industry entrepreneurs who amassed crude capital so that the next generation would accumulate more cultured—and cultural—forms of capital.

Like some haunted refrain, the mid-1990s rap cry of "It's all about the Benjamins" (Benjamin Franklins, or one-hundred-dollar bills) simply underscored the timelessness of the American fascination with success, as does that department of MTV, "Cribs, " that parades the palatial estates and chichi kitchens, with their honed marble and granite backsplash and stainless steel—to say nothing of the occasional Victorian chintz—of all manner of NBA and rap stars. And so, oddly enough, Combs becomes just another instance of a (Robert) Mertonian moment of anomic innovation, fiddling and finagling the hip-hop means toward a shared pecuniary end.

The outcome could have emerged from the fondest fantasies in the playbook of the Whigs in the nineteenth century, as they sought to get rid of the self-destructive image of aristocrats and to appeal to the common classes with the phantasm of pecuniary success achieved the Alger way: Puff Daddy, it seems, has joined the day traders, Web virtuosos, and Silicon Valley hotshots. They really are all Lockeans now. At least they were until the Dow began to plummet, worries about the transparency of financial institutions spread from the Third World to the United States, and savings bonds suddenly became a seductive alternative to mutual funds.

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All in all, then, it is a good time to step back from the unfolding pageantry of events to reach for the clarity of detachment. As we do so, we discover this much: Even as they play out in the most intricate, sometimes idiosyncratic, incarnations, two sets of common themes course through these ruminations on our current state. The first is methodological: simply put, our efforts to appraise the moral fiber and social cohesiveness of a society, especially one as complex and multifarious as the United States, are an especially dicey enterprise, inevitably subject to a number of estimating errors and distortions.

The second point is more substantive. Although this volume is a testimony, at least modestly, to disagreements over the meaning, intensity, and import of these battles, on balance a counterpicture emerges. In important respects American society has shown a striking resilience, a classic ability to absorb change without sacrificing its basic sense of identity. Surely, conflicts of all stripes continue to divide Americans and threaten democracy. But like the other slogans adduced to sum up change—narcissism, culture war, backlash—the master imagery of "fragmentation" may be handier for expressing personal and cultural anxieties about change than for illuminating them.

We have become in many respects, both in private life and public culture, a more tolerant, democratic, and cohesive society than we once were. More fractions and sectors have been incorporated under the banner of civic society. In a sometimes volatile, but ultimately creative, dynamic of incorporation, essential notions of rights have been extended to broader constituencies—not just to those "suspect classifications" like race but also to children, wives, and the disabled. Rights of cultural recognition, albeit trivialized in public-school celebrations of ethnic holidays and distorted by mythic third-grade histories of the Aztecs and Taino Indians, have disseminated widely, if not always deeply, in vernacular forms. Perhaps most counterintuitively, the right wing is a more genteel, less ethnocentric right than it used to be. And in countless domains, including the feistily contested ones of family and sexuality and race, divides of opinion have been closing.

This analysis is not quite a swerve back to some ancient faith in American exceptionalism or the identity of redeemer nation. Such notions too often displayed a blithe confidence in American institutions, heralding the nation's successes at the expense of our failings. But neither is the cumulative wisdom of The Fractious Nation? quite a refutation of that progressive faith. It's more a chastened twist on the theme of democratic nationalism that recognizes both the vitality of the American liberal tradition

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and the tough work of litigation and moral critique, protest and politics, that is needed to ensure the fulfillment of democratic ideals. There is nothing pristine or guaranteed about those ideals; to acquire suasive power, they often need to be reworked and revived and sometimes even remembered. As a result their energy—and the sense of collective "we" those values can inspire—has often been most evident when turned like a weapon against various forces of particularism—white, Puritanical, Anglo-Nordic, antigay, Christian, anti-Catholic—that reject inclusive universalism. Even claims for narrow forms of identity, as proponents of queer and hip-hop nations tacitly grasp, have managed to find in the universalism of the tradition a haven for their own tribal huddling.

None of this should be cause for smug celebration. In one of those ironic twists that recurs throughout this book, this relative cohesiveness—and one must emphasize that qualifier relative—is not entirely good news. For starters there's the problem of a baseline; if the starting point of racism is extraordinarily high, as it surely was in the United States, these two vexingly rival things can still be simultaneously true: racism of the most virulent sort has diminished mightily, and there remains a core of people who dislike blacks intensely, as much, perhaps, as one-fifth of the nation.^[4] This latter bunch, it turns out, tends to comprise the same individuals who hate Jews, and they are not so fond of other kinds of difference either. There remains, then, a dangerous, if shrinking source of authoritarianism in the land.

Moreover, if the nation had truly become a good deal more cohesive even before September 11, it is not self-evident that harmony is the most noble ideal for societies to strive for. The absence of manifest conflict may simply mean accommodation to injustice, indifference to inequality, or the exhausted inability to imagine striking back. Quiet riots, as Roger Wilkins once deemed them, are utterly compatible with a lack of surface indications of "fragmentation, " and they can be as damaging as less tranquil ones. Poverty, the diminished life chances that go with it, poor health, the excess political power that goes with money, and much more besides fragmentation—or these particular forms of fragmentation—threaten the fabric of society. The Enron scandal provided a timely reminder of David A. Hollinger's warning that a "business elite with a transnational focus will find certain uses for the American state, but it has little need for the nation.… Those who worry about the fragmenting of America would do well to attend more closely to this variety of separatism."^[5]

Ironically, such relative convergence as has emerged in recent decades

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may not even be good news for partisans of order. After all, agreement in certain spheres has the uncanny ability to generate discord in others. To take only one example, the declining primacy of racism, anti-Semitism, and ethnocentrism among traditionalist Christians—one mark of diminishing incivility in a democratic society—helped quicken the tempo of ideological and cultural warfare, if only by creating a panreligious alliance devoted to moral restoration. We could even say the diminution of fragmentation made for, even was a necessary condition for, the heightening of fractiousness. The current state of affairs is replete with other contradictions that remind us that conflict and harmony, fragmentation and integration, are hardly polar oppositions, but that is not even the most ironic turn that emerges from the chapters ahead.

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