1. Moral Unity,
Moral Division
2. The Fetish of Difference
Richard Bernstein
In his biography of Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the international banking dynasty, the Israeli writer Amos Elon talks about the creation of the first modern Jewish school in the city of Frankfurt, where the Rothschilds lived in the narrow, overcrowded ghetto known as the Judengasse. The school was the brainchild of Seligmann Geisenheimer, an "Enlightenment" Jew whom Rothschild had hired to be his bookkeeper. Geisenheimer is an important figure. Until he arrived on the scene very early in the nineteenth century, the Jews of the Frankfurt Judengasse were educated strictly along religious lines, with no instruction in the local majority language, much less in classical secular subjects like Plato or mathematics. But the school that Geisenheimer set up under Rothschild's auspices, known as Philantropin, or "School for the Poor Children of the Jewish Nation, " taught Torah as well as Voltaire, Rousseau, Lessing, and Herder. Its guiding principle, writes Elon, was "Torah and Derekh-Eretz, "[1] Torah and the customs of the land.
Among the many interesting things about Philantropin, looked at from the perspective of multicultural America, is that the school aroused the ire of an odd collection of political bedfellows. The Orthodox rabbinate was opposed to its inclusion of secular subjects. And many of Frankfurt's Christians disliked that idea as well. As one writer of the time put it: "It seems as though the Christian gentlemen begrudge Jews the light of knowledge and are downright eager to keep them in their ignorance."[2]
This episode of two hundred years ago offers an ironic, inverse echo
It is a beautiful vision. And it seems quite different from the one of those Frankfurt Christians who were alarmed at the prospect that Jews would not stay as separate as they wanted them to stay. After all, the Christians were more concerned about preserving the subordination of Jews than the richness of Jewish culture. Yet in their way—a way that stressed the separate cultural and religious identity of Jews—the Christians were the multiculturalists of their epoch, whereas for those like Geisenheimer, who wanted to encourage Jewish worldly success and engagement, "multiculturalism" was an obstacle.
I recognize that the multiculturalism of today aims, at least in rhetoric, at something different—inclusion and success, not separation and subordination for those who are different. At its best it is a moral call to the American nation to live closer to its values than it has lived in the past. It is precisely this moral grounding, and the high-flown motivations behind it, that gives multiculturalism its special power and appeal.
But that, alas, is all too often the theory. In practice, whatever the claims that are made on behalf of it, multiculturalism has proved to be far less an avenue toward inclusiveness and tolerance than a new orthodoxy exceedingly intolerant of disagreement. At the same time, its emphasis is on what makes various American groups different rather than on what brings them together. In the guise of bringing about a fairer society, it invents and then sustains separate cultural worlds, especially in our educational institutions, which are so respectful of "diversity" that they have lost sight of the simple fact that everybody needs to master a certain common cultural vocabulary in order to get on the ladder of upward mobility in American life. And, by denying the very existence of a common American identity, multiculturalism foments a narrow orthodoxy as the sole moral truth that endangers the very liberal values that are the genius of American life.
This multicultural vision is no fringe phenomenon. It is pervasive and entrenched. As the title of a 1997 book by Nathan Glazer puts it,
Despite the differences between then and now, the irreducible feature of multiculturalism holds that the very notion of a common culture is an imposition on cultural minorities, and an unfair imposition at that. Rather than wanting everybody to master the same culture, the multiculturalists want society as a whole to recognize the worth and equality of each separate culture. Its stress is not on the things that each person must know in order to succeed in American life. Its stress is on changing the rules so that the ladder will be available to all, whether they master the majority culture or not. The educational idea is for children to see themselves "reflected in the curriculum, " as the common saying goes, so they will feel better about themselves and do better in life.
But think about it. Before Geisenheimer the philosophy of the Jewish schools of the Frankfurt Judengasse was to privilege the Jewish culture, to enable Jewish children, especially poor Jewish children, to see themselves reflected in the curriculum of Talmud Torah. It was not to read the works of the hegemonic, anti-Semitic culture of the dead white goyischemales. The benign Jewish motive in this was primarily to encourage religious observance; secondarily it was to perpetuate the values and the identity of the Jewish people. The Christian motive was not so benign.
My assessment of the meaning of multiculturalism emerged from more than cranky ideological recoil. When I was traveling the country doing research for my book Dictatorship of Virtue, I visited numerous institutions of American life to see what actually was being done in the name of the new American value of diversity. I visited elementary schools and universities, corporate "diversity training" seminars, newspapers striving for "diversity" in their coverage, curriculum development committees, and meetings and conventions from Massachusetts to California.
I confess that some of what I witnessed surprised me, as in the almost entirely black schools of Milwaukee's inner city, where Afrocentrism had become the reigning doctrine. I have opposed Afrocentrism, in part because it is the weaving of an entire broad fabric of supremacist myth—a mirror image of the myths of white and Christian supremacy that reigned in Europe for so long. But I also felt uneasy about Afrocentrism because it purveyed, I thought, wrong ideas about how children get ahead and how they get self-esteem. Children, I believed, feel good about themselves not by seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum but by experiencing the thrill and satisfaction of acquiring knowledge, mastering material, achieving things—not by being fed propaganda about how the "hegemonic culture" is biased against them, how it eradicates their identity and alienates them from their true natures.
Despite those misgivings I came away from the schools in Milwaukee thinking that Afrocentrism could actually be a good thing after all. Or maybe it wasn't the Afrocentrism. The schools I saw were hopeful places. There was a vibrancy to them. Expectations were high. The children were well behaved. They wore uniforms, an indication that school was a special place, like church, and that you don't go there in just any old clothing. In other words, under the guise of Afrocentrism the children were given the message that education is important and serious, a matter of hard work and discipline. If a few false myths get thrown into the picture, that seemed a price worth paying if the inner-city children of Milwaukee and many other places were to be served better by the public schools.
Unfortunately, it turned out, the Milwaukee case was rather exceptional. More typical was another school I visited, this one in Minneapolis, where the board of education had created the Hans Christian Anderson Schools of Many Voices to further the multiculturalist approach to education
The philosophy of the school was summed up in a series of not-very-easy-to-remember initials—MCGFDA pedagogy, for Multi-Cultural, Gender-Fair, Disability-Aware pedagogy. When I first heard that phrase, I admit to feeling just a twinge of suspicion that the Hans Christian Anderson Schools of Many Voices were going to be places of High Virtue, that everybody was going to be made to attend the compulsory chapel of political morality in education. And so it was. I attended a poetry-reading class for one of the lower elementary grades (the school went from kindergarten to fifth grade). After each poem was recited, the teacher would ask the students to identify the poem by its ethnic origins. So after the poem the children would shout out "Langston Hughes—African American." They sang in unison "European American" after the name of another poet, "American Indian, Zuni, " after another, "Asian, China, " for yet another. The feeling pervaded the school that recognizing the diversity of American life was not just a goal created in the service of tolerance but that it was the ultimate objective of the entire educational experience, the single-issue campaign to be waged through the six years that children would spend there. A banner displayed in the school saying "I Learn Through Diversity" summed up this idea. But that seemed to me an empty slogan, a phrase utterly without real meaning. How does one learn through diversity? Does it help with addition? Can you master a foreign language with it? Does it teach correct English usage? Could there be another banner reading "I Learn Through Homogeneity"?
On a bulletin board I saw a display of children's essays in which they expressed their ideas on making the world a better place. At the bottom of each little essay the pupils had written their names and their ethnic identity, along the lines of "My name is John Smith and my culture is European American" or "My name is Elisa Jones and my culture is African American." There was, in other words, no American culture, no common
When I asked a series of social studies teachers what they actually taught, however, the notion of the victim cultures and the victimizers became clear. "Whom do the students admire after they have finished at the school?" I asked one teacher. Her reply: "The sentiment in my room is that they don't like Christians and they don't like white people, because they saw what has been done in the name of Christianity and what the white people did to the Indians and the Africans."
"What about George Washington?" I asked, wondering if there was at least one admirable white person for American children to admire. "What do you teach about him?" "That he was the first president, that he was a slave owner, that he was rich—not much, " she replied. This teacher (who, it must be stressed, was a dedicated person who gave the strong impression of caring deeply about her pupils) told me that her pupils did learn about Eli Whitney, the cotton gin inventor, in her social studies class. The children learn, she said, "that he stole his invention from a woman who didn't patent it, " she said, spoiling my illusion that at least some whites could be portrayed in a generous and positive way under the strict rules of MCGFDA pedagogy.
Actually, my visit to Minneapolis indicated an important truth: multiculturalism has almost nothing to do with culture, and it isn't very multi either. Draping itself in the language of respect, tolerance, and diversity, multiculturalism does not respect difference, and its idea of diversity is extremely truncated. Diversity to a multiculturalist means a group of people who look different and who have different sexual practices, religious beliefs, and ethnic origins but who think pretty much alike.
If you want multiculturalism, real multiculturalism, get on an airplane and go someplace else. Out there in that great region of the world called "Abroad" there are practices like female circumcision, amputation of the hands of thieves, head-to-foot veils for women. That place called Abroad, by the way, is not the place where tolerance for homosexuality was invented, or equal rights for women, or where the phrase about all men being born equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable
There is a supreme irony here. Multiculturalism is at best a misnomer, a well-intended but inaccurate synonym for a set of values that is Western in origin and that makes up a key part of the American culture to which we all actually belong. Yet multiculturalism denies that there is such a thing as a common American culture. The funny thing is that in all of my travels among the multiculturalists I almost never encountered one who had actually bothered to undertake the serious study of another culture. It might have something to do with the fact that it's a lot easier and emotionally gratifying to substitute a few honeyed and heartwarming clichés for in-depth knowledge. It might have something to do with the inherent difficulty and the consumption of time involved, say, in learning three thousand ideograms so that you can read the newspaper. Because it's impossible to take a few years off from your regular life to do that—the only way you can become literate in the Chinese culture, literacy being, it seems to me, a kind of prerequisite for cultural understanding—you can learn a few boilerplate phrases about the yin and the yang instead, or you can be fed a couple of prefabricated notions about how the native peoples of America have always valued spiritual wholeness over competitiveness—never mind that the Indians waged wars against each other every bit as vicious and unsparing as the wars waged between the Indians and the U.S. cavalry.
If you did really learn the Chinese culture, of course, you would discover what ought to be obvious: that it is made up of some combination of admirable and not-so-admirable features. Or you are likely to see as admirable those features of the Chinese culture that seem similar to your own values and practices. The Chinese culture puts a very strong value on the family, which has, from our point of view, the admirable consequence of stability and security; but, again from our point of view, it also has the less desirable consequence of patriarchal authoritarianism. The great poets of the Tang and Sung Dynasties are an unmitigated cultural good, but you're going to have to expand your list of ideograms from three thousand to five thousand or so if you are ever going to read them in the original.
The truth is we are better off in the United States of America with our own culture, not with the Chinese culture. Our own culture has produced
I, for one, prefer to be a member of the culture that we share as Americans. I don't want the pre-Geisenheimer Jewish culture of the Judengasse. I don't want my children to have to write on the bulletin board that their name is Bernstein and their culture is Jewish American, whatever that might mean to the faceless bureaucrats of some school system who, with their relentless good intentions, reduce the real and ineffable complexity of human life to a few simple concepts that they, in their ignorance, think they understand. I would want my children in their public institutions to be considered irrespective of their private identities, not to have those identities hung on their breasts like badges of merit. I am a Jew. I am an American. I am not a Jewish American. Why not? Because the concept Jewish American entails a public identity that erases one of the most important distinctions in American life, a distinction unrecognized by the rising ethic of multiculturalism. Since the first great waves of immigration the United States has been a country of qualified assimilation. New arrivals who were put under pressure to shed all of the cultural trappings of past life refused to do so completely. In becoming Americans they retained a degree of private separateness, linguistic, cultural, or religious, even as they became public members of the common American culture, that complex blend derived mostly from England but mixed with influences from numerous other places of origin from Angola to the shtetl.
They did that out of patriotic duty perhaps, given that in decades past most immigrants arrived in the United States without any intention of reproducing in every detail the lives they had abandoned in the old country. But even if they did not feel patriotic love for the new country, they did it because they had no choice. Americanization was, as Norman Podhoretz famously put it, a brutal bargain. It was freedom and opportunity
There's no point in idealizing the approach to immigration and cultural assimilation of yesteryear. Its welcome was limited to white people from Europe, who were seen as culturally very different from the majority in place. People of color were not included in the brutal embrace. It involved rites of initiation that seem in retrospect disrespectful and unduly harsh. Higham describes the ceremony that took place in the Ford English School, set up by the automobile manufacturer with attendance required for foreign workers. There was a great melting pot in the middle of the stage. "A long column of immigrant students descended into the pot from backstage, clad in outlandish garb and flaunting signs proclaiming their fatherlands. Simultaneously from the other side of the pot another stream of men emerged, each prosperously dressed in identical suits of clothes and each carrying a little American flag."[5]
Like I say, some of this was brutal. But it was also a commonsensical approach to the realities of nation building, and it was aimed at inclusion, at Lilian Wald's "brotherhood of men." (She would, of course, have to find some gender-neutral language to express that idea now, the words brotherhood and men having been banned by the language police.) But the truth was that the new arrivals never all wore identical cultural or religious clothing. The melting pot, as Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in Beyond the Melting Pot, was never wholly successful.
Multiculturalism would upset that delicate balance between public and private, between individuality and group affiliation. If it had its way, rather than presenting ourselves as members of the common culture with private identities, we would present ourselves as the bearers of private identities who also share elements of the common culture. Such a shift would be more than a subtle change of emphasis. It would diminish something precious in our liberal democracy, a heritage worth affirming, not out of smug self-congratulations but because it has proven resilient enough to give us moral courage to confront our own society when it has failed to realize those worthy ideals.
NOTES
1. Amos Elon, Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and His Time (New York: Viking, 1996), 124.
2. Ibid.
3. Nathan Glazer, We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
4. Quoted in John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1928 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 238–39.
5. Ibid., 247–48.
3. Fragments or Ties?
The Defense of Difference
Martha Minow
There is a school of thought that holds that ours is a time of unusually high conflict between groups. Generations square off against each other as senior citizens support cutting funds for schools and children's services while maintaining support for themselves. Fiscal warfare is intensified by a lack of compassion across ethnic and racial lines. New regionalisms arise even as global communications surge. 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.
Even more dangerous, some argue, are the divisions created by "identity politics, " the allegiances that gays, blacks, immigrants, Latinos, and others show to their own kind. Whether embodied in group claims for recognition; battles to transform white, Euro-American-dominated curricula; or the demonizing language of separatist demagogues, such instances have provoked widespread fear that assertions of group identity threaten national unity. They also raise the question as to what does, or could, bind Americans together. As we will see, the answers to that query have not always been entirely satisfactory.
IDENTITY POLITICS AND ITS CRITICS
Those who worry that group conflicts are fragmenting American society often cite "the division of society into fixed ethnicities, " as Arthur
In the waning years of the twentieth century these charges took various forms, but the basic elements remain relatively constant as we move into the new millennium. They include a defense of the values of Western civilization against critics who condemn it as racist, sexist, imperialist, and otherwise oppressive; opposition to sentiments of ethnic or linguistic separatism and to the demagogic hucksters and mass media that stir them; and a rejection of new "feel good" histories that nurture group pride and self-esteem for the children of minority groups. Against such fragmenting tendencies the critics often invoke an American national identity, as reality or aspiration, that unites the diverse residents of the United States.
These charges are not entirely unfounded. Even a thoughtful historian like Eric Foner, who admires how the new histories give increased attention to previously neglected groups such as women, blacks, and Latinos, nonetheless observes, "When history moves from recognition of the irrefutable fact that different peoples have had different historical experiences to an effort to locate supposedly primordial characteristics shared with other members of one's group and no one else, it negates the study of change that is the essence of the discipline itself" and ignores the influences of different cultures on one another to shape America.[2] Too much emphasis on what divides rather than unites Americans risks undermining true depiction of the past and actual practices of national cohesiveness.
Unfortunately, most of those who anguish about ethnic fragmentation lack Foner's sense of historical nuance. Their diagnoses of identity politics suffer from several weaknesses. For one, they miss the needs to which identity politics responds. Identity politics offers those who embrace it a life raft in the turbulent search for meaning, a sense of home, acknowledgment, and redress. Joining with others to seek recognition may be easier than going it alone.
Second, the critics tend to miss the logic, as well as the predictability, of identity politics. When citizens injure others because of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or disability, it makes sense that the injured parties will resist along those very lines. Demanding recognition or restitution on the grounds of group membership is also a way to deny that such membership is a natural or legitimate ground for injury. Efforts
Communal injuries include present harms and the memories of past ones. African Americans remember the laws that prevented them from voting and the violent white resistance to their efforts to gain justice.[3] In 1990 young blacks and young whites with equivalent résumés were trained to behave identically to test the job market; whites did substantially better.[4] Hispanics have continually risked loss of jobs, land, and language.[5] Japanese Americans—many of whom were citizens—lost property, homes, dignity, and health when they were corralled into internment camps during World War II.[6] American Indians endured ethnic cleansing and massive killing; implicit and explicit policies deprived them of land, children, self-government, and language.[7] Women of all backgrounds could be denied participation in juries in some parts of the country until 1975 and refused admission to private schools and clubs up through the present; women still face risks of domestic violence, bias in the courts, and sexual harassment in the workplace.[8] Gays and lesbians encounter job and housing discrimination with little protection. Persons with disabilities have been denied education, employment, and housing and also have been confined in often brutal and disgusting institutions.
Third, the critique of identity politics overstates the risks of divisiveness, thereby missing a more urgent problem: the danger of restrictive notions of group loyalty. We do not need fancy theories to recognize that members of excluded groups may embrace new stereotypes to define themselves even as they reject the stigmatizing ones inflicted by outsiders. But reducing the complexity of a person or a group to a single trait, even for ostensibly self-affirming reasons, misses much of what matters to individuals and invites demands for conformity. Moreover, no single trait can convey the richness of experience and identity individuals draw from belonging simultaneously to multiple groups—such as the special experiences of being Chinese American and female, or African American and Baptist, or Muslim and second-generation New Yorker, or male and gay and Catholic. Mobilizing around identities forces people to choose sides when the lines are themselves often arbitrary, shifting, mythical, or nonexistent.
The San Francisco public schools adopted a rule permitting a parent to change the racial identification of a child only twice, and the U.S. census now allows individuals to claim multiple racial identities. What acknowledgments
Communal injuries encompass more than exclusion, economic hardship, and humiliation. Injured groups suffer less tangible injuries to the self from the "web of narratives … [developed to] legitimize those exclusions by constructing an identity of the excluded group."[9] Such symbolic assaults may not only inspire those who denigrate the excluded; the targets of denigration may themselves come to believe they possess inherent defects of competence and character.
To some extent, then, the identity politics of the excluded can be viewed as a way of rejecting not some unifying national identity but rather the identity politics of those who have excluded them. As Foner notes, the effort to turn history into psychological uplift and to emphasize innate and immutable group differences better characterizes the political right than the political left. "[W]itness, for example, The Bell Curve, or Alien Nation, Peter Brimelow's recent screed against nonwhite immigration as destroying America's ‘ethno-cultural community, ’ grounded, according to him, in a shared European ancestry." The strongest advocate of "feel-good" history designed to promote self-esteem, according to Foner, is "Lynne Cheney, former head of the [National Endowment for the Humanities], who condemns the new history standards for neglecting the greatness of the Western tradition and offering a ‘depressing’ portrait of our nation's past."[10]
BEYOND IDENTITY
The obsession with identity politics reflects deep anxiety about the fragility of the ties that bind a nation of diverse and mutually suspicious people. Because of this, many critics of identity politics embrace assimilation to an existing, although gradually evolving, American identity.
Underlying all of this is a largely unexamined and fallacious premise in the narrative of fragmentation: that elevating a singular, shared American identity—if one could be invented—is the only way to unify the nation. Indeed, there are at least three other forces that bind Americans to one another: American civic culture, consumer culture, and crosscutting affiliations. Taken collectively, these dynamics remind us of the institutional sources of order in pluralistic societies.
In the view of those who herald the power of civic culture, to be American
This vision of a workable and inclusive civic culture does not fully describe our nation's past or present. Even defenders of the ideals of civic culture acknowledge such historical lapses as the exclusion of blacks, Indians, and Chinese and Japanese immigrants from its moral protection.[12]Yet these failures do not disprove its power—periodically in the past and potentially in the future—to hold together the diverse residents of this nation. The United States can claim pluralism as one of its defining values. The United States is "a nation of immigrants, " whereas "France is a nation that attracts and incorporates immigrants."[13] Constitutionalism affords resources to redress the gap between rhetoric and practice; when criticized by the aggrieved or their spokespeople, the gap itself may serve as a moral tool for persuading the larger nation to live up to its claims.
Attachment to constitutional law does not imply unanimity or even a high level of consensus. It may indicate the prevalence of conflict requiring adjudication. Nor does venerating the Constitution necessitate agreement about its meanings. Sanford Levinson, who puts the Constitution at the heart of American civil religion, argues that such interpretive fights have been as great a source of disunity as have fights over the Bible's meaning.[14] Such conflicts, much like our constant resort and imaginative references to litigation, reflect shared respect for the Constitution and the legal resolution of disputes. We can fight hard within the ideological and institutional framework that we take for granted and reaffirm by regular use. Allegiance to the framework, if not to the content of specific decisions, is a unifying force.
It might seem as if the emphasis on rights in our civic culture would exacerbate group conflict. The pervasiveness of winner-take-all litigation and the stress on individual or group entitlements at the expense of the
Americans' consciousness of their Constitution is not restricted to a limited band of elites. Trends in this area are not easy to establish, but popular discussions about rights burgeoned during the bicentennials for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and may play some role in reanimating commitment to those legal documents. Curricular programs for high school and even elementary school students increasingly model judicial action and focus on contemporary legal issues. If only as a point of departure, the language of law and constitutionalism can provide a common set of civic reference points for Americans who otherwise feel little in common.
A second source of national unity may be found in the integrative functions of consumer culture. Whether one celebrates or bemoans them, the marketing strategies of leading advertisers and merchants increasingly appeal to images of respect for diversity. Sociologist Todd Gitlin observes, "Today it remains true that immigrants want to assimilate, but the America into which they hope to do so is not the America of white bread. It is an America where the supermarket shelves groan beneath the varieties of bagels, sourdough rye, seven grain, and other mass-produced loaves. One belongs by being slightly different, though in a predictable way."[16]The United Colors of Benetton advertising campaign of several years ago that showcased multiethnic individuals in Benetton clothing appealed to the ideal of pluralistic mixture.
Malls across the country replace restaurants with "food courts" that array mass-produced fast food with distinctive ethnic presentations, and customers then sit down in a common eating area; those at one table may be eating Mexican food while those at another consume Japanese fish; at another table individual family members each relish different ethnic foods. When General Mills decided to replace the picture of Betty Crocker on its syrup and cereal packages, it substituted a computer-generated composite of seventy-five American women of various racial and ethnic backgrounds; someone in marketing discovered that this was America.[17] One can question the desirability of these forms of consumer culture. If legality can be coldly abstract and divisive, consumerism tends
As a result there is some danger that both civic culture and consumer culture ultimately may seem too thin and abstract to provide social cohesion. To define American in terms of civic culture is to assert that "[t]here is no American people, merely an American Idea."[18] To define American in terms of consumer culture is to assert merely the marketing of America. Cultural glue needs more. Especially in the face of heated disagreements, solidarity and respect may require something more textured than abstract commitments.
The third source of solidarity, the crosscutting ties that link Americans, offers precisely this virtue of concreteness. One may see such linkages not simply as an alternative to civic and consumer culture but as their enriching complement. Americans are linked through concrete social relations, not by a single unity but through overlapping communities, the way a family may extend across marriages, divorces, and other intimate relations.[19] A community of communities can evoke sufficient allegiance to the ground rules that let the subcommunities thrive, [20] and the abstract quality of ground rules is humanized and enlivened by the actual network of connections shared by members.
This kind of sharing further qualifies any emphasis on identity as a source of solidarity. Certainly one way to become American has long been to affirm a particular religious or ethnic identity.[21] Americans also ironically claim commonality as a nation of strangers.[22] Claiming outsider status is a familiar American practice.[23] The "one" American is yoked to "the many." Especially American may be the unsettling of even these identities through the tradition of undermining tradition.[24]
In this view unity is less important than solidarity. Unity implies coherence, which may be elusive. By contrast solidarity does not require unity, identity, or similarity; rather, it puts differences aside in the name of affection, self-interest, or short- or long-term purposes. Rather than emerge from commonality, solidarity grows through interactions. Rather than a community of common identity or interests, repeated interactions among heterogeneous peoples can provide social glue.
Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have long heralded the virtues of crosscutting ties. Complementarity, interacting across lines of
Recent scholarship has exposed the notion of the "melting pot" as a mythical construct that served historically to distract from the divisive features in American life.[28] Before the Revolution English officials tried unsuccessfully to impose uniformity on the untidy variety in colonial life, laws, and politics. Traditions of governance and cultural renewal that emphasized the local and resisted central authority made uniform laws, customs, and even coinage often unavailable prior to the war. The preservation of state sovereignty alongside federal supremacy marked an ingenious compromise in the founding of the nation. Myths of the melting pot emerged with the new nation but perhaps applied only to American Negroes, who did indeed overcome regional, linguistic, and tribal differences during and after slavery.[29] Protected by the rule of law, as well as a complex constitutional structure, the nation preserved and promoted a plural society despite fears of potential instability. "Americans continue to celebrate pluralism in the past but are reluctant to honor it in the present."[30]
This messiness might be pursued to an even more radical conclusion: ambivalence about our pluralism is itself an American tradition. As Michael Kammen suggests, "conservatism and liberalism, individualism and corporatism, hierarchy and egalitarianism, emotionalism and rationalism, autonomy and co-operation are all integral to the mutuality of pluralism."[31]
The diversity that characterizes even seemingly homogeneous cultures further challenges the assumption that unity is necessary for stability. Associations and subgroups function as democratic bulwarks against centralized power. Ties of cooperation and respect and the work of self-governance through democratic politics are enhanced by overlapping but
Constitutional scholar Kenneth Karst has argued that the proliferation of an individual's connections to groups defined by race, religion, family, occupation, and hobby create new kinds of commonality that serve to unify a national society that might succumb to cultural divisions. He gives the example of the "bloody" battles between Catholics and Protestants who battled in mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Had they continued to live cheek by jowl in their own separate communities, the battles
might have been bloodier still. But market individualism went about its usual work of multiplying ways of life with the result that both homogeneity and separateness were destroyed. Each of the groups became stratified by class and otherwise differentiated within itself, making new integrations possible for succeeding generations. Opportunity called individuals and families, both Catholic and Protestant, to join the move West; in their new surroundings they formed communities in which the old divisions just didn't matter so much. Their grandchildren intermarried and produced children of their own. As daily life in Hawaii makes beautifully clear, nothing else integrates quite so effectively as a baby.[32]
The solidarities created by crisscrossing connections may never appear as strong as those tied to an overarching value like nationalism or feelings of tribal unanimity. Yet these solidarities may be strong enough to foster mutual aid against fractionalizing violence. The connections of intermarriage and overlapping group membership offer something at once more fragile and more reliable than unity. The recognition that a stranger belongs to the soccer team that plays in the same league as your uncle's team generates a bond founded in concrete encounters rather than idealized histories or shared mythic heroes.
Aviam Soifer, an insightful scholar of groups in American history, observes that illusions of unity cannot sustain tolerance when communal differences surface, as they inevitably must. "Tolerance, ironically, must be bound to group struggle. It requires recognition of the guilt and fear we all encounter, rooted in uncertainties about our own identities. We strive for independence, yet any meaningful freedom is deeply dependent upon our social networks. To be real, tolerance requires recognition that we all use groups to define ourselves and others, inescapably and differently."[33]
For a democratic society, then, unity is neither the precondition nor
The links of a common fate join those who share this nation. That fate, as David Hollinger has written, "can be common without its will being uniform, and the nation can constitute a common project without effacing all of the various projects that its citizens pursue through their voluntary affiliations."[34] After September 11, 2001, more Americans expressed commitment to the common project even as they reclaimed their connections with different religions, ethnicities, occupations, regions, and generations. Some observant Jewish males donned yarmulkes with stars and stripes. Some Sikhs wore T-shirts reading "Proud to Be American" along with their turbans. People sent canned goods and stuffed animals, tissue and blood, boots and jelly to survivors of the disaster and to the police, firefighters, and cleanup crews in New York. Some declared, "We're all New Yorkers, " whereas others proclaimed themselves Texans or second-graders, offering support. Some saw dangers of a new American separatism, whereas others felt sudden solidarity with victims of terrorism in other parts of the globe. Group identities, then, are hardly the condition of solidarity, nor are they corrosive to it. They are one ingredient of our complex sense of self as we each go about creating a collective future.
NOTES
1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America (New York: Norton, 1992), 113.
2. Eric Foner, "What Is an American?" in Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 149–66.
3. See Gerald Stern, "It's Not Right, " in Outside the Law: Narratives on Justice in America, ed. Susan Richards Shreve and Porter Shreve (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). Thus, the issue is not just slavery but new forms of exclusion developed during Reconstruction and since. See generally George Lipsitz, "The Possessive
4. See Michael Kinsley, "The Spoils of Victimhood, " New Yorker, March 27, 1995, 62.
5. See, e.g., Deborah Barfield, "Minority Legislators Fight State Budget Cuts, " Newsday, March 13, 1996, A36; Sharon Cotliar, "Towns Make English Official, " Chicago Sun-Times, Aug. 25, 1996, 15; Robert D. Hershey Jr., "Bias Hits Hispanic Workers, " New York Times, April 27, 1995, D1; Irene Middleman Thomas, "Survival of the Fittest, " Hispanic 9 (June 1996): 32.
6. Peter Irons, Justice at War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Page Smith, Democracy on Trial (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); John Tateishi, And Justice for All: An Oral History of the Japanese American Detention Camps (New York: Random House, 1984).
7. Robert Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Vine DeLoria, Custer Died for Your Sins (New York: Macmillan, 1969); Vine DeLoria, American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985).
8. See United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515 (1996); Taylor v. Louisiana, U.S. 419 (1975): 522; Deborah Rhode, "Association and Assimilation, " Northwestern University Law Review 106 (1986): 81; Judith Resnik, "Asking about Gender in Courts, " Signs 21 (1996): 952; Reva B. Siegal, "‘The Rule of Love’: Wife Beating as Prerogative and Privacy, " Yale Law Journal 105 (1996): 2117.
9. Adeno Addis, "Role Models and the Politics of Recognition, " University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144 (1996): 1377, 1441.
10. Foner, "What Is an American?" xii, 149.
11. Philip Gleason, "American Identity and Americanization, " in Concepts of Ethnicity, ed. William Petersen, Michael Novak, Philip Gleason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 62.
12. See Kenneth Karst, Belonging to America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989). A more critical attack argues that American civil identity has always involved multiple, competing traditions, including nativist and inegalitarian, as well as liberal republican strands. See Rogers M. Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America, " American Political Science Review 87 (Sep. 1993): 549; and Jacqueline Stevens, "Beyond Tocqueville, Please!" American Political Science Review 89 (Dec. 1995): 987.
13. Stanley Hoffman, "Thoughts on the French Nation Today, " Daedalus 122 (1993): 63, 64.
14. Sanford Levinson, "The Constitution in American Civil Religion, " Supreme Court Review (1979): 125.
15. Mary Anne Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991).
16. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995).
17. See Joan Beck, "Get the Facts Straight and Start Dealing with Racial Realities in the Once-a-Decade Head Count, " Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1996, 23.
18. Michael Lind, "Are We a Nation?" Dissent (summer 1995): 355, 356.
19. See Judith Stacey, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). The classic statement of this view is Georg Simmel, Soziologie (Berlin: Doneker and Humblot, 1968).
20. See Horace Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959); Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America, " in War and the Intellectuals: Essays by Randolph S. Bourne, 1915–1919, ed. Carl Resek (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); Michael Walzer, "Multiculturalism and Individualism, " Dissent 41 (spring 1994).
21. See David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
22. Jodi Dean describes a way to pursue solidarity in a pluralist society: citizens should not try to see the stranger as the other of a citizen; but citizens should try to recognize themselves as strange. Jodi Dean, Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 42. For an insightful rejoinder to Kristeva see Bonnie Honig, "Ruth, the Model Emigree, " in No Place Like Home: Democracy and Foreigners (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
23. R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
24. Joseph A. Maxwell, "Diversity, Solidarity, and Community" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, April 1996).
25. See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Elizabeth Mertz, "Legal Loci and Places in the Heart: Community and Identity, " Law and Society Review 28 (1994): 971; Regina Austin, "The Black Community: Its Lawbreakers, and a Politics of Identification, " Southern California Law Review 65 (1992): 1769; Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
26. Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960).
27. "Generally speaking, nationalist ideology suffers from pervasive false consciousness. Its myths invert reality.… It preaches and defends continuity, but owes everything to a decisive and utterly profound break in human history" (Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983], 124–25). See also Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an American: Essays on the American Experience (New York: Marsilio, 1992).
28. See Michael Kammen, People of Paradox: An Inquiry into the Origins of American Civilization (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980).
29. Ibid., 82–85.
30. Ibid., 85.
31. Ibid., 92. Partisan groups operating in the swirl of these multiple trends often take on the coloration of opponents, and the paradoxes expand to include new groups and individuals.
32. Karst, Belonging to America, 176.
33. Aviam Soifer, Law and the Company We Keep (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69.
34. Hollinger, Postethnic America, 157.
4. The Myth of Culture War
The Disparity between Private Opinion and Public Politics
Paul DiMaggio
In June 1999, speaking before Congress in opposition to gun control, Representative Tom Delay attributed school violence to such apparently disparate features of modern life as daycare, abortion, evolution, the entertainment industry, individualism, moral relativism, and contraception. New York Times correspondent Francis Clines described the speech as "Joshua's trumpet to a full-scale cultural war."[1]
For almost a decade now journalists and political pundits have told us that a culture war is raging. Bitter disputes over matters that most Americans once regarded as inappropriate for government intervention—abortion, sexuality, artistic expression, parenting—have divided communities and reshaped the contours of national politics. Signs of struggle have been evident in incivility on the airways, violence on the far right, partisan ill temper in congressional debate, and electoral volatility, all of which have appeared to be on the rise.
Social scientists have also warned of political polarization. James Hunter, an expert on conservative Christianity and author of the book Culture Wars, has written, "Every day presents us with disheartening signs that America is fragmenting" and has argued that "tensions over social issues … are undermining the cohesion of our union."[2] Another sociologist, Os Guinness, wrote of "the cultural chasm that has opened up in American society since the sixties."[3]
According to Hunter and Guinness the United States has been in the midst of a "culture war" in which supporters of traditional morality vie
This view is attractive because it helps us to articulate and come to grips with anxieties about many unsettling features of contemporary public life. Moreover, it seems consistent with much of what we see on television or read in the press. But the argument also fails to fit the facts. Americans are far more united in their opinions on social and cultural issues than talk of culture wars would lead one to believe; indeed, their views on many issues were becoming more united at precisely the time that scholars and journalists were warning of growing polarization. Rather than representing an accurate diagnosis of the American political condition, the culture wars account has served as an interpretive frame with an intrinsically conservative bias, attributing to the general populace a strident antagonism thus far visible mainly among political elites and well-financed social-movement organizations.
THE PRESS AND THE "CULTURE WAR"
Although controversial in academic circles, the "culture wars" perspective has had enormous influence on American political discourse. Journalists, always eager to provide drama and thematic consistency for the frequently humdrum and disconnected events they must report, have found the metaphor of culture war attractive. Between 1990 and 1994 the culture wars figure gradually came to structure the media's understanding and interpretation of many political conflicts.
The term first appears in the Nexis database in 1987, when sociologist Todd Gitlin and historian Ruth Rosen employed it in a New York Times article entitled "Give the 60's Generation a Break." This was an unusual instance, however, both because it preceded the next appearance by many months and because the authors were sympathetic to the left. By the term's next sighting it had become a byword of political conservatives, many of whom hailed the purported conflict. For example, in 1990 Congressman Henry Hyde described his proposed constitutional amendment to ban flag burning as "one front in a larger culture war."[4]
Although the publication of James Hunter's scholarly Culture Wars introduced the notion to academics in 1991, it was Patrick Buchanan's call to arms at the 1992 Republican presidential nominating convention that made the phrase a household expression.
Despite its embrace by the political right, the term proved irresistible to mainstream journalists, no doubt because it served as such a handy and dramatic frame for dealing with so many issues. Indeed, trend spotters in the media and advertising industry who had been writing about social division since the early 1980s were particularly attuned to talk of polarization from Washington and the universities.[5] Some pundits hailed President Clinton's 1992 election as marking a "truce" in the culture war, and references fell off immediately thereafter.[6] But they revived again when the Christian Coalition organized a conference called "Winning the Culture War" for conservative political operatives in spring of 1993.[7]
By mid-1994, journalistic attention to the putative culture war reached a new peak. More important, for the first time, culture war had become a generally accepted shorthand for a wide range of social conflicts. Instead of referring to the hot debate of the day—whether it was about school prayer, the National Endowment for the Arts, or abortion—the term came to describe many issues at once, to characterize a chronic syndrome rather than acute outbreaks of social division. It also came to be employed in an offhanded fashion in articles only marginally concerned with cultural conflicts, one of those lazy phrases that substitute for thought among journalists pressured by deadlines. One reporter even referred to a rock festival as "Generation X's first clear victory in the culture wars."[8] Finally, with the religious right's extraordinary success in the 1994 off-year elections, references to culture war reached a crescendo in the first months of 1995.
To be sure, not every journalist joined the swelling chorus. E. J. Dionne Jr. of the Washington Post wrote of a "false polarization" in which public controversy obscured mass "consensus on where the country should move."[9] He was in the minority, however.
HAS AMERICA BECOME MORE POLARIZED?
It is tempting to infer the presence of polarization (either within the population as a whole or between specific groups), in circular fashion, from the very political conflict and volatility that such polarization is presumed to cause. For example, in 1995 former senator Warren Rudman, trying to explain the partisan and extreme tone of congressional debate, told a
To see the surface as the tip of a deeper, larger iceberg is a natural way to look at things. But is it an accurate one? To find out, Bethany Bryson, John Evans, and I reviewed twenty years of data on Americans' opinions on a wide range of social and cultural issues—gender roles, race, school prayer, abortion, crime, family values, sexuality, and feelings toward African Americans, liberals, conservatives, and the poor.[11] We drew our evidence from answers to forty-four questions asked at repeated intervals from the early 1970s to the early 1990s by the General Social Survey and the National Election Study. These are the surveys that social scientists use most often to explore recent social trends. They are based on high-quality national samples, and the researchers who prepare them ask questions in the same way each year and avoid changes in survey procedure that might make comparison misleading.
To test the accuracy of the perception that Americans have become more polarized, we first had to specify what polarization is. This is more difficult than it sounds, for journalists or politicians use the word polarization to refer to two different things. In the first instance it refers to a shift in opinions of the whole population from moderate centrist views toward more extreme positions, leaving a yawning gap in the middle of the ideological spectrum. In the second usage polarization refers to disagreement between specific kinds of people thought to be at odds with one another, such as men and women, blacks and whites, or Republicans and Democrats. Each type of polarization may lead to political turbulence, but they are analytically distinct, as either kind may increase (or decline) without a parallel change in the other. We looked at both kinds.
TRENDS IN THE DISTRIBUTION OF ATTITUDES
First, we asked: Has there been a trend among all respondents away from moderate opinions and toward more extreme responses? To what extent has the public separated into two distinct camps?
Have Americans' opinions on social issues become more extreme and less centrist? No, with one celebrated exception, the abortion issue. Respondents to the General Social Survey were asked if abortion should be legally available under each of seven different circumstances, and their
Far from being the archetypal issue of an era of social division, however, the abortion debate was uniquely polarizing.[12] On virtually every other issue polarization either remained constant or actually declined. The public actually has become more unified in its attitudes toward race, gender, and crime since the 1970s. For race and gender this reflects a liberal trend: almost all respondents now reject crudely racist positions and support women's right to work and be active in public affairs. For crime the decline in polarization reflects a conservative trend, with the public favoring tougher sentencing policies, the death penalty, and gun control.
Given all the talk about polarization, we were surprised to find so little of it. Perhaps, we reasoned, we missed the main story by looking at the population as a whole. Maybe the culture wars are waged only by people who follow the controversies of the day: voters, the politically active, and college graduates. We repeated our analyses for each of these groups, and we also looked separately at men and women under thirty, in case growing division was a generational phenomenon. Still, our search for polarization was in vain.
TRENDS IN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN GROUPS
Next we compared groups that might be expected to differ in their views on social issues and asked: Have differences in opinion between these groups become larger over the past two decades? Even if the distributions of social attitudes among the general population had not polarized during the 1970s and 1980s, it is certainly possible that growing gulfs between the attitudes of African Americans and Euro-Americans or between evangelical Christians and people with liberal religious views might be responsible for widespread perception of social fragmentation.
Once again, our efforts to find polarization were disappointed. The generation gap that loomed so large in the 1960s and early 1970s had clearly waned by the 1990s. Of eighteen opinions on social issues that we examined, differences between people older than forty-five and those
We have heard so much about the gender gap in voting over the past decade that we expected differences between the social attitudes of men and women to have increased as well. Surprisingly, this is not the case. Between the 1970s and the 1990s women's and men's opinions on crime and sex education converged, and on no issues did they become more distinct.
As we analyzed our data, press accounts of reactions to O. J. Simpson's acquittal rendered tensions between black and white America especially apparent. But although blacks' and whites' attitudes on many social and political issues are far apart, such differences have actually diminished over the past twenty years. This convergence of opinion reflects two trends. First, white Americans have rejected crude forms of racism, so racial attitudes (as the surveys have measured them) have grown more similar. Second, with the emergence of a sizable black middle class, African-American opinion on many issues has grown more heterogeneous.
On many of the issues that the media has placed under the heading of "the culture war"—abortion, flag desecration, family values, the National Endowment for the Arts, and so on—conservative leadership has come from the Christian right. The 1970s and 1980s were periods of expansion for evangelical Christianity, providing a base for religious figures eager to influence public policy. Given the rise of the religious right, and opposition to the religious right from within mainline Protestant denominations, we expected to find a growing opinion gap between members of theologically conservative religious groups who attend church regularly, on the one hand, and members of liberal denominations and agnostics, on the other.
Remarkably, the opposite was the case: the religiously conservative and religiously liberal have become more similar in their attitudes toward abortion, gender roles, sexual morality, race, sex education, and divorce. Differences persist, but the religiously conservative are less monolithic than many believe, and on many issues large differences have diminished significantly. The reason is simple: whereas religiously conservative denominations used to draw disproportionately from southeasterners with modest levels of formal education, by the 1980s evangelical
We found only one major exception to the trend toward stable or declining polarization among groups: people who told pollsters they were "strong" Republicans and Democrats drew apart on many issues between the early 1970s and 1995. Differences increased in attitudes toward abortion, divorce law, crime, race, government assistance to minorities, and the poor. These developments appear to reflect a shift in the basis of party identification from economic issues and foreign policy in the early 1970s to social issues, especially race, in the 1990s.[14]
Taken as a whole, our results could not be more inconsistent with conventional wisdom. On every salient between-group dimension except party identification Americans have become either a little or a lot more unified. Men and women, blacks and whites, members of conservative faith communities and religious liberals—in each case social attitudes have either stayed the same or converged. Even on the wedge issues (race, abortion, school prayer, sex education) between-group differences have remained stable or have grown smaller.
What should we make of this? We have seen that journalists seem to believe that America has become more divided. Attacks on abortion clinics and government buildings and confrontations between federal agents and armed rightist groups provide vivid indications of the terrible toll that moral conflict can exact. And other evidence demonstrates that partisanship in Congress grew ever more strident and divisive over the period we reviewed.[15]
The question, then, is this: How is it that our public politics have become more polarized while our private attitudes and opinions have become more united?
WHY DO AMERICANS THINK THEY ARE MORE DISUNITED THAN THEY ARE? TWO CHRONIC FALLACIES
There are three general ways of explaining the dramatic disparity between trends in public opinion and the perception of culture war that our research revealed. First, this disparity may reflect chronic habits of mind that render us ill equipped to assess the strength of the social fabric. Second, it may be that there really are significant divisions in the American polity, but they are divisions in something other than public opinion. Third, something about the political environment of the 1990s
To argue that Americans have not become more divided in their political views is not to deny that our political debates are raucous, passionately joined, and often disagreeable. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to assume that public disputes or even the violent acts of a few extremists betoken deep and growing underlying division among the citizenry as a whole. Such an assumption reflects two common fallacies in our political reasoning: the fallacy of change; and the fallacy of proportionate sampling.
By the "fallacy of change" I mean many observers' tendency to pronounce every notable political event as betokening momentous transformation and to view political developments as results of directional trends rather than as cyclic fluctuations. There are, of course, many more blips than trends in almost every realm of life. But in a culture (and a profession, journalism) preoccupied with the present, it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference.
It is natural, therefore, for pundits observing a surge in debates over social issues to assume that Americans are becoming more divided. Such an assumption, however, reflects a confusion of political climate and political weather, of the condition of American politics with meaningful change in that condition. The fact that polarization has remained stable or declined a bit over the past two decades does not mean that Americans are united in their social perspectives. It only means that they are no more divided than usual.
The United States has always been a contentious polity. Consider the cultural conflicts of the 1960s, not to mention the antiwar movement and the struggle for African-American civil rights. Or recall the political divisions of the Great Depression, when Communists and Socialists received unprecedented political support at the same time that right-wing demagogues like Father Coughlin excited the enthusiasms of huge national followings. At the turn of the last century, violence associated with labor unrest claimed more lives in the United States than anywhere else except Russia.[17] And the Civil War was no picnic. Only a chronic case of collective amnesia leads us to view the disagreements of the 1980s and 1990s as historically notable.
The second fallacy is the "fallacy of proportionate sampling, " by which I mean the assumption that public conflicts mirror private divisions in
A moment's reflection reveals that the fallacy of proportionate sampling is just that. With a few dollars and a bit of technical know-how anyone can create her or his own Web site, mailing list, letterhead, or, regrettably, terrorist incident. Even at the mass level political scientists have demonstrated that members of the public are more willing to articulate some of their opinions than others. People differ, they have learned, not just in what they believe but in their readiness to express their views. Positions held by passionate minorities can come to overshadow and even appear more widely held than the opinions of reticent majorities.[18] Thus one can never assume that a rise in the frequency of visible public conflicts reflects a commensurate growth in dissensus.
HAS SOMETHING OTHER THAN
SOCIAL ATTITUDES CHANGED?
We often think of politics as being about "issues" on which citizens have attitudes or "preferences" that they seek to institutionalize in public policies. But politics can also engage passions, identities, beliefs, and values, none of which are necessarily closely linked to people's attitudes on specific issues.
One possibility is that Americans have become more passionate about the beliefs that divide them, not more divided in the beliefs themselves. Polarized opinions only sometimes yield passionate public debates. For example, public opinion about abortion is polarized, and abortion is a topic of fierce controversy. Public attitudes toward legalized prostitution are also highly polarized, but debate on this topic is neither widespread nor emotionally intense.[19]
The General Social Survey has tapped emotions by using "feeling thermometers" to elicit respondents' affect toward various groups (African
It is possible, of course, that other forms of political affect—for example faith in democratic institutions or willingness to participate in the political system—have intensified or polarized. Surely a division of the citizenry into distinct groups of activists and alienated political dropouts would have corrosive effects on public life. But plausible as this may be, the data do not reflect it.[21]
Perhaps Americans are agreeing less about facts, even as they are agreeing more about values. The convergence of social attitudes between black and white Americans might tempt one to think that racial divisions in the United States are healing. Yet when one looks not at what black and white Americans believe to be just and appropriate but at what they believe to be factually true about such things as the origins of the AIDS epidemic, the prevalence of racism, or government involvement in the drug trade, one sees alarming divisions.[22] Perhaps we would find growing cleavages over facts (despite narrowing differences in attitudes) if we were to compare the beliefs of secular liberals and conservative evangelicals on such matters as abortion, sexual practices, and the behavior of federal government officials.
It is also possible that Americans have become more divided in their deepest values, even as their attitudes on most issues have converged. A centerpiece of James Hunter's argument is that the values of "orthodox" traditionalists (who derive morally binding norms from their religious beliefs and Scripture) are at odds with the values of "progressivist" relativists (who believe in the moral equivalence of different value systems and in reason as the ultimate source of moral authority) on a wide range of issues. Sociologist Wayne Baker has found that Americans' values have indeed become more polarized between absolutism and relativism in recent years.[23] Significantly, however, Baker reports that this divergence has not led to polarization in the social attitudes that these values are often presumed to shape.[24]
Rhys H. Williams identifies two reasons such worldviews have relatively little effect on specific attitudes. First, people's judgments are more complex than our theories tell us they are. Rather than deduce our social
In this sense attitudes help to assert our social identities. They tell each of us (and others) who we are and what we stand for and against. Most of us have many "social identities" based on our genders, our racial or ethnic backgrounds, our jobs, our neighborhoods, even our hobbies. Each of these identities may have different implications for our views on particular issues. For example, Catholic physicians who work among the underprivileged may oppose abortion as Catholics, support family planning as advocates for poor women, and oppose antiabortion legislation as a threat to medical authority.[26]
Three important implications flow from these observations. First, because most people have more than one important identity, their perspectives on social issues are more complex, and their ability to see many sides of an issue greater, than they might otherwise be.
Second, because different social identities entail different perspectives, most people possess alternative understandings of social issues, different ways of thinking about them that lead to contrasting attitudes or preferences that may ebb and flow as particular social identities become more or less salient.[27] Sociologist Christian Smith argues that most conservative Christians simultaneously adhere to the "legacy of Christendom"—the belief that the faithful should use government to establish the Kingdom of God on earth—and endorse the pluralism and individualism characteristic of America's civic culture. "Most of the people we interviewed, " he writes, "tried to resolve this dissonance by compartmentalizing both beliefs, strongly affirming them as separate commitments, and preventing each from having to face the full implications of the other. When we began to press people to … choose one above the other, they fought long and hard to keep them in their separate compartments."[28]
Third, it follows from the first two points, that social movement groups and political organizers gain converts not only by changing people's attitudes but also by changing the political salience of people's various social identities—for example, by persuading blue-collar Hispanic Catholics to think of themselves as Christians rather than union members or Latinos.
WHY AMERICANS THINK THEY ARE
MORE POLITICALLY DIVIDED THAN THEY ARE
Actual politics, of course, is connected only indirectly to what we usually think of as "public opinion." As Susan Herbst has argued, the temptation to think of public opinion as the aggregate of what individuals tell pollsters in the (compromised) privacy of their homes is a peculiarly modern perspective. Until relatively recently, "public opinion" was understood to be the opinions formed and expressed by people speaking together in specific institutional settings like salons, pubs, or community meetings.[30]
In practice, all opinion that matters is organized. Public conflict emerges not simply, or even primarily, as a function of the opinions that people hold but as a result of the way in which groups and institutions organize those opinions. For example, polarized attitudes toward legalized abortion generate more social conflict than polarized attitudes toward legalized prostitution because many institutions mobilize people to influence abortion policy, but few work to put prostitution on the political agenda. As John Evans and Bethany Bryson have shown, institutional factors have shaped the extent to which denominations in different religious traditions (Catholic, evangelical, mainstream Protestant, and liberal Protestant) have polarized over abortion. Within-tradition divisions grew most significantly where church leaderships permitted members with different positions on abortion to form special-purpose caucuses to advance their views. They did not increase where dissenting special-purpose groups were prohibited. In other words attitudes matter most when they become the basis for organizing people into contentious groups.[31]
The 1970s and 1980s witnessed two significant changes in the way institutions organized and disseminated opinions on cultural matters. The first involved changes in media practice. Between 1980 and 1990, social and cultural views expressed in public became more diverse in ideological content and less restrained in style of expression (although to no greater degree than in the 1930s or 1960s). Above all, more conservative views were included in public debate, and the range of permissible
Communications scholar Joseph Turow has argued that changes in the communications marketplace may eventually exacerbate social divisions. Technological developments make it easier and easier for marketers to target specific groups. Because advertisers are much better at getting people to act on interests and inclinations they already possess than at cultivating new interests or changing people's minds, the media increasingly create separate programs or messages for people of different views, reinforcing the opinions and preferences characteristic of the groups to which they belong.[33] Fortunately, against such balkanizing tendencies stands the fact that most of us belong to many different social groups with crosscutting perspectives and orientations that counterbalance the forces of fragmentation.
A second institutional change that was crucial for both the organization and appearance of culture war reflected developments in the political parties. Recall that the only publics that became more divided in their views (relative to one another) over the past decades were Republicans and Democrats. In conventional political theory political parties are supposed to take the rough edges off conflicts in civil society by vying for the allegiance of the "median voter" (political scientists' term for the centrist majority). By contrast, through 1994 at least, the parties had themselves become sources of cleavage, sowing divisions only dimly reflected in public attitudes. As political scientist Ted G. Jelen has documented, moral politics increasingly shaped the party identification of both white evangelical and mainline Protestants during the 1980s. Before then, views on cultural and social issues were largely unrelated to party identification; afterward, moral conservatives—white evangelicals in the first half of the decade, other white Protestants during the late 1980s—shifted to the Republican Party.[34]
This shift responded to a well-orchestrated campaign by elements of the Republican Party to boost the primacy of cultural issues in its appeal. Cultural conservatives like William Bennett and Patrick Buchanan attempted to define the major axis of conflict as one separating supporters of "traditional values" from cultural elitists endowed with many imputed, if shadowy, negative identities. This strategy was sensible insofar as the party's views on other issues were less appealing to voters than its moral
Much of the traditional Republican leadership opposed this strategy, however, for fear that a too passionate embrace of moral conservatism could jeopardize the centrists whom Ronald Reagan had attracted to the Republican coalition. The success of the moral conservatives throughout much of the 1990s reflected a number of institutional changes that reduced party organizations' ability to exert discipline over divisive candidates, officeholders, and special interest groups. Such developments may or may not polarize public opinion in the long run, but they certainly contribute to the perception that opinion has been polarized.
"CULTURE WARS" AND THE POLITICS OF FRAMING
As the millennium approached, evangelical columnist Charles Colson asked his fellow moral conservatives, "Will we lose the Culture War?" Christian conservatives, he lamented, were losing ground on several fronts, with the public indifferent or even unsympathetic to many of their causes. Yet Colson took heart in the fact that 84 percent of conservative and 33 percent of liberal respondents to a national survey endorsed the view that it is "important for society" to "promote respect for traditional values." The strategic lesson Colson drew was that moral conservatives should avoid skirmishes and stick with the war. "Our culture is embroiled in nothing less than a clash of worldviews, " he wrote. "Christians must stop focusing on social issues one at a time. Instead we must delve beneath the surface and identify the underlying principles.… Otherwise we may win a few battles, but still lose the war."[36]
Colson's remarks exemplify the logic of the culture war as a rhetorical project. When moral conservatives have tried to persuade Americans to accept their views on social issues one by one, their success has been limited. When they have welded the issues together into a compelling narrative frame, they have had more success.
By frame I mean a package that contains a repertoire of identities, a set of beliefs, and an integrative story that knits those beliefs into a coherent whole.[37] The "culture war" is best understood as a frame of this kind. Its rhetoric invites religious conservatives to make their faith (rather than their gender, age, race, occupation, or neighborhood) their primary identity and to define this identity as germane to many political
Ironically, proponents of the culture war used precisely the same deconstructive techniques to call attention to disrespectful treatment of religious conservatives that feminists and people of color had employed in their struggles for equality. James Hunter has made arresting use of Antonio Gramsci's notion of cultural hegemony—once a staple of neoMarxist cultural studies—to explain the political resentments of moral traditionalists.[38] Once the term migrated from the academy to the political arena, the declaration of culture war became a conservative effort to hoist liberalism by its own petard: to use the techniques of identity politics to raise the consciousness of the theologically and morally conservative.
A further irony is that the capacity of political leaders to mobilize conservative Christians around religious identity depended in no small part on the latter's increasing integration into the social mainstream. The Christian right emerged as theologically conservative Christianity expanded from its southeastern (and working-and lower-middle-class) base to recruit well-educated, upper-middle-class adherents throughout the United States.[39] Thus it happened that some Christian conservatives recognized and resisted the marginality imposed on them only as they became less marginal.
Like most identity groups that find common ground in resistance to elite-imposed status offenses, members of conservative faith communities possess many other identities that influence their political opinions. Using the combined criteria of self-identification, conservative political views, and intention to vote, James Hunter and Carl Bowman estimate that only about one in five evangelical Christians is part of the "Christian right."[40] Nancy Ammerman, who used field methods to study fundamentalist congregations, and Christian Smith and his colleagues, who interviewed evangelicals, likewise discovered much diversity in conservative Christians' political views.[41] Most religious traditionalists, we may presume, continued to base their issue preferences on other available identities or on reasoned consideration of alternative positions.
CONCLUSION
If by culture war we mean polarization of attitudes, then the culture war is a myth. But if we understand it as a campaign to construct new forms of political identity and define the terms of political engagement, then it warrants our close attention.
In fact, the culture war is both of these things, an effective myth that has shaped the public's understanding of the issues that divide it, making some identities more salient and others less accessible, and connecting the former to a galvanizing trope. Its rhetoric fits the interests and perspectives of political conservatives more comfortably than it does those of liberals or the left. Insofar as Americans understand their politics in terms of the culture wars story—as opposed to, for example, alternative narratives built around economic inequality, globalization, institutional racism, or communitarian democracy—we will attend to different problems and elect representatives who make different choices than would otherwise be the case.
NOTES
1. Francis X. Clines, "In a Bitter Cultural War, an Ardent Call to Arms, " New York Times, June 17, 1999, 21.
2. James Hunter and Carl Bowman, The State of Disunion: 1996 Survey of American Political Culture (Ivy, Va.: In Medias Res Educational Foundation, 1996), 4.
3. Os Guinness, The American Hour: A Time of Reckoning and the Once and Future Role of Faith (NewYork: Free Press, 1993), 167.
4. Elaine S. Povich, "House Panel Won't Touch Flag Issue, " Chicago Tribune,June 20, 1990, 5.
5. Joseph Turow, Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
6. Michael Barone, "The New Political Order, " U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 16, 1992, 113.
7. Ralph Hallow, "Cultural Warriors Fault Movies, TV, Schools, Press, " Washington Times, May 14, 1993, A4.
8. Scott Aiges, "A Whole Lotta Lolla, " New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 30, 1993, L20.
9. E. J. Dionne Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).
10. Interview with former senator Warren Rudman on Weekend Edition, National Public Radio, Saturday, Aug. 12, 1995.
11. For a more detailed account see Paul DiMaggio, John Evans, and Bethany Bryson, "Have Americans' Social Attitudes Become More Polarized?" American Journal of Sociology102 (1996): 690–755.
12. There were signs of growing division in the public's attitudes toward "poor people, " but these changes were not statistically significant. Although change in average attitudes was negligible, people migrated to more extreme views on either side of the stable mean during the 1970s and 1980s. There is also some evidence that attitudes toward government assistance for members of minority groups, which had been converging until the mid-1980s, may have begun to re-polarize thereafter.
13. James Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
14. There was only one other minor exception: people who describe themselves as "liberal" and "conservative" became more different in their views on abortion. This occurred because attitudes toward abortion became more central to the way that people characterize themselves ideologically. See Michael Hout, "Abortion Politics in the United States, 1972–1994: From Single Issue to Ideology, " working paper, University of California, Berkeley, Survey Research Center, 1995.
15. Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
16. A fourth possibility, which I believe can be dismissed quickly, is that our empirical work was flawed, either because the data were poor or because we looked at the wrong questions. The General Social Survey and the National Election Study are the two leading sources of social science data on opinion trends, each conducted by a leading research organization and subject to regular, exacting review by experts whom the National Science Foundation recruits to review proposals for research support. If we can be confident that any surveys collect reliable data on Americans' attitudes (and I believe we can), then these are the ones. We took more seriously the question of whether the set of attitudes available for trend analysis may have biased our results but concluded that they did not for the following reasons. To be sure, new questions appear when particular issues heat up, and to the extent that polarization is greater on "new" issues that have only recently entered public discourse than on "old" ones, trend studies (which rely on many years of data) may underestimate polarization. But such bias is balanced by the fact that surveys make room for questions about issues that have become controversial by eliminating questions on issues about which most people have come to agree, potentially leading trend studies to overestimate polarization. Moreover, although we lacked trend data on some hot-button issues (immigration, National Endowment for the Arts funding, bilingual education), we did have information on many others (e.g., sex education, gun control, and race); and, as we have seen, except for abortion, these evinced no more polarization than less contentious matters.
17. Charles Lindblom and John A. Hall, "Is the United States Falling Apart?" Daedalus 126 (1997): 183–208.
18. Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague, "Choice, Social Structure, and Political Information: The Informational Coercion of Minorities, " American Journal of Political Science 32 (1988): 467–83; Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence—Our Social Skin, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
19. Data on attitudes toward prostitution are from the 1996 General Social Survey.
20. Christian Smith, with Michael Emerson, Sally Gallagher, Paul Kennedy, and David Sikkink, "The Myth of Culture Wars: The Case of American Protestantism, " in Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth, ed. Rhys. H. Williams (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997), 175–95.
21. John Evans, Bethany Bryson, and I used data from the General Social Survey and National Election Study to see if participation in voluntary associations, voting, and other forms of political participation had become more unequally distributed between the early 1970s and early 1990s or if such political activists and political dropouts had become more divided in their social views over that period. Neither was the case.
22. Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
23. Wayne Baker, "Americans Are Polarized: Cross-Cultural and Longitudinal Comparisons of Beliefs about Moral Authority, " manuscript, University of Michigan, 1997.
24. John Evans and Bethany Bryson, "Locating Actual Cultural Conflict: Polarization over Abortion in Protestant Denominations, 1972–1995, " manuscript, Princeton University, 1997.
25. Rhys H. Williams, "Afterword, " in Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth, ed. Rhys. H. Williams (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997), 283–95.
26. Multiple social identities have nothing to do with the "multiple personalities" that play such prominent roles in psychological thrillers and treatises on psychopathology. Think of them as sets of feelings and self-images—what psychologists call "self-schemata"—that go along with the various social roles that people play in their everyday lives.
27. Paul DiMaggio, "Culture and Cognition, " Annual Review of Sociology23 (1997): 263–87; John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
28. Smith et al., "Myth of Culture Wars, " 191.
29. For a thorough and relevant discussion of the relationship between social identities and movement strategies see Mary Bernstein, "Celebration and Suppression: The Strategic Uses of Identity by the Lesbian and Gay Movement, " American Journal of Sociology 103 (1997): 531–65.
30. Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
31. Evans and Bryson, "Locating Actual Cultural Conflict."
32. Ellen Messer-Davidow, "Dollars for Scholars: The Real Politics of Humanities Scholarship and Programs, " in The Politics of Research, ed. E. Ann Kaplan and George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 193–234.
33. Turow, Breaking Up America.
34. Ted G. Jelen, "Culture Wars and the Party System: Religion and Realignment,
35. Stanley B. Greenberg, "After the Republican Surge, " American Prospect23 (1995): 66–76.
36. Charles Colson, "Will We Lose the Culture War? An Effective Battle Strategy, " Breakpoint (Sep. 8, 1999): radio-program transcript originally available at the now-defunct www.breakpoint.com.
37. William Gamson, Talking Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
38. James Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
39. Wuthnow, Restructuring of American Religion.
40. Hunter and Bowman, State of Disunion.
41. See Nancy T. Ammerman, Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987); and Smith et al., "Myth of Culture Wars, " 175–95.
5. America's Jews
Highly Fragmented, Insufficiently Disputatious
Jack Wertheimer
During the 1997–98 academic year five Orthodox Jews filed a lawsuit against Yale University, claiming Yale's policy requiring all freshman and sophomores to live in a mixed-sex dormitory was discriminatory because it forced them into an environment whose mores were sharply at odds with their strict religious and ethical sensibilities. The students requested either to be exempted from the requirement or to be housed in a single-sex residence "where rules against visitation by members of the opposite sex and against cohabitation are enforced."[1]
The response of the secular organized Jewish community to the law-suit was telling. The community relations sector, the organizations whose primary responsibility is to improve relations between Jews and their neighbors, reacted with virtual silence. Jews engaged in the realm of public policy curtly rejected the lawsuit as baseless. Meanwhile, some non-Orthodox Jewish religious leaders condemned the undergraduates for seeking to establish a "ghetto Judaism" at Yale.
This little vignette dramatizes the current state of disputation within the organized Jewish community of the United States. The culture wars of the late twentieth century surely divided the Jewish community, as they did other groups in American life. After all, in suing Yale the Orthodox students were doing more than simply questioning the morality of campus housing arrangements. They were also challenging the reflexive universalism and liberalism of the larger Jewish community, which regards such arrangements as a nonissue. Much of the organized Jewish community,
To some observers, this disagreement may seem quite unremarkable. Don't Jews have a long history of disputation? If anything, divisiveness has been the hallmark of Jewish life historically. Indeed, one could enumerate a long list of schisms that have punctuated Jewish communal life stretching back to sectarian strife in first-century Palestine. Still, what is striking about the recent fragmentation is the virtual absence of serious debate: even as social barriers among Jews are rising ever higher and shrill invective has become all too common, there are fewer opportunities for a genuine clash of ideas. Jewish life in the United States in recent decades has come to resemble a startling sociological anomaly: fragmentation virtually unaccompanied by serious moral disputation.
Once again, the case of the Yale students illustrates the larger pattern: whereas the issue they raised—sexual morality on the campus—ought to have provoked some reflection in a community that sends a disproportionately high percentage of its youth to colleges and universities, Jewish communal leaders either dismissed the matter entirely or castigated the Yale students as parochial. Much like the talking heads who dominate cable television, Jewish communal leaders concerned themselves with the technical issues: did the students have a legal case? The larger moral and cultural issues elicited no sustained debate. Driven by a desire to be inclusive and universal, the organized Jewish community avoids debates over potentially divisive issues and marginalizes those who take exception.
This is not to suggest that Jews do not participate in the serious debates of our time. Individual Jews, to be sure, do engage in feisty argumentation on both sides of the cultural divide. But only rarely do these individuals speak as Jews. Thus, when a person of Jewish background publishes an op-ed article in a major newspaper on abortion or affirmative action or gun control, that writer does not speak for or specifically to the Jewish community. Similarly, when Jews in Hollywood produce films, they are not driven by a Jewish agenda any more than is a critic of Hollywood violence and pornography who criticizes those same movies in the name of Jewish values.
As for the institutions of the Jewish community—the subject of this essay—organizations that speak for Jews rarely engage in serious debate with one another.[2] To some extent this absence of sustained debate is inertial: during the middle decades of the twentieth century the Jewish community had achieved such wide agreement on key issues that it continues
THE FRAGMENTED WORLD OF AMERICAN JUDAISM
For much of the twentieth century Jewish institutional life was marked by a division of labor between "church" and state: institutions in the former category addressed religious issues, whereas the so-called secular organizations addressed a range of public-policy matters.[3] In sway to the model of American Protestantism, the religious sector of American Jewry has fragmented into several "denominations, " each presenting its own somewhat different version of Judaism.
In the closing decades of the century these denominations clashed sharply with one another. They no longer shared a common set of assumptions about the most basic questions of religious belief, as the once-taken-for-granted questions of "Who is a Jew?" and "Who decides?" dramatically illustrate. Jewish religious movements today act unilaterally and with no consultation.
Traditionally, Jewish identity consisted of a mixture of tribal and religious elements. As defined by the rabbis of the Talmudic period, a Jew was one who either had been born to a Jewish mother or had converted to the Jewish faith. (The latter was expected both to adopt Jewish religious norms and to identify with the historical experience of the Jewish people.) Until recently, Jews of different denominations, whatever their theological disagreements, could agree on who was a member of the Jewish community. Not only was the ancient rabbinic standard universally accepted, but the barriers to intermarriage created by internal Jewish
The most obvious target has been the doctrine of matrilineal descent. Why, some ask, should a child with only one Jewish parent be treated differently by the official religious community if that parent happens to be the child's father rather than its mother? Should not community and synagogue alike embrace such children and thereby help "interfaith" families identify as Jews? Is it not self-destructive to risk the loss of hundreds of thousands of children solely to maintain a principle that, whatever may be said for it historically, no longer suits our circumstances?
In 1983 the Reform movement, the denomination with which the plurality of American Jews identify, formally adopted a resolution accepting any child of intermarriage as a Jew. No longer was descent from a Jewish mother a necessary condition. Nor, for that matter, was formal conversion to Judaism. Rather, the child's Jewish identity was redefined as an act of personal choice, the only proviso being that the "presumption" of Jewish status was "to be established through appropriate and timely public and formal acts of identification with the Jewish faith and people. The performance of these mitzvot [commandments] serves to commit those who participate in them, both parent and child, to Jewish life."[4]
The Reform resolution equally introduced a different conception of Jewish identity. No longer is Jewish descent sufficient; no longer is conversion necessary for a person not born to a Jewish mother. Rather, public acts of Jewish affirmation are necessary to substantiate the presumption of Jewish identity. In this way Jewish identity was transmuted from a matter of fate into one of faith; it is an act of personal choice rather than an obligation conferred through birth. Indeed, as the debate over this resolution unfolded, some even defended patrilineality as a means of toughening the requirements, given that under its stipulations the child of an interfaith family who was born to a Jewish mother would not be accepted as a Jew if that child never publicly demonstrated a commitment to the Jewish religion and people.
This ruling has been rejected by the Conservative and Orthodox movements of American Judaism, both of which maintain the traditional rabbinic position on Jewish identity.[5] They contend that the reasoning behind the original rabbinic definition remains unchanged: children are still most powerfully influenced by their mothers. And these movements regard
Unlike other disagreements over matters of theology and religious practice, this question of personal status—and Jewish disagreement over it—has important social repercussions. The Internet forum of Reform rabbis has been buzzing with stories of Conservative rabbis who will not allow the teenagers in their synagogues to fraternize with their peers from local Reform temples on the grounds that this could lead to their dating young people not considered Jewish according to traditional criteria. Or consider the dilemma of a Conservative rabbi asked by a female congregant to officiate at her marriage to a young man who is Jewish only according to Reform's patrilineal dispensation. A rabbi who acquiesces will be committing an act punishable by expulsion from the organization of Conservative rabbis; a rabbi who declines will end up alienating at least two families on account of "intolerance." We are rapidly approaching the time, moreover, when there will be rabbis who are themselves offspring of interfaith families and who will not be recognized by their colleagues as Jews.
Conversion to Judaism, the recourse long available to those not born Jewish who want to join the Jewish group, now also divides American Jews of different denominations. The conversion process traditionally unfolds in a series of steps: a term of study leading to a commitment to Jewish religious observance and an identification with the Jewish people; the convening of a rabbinic court (beit din), which supervises the conversion; the actual conversion ceremony, in which the convert is immersed in the waters of a ritual bath (mikveh) and, if male, undergoes an actual or symbolic circumcision.
Each of the religious movements treats these phases differently. Many Orthodox rabbis in the United States do not accept conversions performed by their more liberal counterparts because such conversions do not bind the individual to Orthodox observance. Following the ruling of a leading decisor of the past generation, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, many Orthodox rabbis contend that non-Orthodox rabbis are by definition not qualified to constitute a religious court, so no conversion performed by non-Orthodox rabbis can ever be acceptable. Reform rabbis, by contrast, operate as they see fit: they offer educational programs of varying lengths, often perform conversions without a beit din, and do not necessarily require either circumcision or immersion. Caught in the middle are Conservative rabbis, who adhere to all three steps outlined above but
Despite the pluralism of American Jewry, then, its religious movements tend neither to accept each other's definitions of who is a Jew nor to accept each other's converts. At best, each operates independently, with little regard to the others' positions or values. At worst, each movement acts as if convinced that it alone will survive and so does not hesitate to take unilateral actions that have deleterious consequences for other Jews. In short, American Judaism is characterized by deep social and religious chasms but lacks the vocabulary and institutions—and perhaps the will—to bridge them.
THE CIVIL RELIGION OF ORGANIZED JEWISH LIFE
At first glance the external or "state" sphere of organized Jewish life operates differently and appears to be far more cohesive than the religious one. The organizations setting Jewish public policy work in tandem and annually issue "a joint program" (or, as it has been called more recently, "an agenda for public affairs"), a plan for concerted action. For several decades, however, this regime has come under fire from critics who have challenged the basic assumptions of the public policies of the organized Jewish community. Frustrated by the indifference of the policy establishment to their dissatisfaction, a growing number of organizations have opened offices in Washington, D.C., to lobby as they see fit. (Several Orthodox groups have set up shop, and both the Conservative and Reform movements support such offices in Washington.) With increasing frequency these Jewish lobbyists are taking positions diametrically opposed to the proclaimed positions of the organized Jewish community. Thus, despite its surface unity the public policy arm of the Jewish community is also fragmenting—with Jewish groups actively lobbying government leaders even as they ignore each other. To appreciate the seriousness of
That consensus was forged only gradually in the post–World War II years, after a half century of bitter internecine conflict on a wide range of ideological and social issues. In the first half of the twentieth century American Jewry divided as Uptown natives and Downtown "greenhorns" clashed over who should speak for American Jews and whether Jewish leaders should defend their people's interests through dignified, behind -the-scenes negotiations or by mobilizing the masses to take to the streets. They quarreled perhaps most bitterly over the question of a Jewish homeland: was Zionism a threat to Jewish security in the United States? Underlying these conflicts were profound class and cultural differences between native and immigrant Jews and between political radicals and conservatives.
Under such circumstances it was virtually impossible to forge a consensus on communal priorities—even during the crisis years of the Holocaust. In the postwar era, by contrast, the community knitted together socially when second-generation East European Jews rapidly achieved social mobility and the influence of German Jewish leaders waned. As the postwar era unfolded, the Uptown/Downtown interethnic divisions gradually disappeared.
This new social cohesion facilitated the construction of a "functional consensus" regarding American Jewry's communal agenda. In his insightful analysis of the postwar era the historian Arthur Goren identifies the dual components of the new agenda—"assuring Israel's security and striving for a liberal America."[6] Both were linked to America's self-chosen role as the international guardian of democratic ideals and fair play: the American Jewish community insisted that the United States owed Israel strong support because the Jewish state was an embattled bastion of democracy surrounded by autocratic states. Which nation was more deserving of support from America, the defender of democracy around the world? On the domestic front American Jewish organizations after World War II busied themselves with civic affairs to insure that no group in America suffered unfair treatment; the defense of Jews was now understood as part of a larger campaign of social action rather than solely as a parochial cause. Jewish needs both at home and abroad were therefore explained in universal terms. Israel deserved support because it embodied what was best in America rather than because it was a separate country with special needs; anti-Semitism was fought not as an attack
These twin goals energized Jewish organizations and committed them to a new activism in both foreign affairs and domestic policy. Each of the major religious denominations of American Judaism, for example, formed social action commissions in the early postwar years. Throughout the 1950s rabbinic organizations issued resolutions supporting union workers—despite the fact that most Jews were no longer in working-class occupations. Organizations of the Reform movement routinely called for government-funded housing and medical care for the poor; Conservative rabbis rejoiced when the Supreme Court handed down its school desegregation decision in 1954, and the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest organization of Orthodox rabbis, approved resolutions at its 1951 convention supporting price and rent controls.
The defense agencies of American Jewry also reoriented themselves. Whereas formerly they had concentrated on fighting anti-Semitism, they broadened their agenda to encompass all forms of social action. They supported legislation to end racial discrimination and to strengthen unions; they urged the government in Washington to embrace an internationalist policy that included foreign aid to democratic nations (such as Israel); and they favored social welfare programs. In 1945 the American Jewish Congress created a Commission on Law and Social Action dedicated to the twin tasks of "focus[ing] attention … on [social] abuses which must be ended, and promot[ing] … public policies which will make discrimination illegal and assure democratic rights for all racial and religious minorities."[7] A year later the American Jewish Committee's executive committee, noting "the closest relation between the protection of the civil rights" of all citizens and the members of particular groups, resolved to broaden its agency's mandate beyond the battle against anti-Semitism to "join with other groups in the protection of the civil rights of the members of all groups irrespective of race, religion, color or national origin."[8]
By 1953 theJoint Program Plan of the National Community Relations Advisory Council (NACRAC, later renamed NJCRAC when the word Jewish was added in 1971), the coordinator of most Jewish community
CRACKS IN THE CONSENSUS
During the late 1960s and early 1970s this consensus in organized Jewish life came under attack by small fringe groups. In keeping with the general mood of disenchantment with "establishments, " groups on the left and the right challenged the Jewish establishment. To an extent these critics borrowed arguments and tactics from the civil rights movement and feminists on one side of the ideological spectrum and from the emerging Christian right on the other. Groups on the Jewish left, for example, challenged Jewish organizations for offering unqualified support to Israeli government policies after the Six Day War—and especially after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. It was the view of the generally young critics who joined these left-wing groups that the established leadership had demonstrated its moral bankruptcy and inability to lead by failing to criticize the Israeli government.
Almost simultaneously, small groups on the right of the spectrum mounted their own attacks on the consensus positions of the Jewish community. First came the Jewish Defense League and Soviet Jewry activists who twitted the established leaders for their timidity in the face of anti-Semitic thugs at home and abroad. Moreover, conservative critics broke ranks with the community over the ever more liberal agenda on social issues.
By the late 1960s Jewish neoconservatives associated with Commentary magazine challenged other assumptions of the postwar consensus. In a far-reaching manifesto for change Murray Friedman urged "a new direction for American Jews." First on his list of priorities was a strong American national defense because it was the guarantor of Israel's security. He also called for reversing the Jewish "ideological bias [which] systematically favors governmental over private-sector solutions, and systematically
Most globally, the coalition of right-wing forces urged the Jewish community to reassess the wisdom of its political alliances. In 1971 Norman Podhoretz, then editor of Commentary, announced the shift in thinking that led to his journal's turn to neoconservatism: "whatever the case may have been yesterday, and whatever the case may be tomorrow, the case today is that the most active enemies of the Jews are located not in the precincts of the ideological Right, but in the ideological precincts of the radical Left.… Jews should recognize the ideology of the radical Left for what it is: an enemy of liberal values and a threat to the Jewish position."[11]
Around the same time, Orthodox Jews who associated with the religiously right-wing Agudath Israel movement also broke ranks with the liberal consensus of the Jewish community. Beginning in the mid-1960s, this group targeted the most sacrosanct of American Jewish principles—the separationist doctrine. From the very beginning of the republic, historian Naomi W. Cohen has demonstrated, "Jewish spokesmen set themselves up as guardians of the ‘authentic’ American tradition, often urging conformity with the ‘spirit’ of the national, religion-blind Constitution."[12]In the years after World War II Jewish organizations worked unceasingly to shore up the wall separating church and state, believing that anything short of strict separation endangered Jewish security and opened the floodgates to the forces bent on Christianizing America.
Early in the 1960s the consensus position was challenged by Orthodox Jews who came out in favor of state aid to parochial schools. Marvin Schick, a leading partisan of the Orthodox campaign, observed that for countless Protestants and Catholics, from public-school officials to teachers to politicians, the issue of state aid was a practical matter about which "reasonable men might differ." By contrast, "the bulk of the organized and articulate Jewish community, robot-like invoked the holiness and oneness of the First Amendment and proclaimed their opposition to any ‘breach in the wall separating church and state.’ This idol worship, however, did not paralyze the thought processes of Orthodox leaders who were … [starting to think] it might be a good thing for the state to do something which might help the Hebrew Day School."[13]
By the 1970s and 1980s, religiously Orthodox and politically conservative Jews had moved the discussion beyond aid to parochial schools. They now were wondering whether America might be a better country if prayer had a place in the public school and religious symbols were displayed in the public square. Rather than promote the "no establishment" clause of the First Amendment, this coalition emphasized the "free exercise" of religion so that religiously observant Americans, including Jews, could practice their religion unencumbered. "To their thinking, " writes the historian Jonathan Sarna, "the threat posed by rampant secularism was far more imminent and serious than any residual threat from forces of militant Christianity."[14]
THE CURRENT CIVIL RELIGIOUS REGIME
Judging from the annual pronouncements of Jewish community relations specialists, these criticisms have had scant impact. True, the Joint Program Plan and its successors, the Agendas for Public Affairs, include statements of demurral by member organizations on specific policy recommendations. But on balance the Jewish community continues to embrace its historic liberalism. In recent years the Joint Program Planhas endorsed public-school education, coupled with unwavering opposition to any aid to parochial schools; complete opposition to capital punishment; a statement on AIDS that instructs the Department of Health and Human Services to remove "the HIV virus from the list of ‘dangerous and contagious diseases’ for which aliens are excluded from this country"; and a strong endorsement of environmental programs, including a call for the "elevation of the Environmental Protection Agency to Cabinet status."
Surely one might debate whether these policy positions offer the best solution to contemporary problems in the United States. But on what basis have they been enunciated in the name of the American Jewish community? And why should that community invest its moral and political capital in support of policies that do not affect Jews as a group and about which American Jews as individual citizens undoubtedly hold a variety of opinions?
Over the years a number of explanations have been offered to justify these forays into the public policy arena. Perhaps the major one is that the Jewish tradition itself commands political activism. In the words of one Joint Program Plan: "American Jewish activism reflects the essence of the Judaic concept of ‘mitzvot, ' to act upon commandments."
This, however, only begs the question of how particular commandments
A second rationale—namely that most American Jews do, in fact, concur with the public policy positions taken by their "spokesmen"—is not implausible on the face of it. Jewish leaders, it is argued, reflect the will of American Jews. There is some truth to this claim. But if Jews are generally to the left of Protestants and Catholics, all things being equal, it is also true, as survey research indicates, that activists are considerably further to the left than the communities they claim to represent. Moreover, the very process by which individuals rise to leadership in the community-relations agencies strongly favors those who hold liberal views: such lay and professional leaders are not randomly selected but gravitate to the field because they are social activists. Individuals who dissent from the party line are marginalized. Finally, organizations tend to pick their battles carefully, and Jewish ones are no different; on matters that do not concern them directly many Jewish organizations defer to coordinating bodies. (Indeed, a perusal of the actual policy positions of national agencies represented in the Jewish Council for Public Affairs demonstrates that organizations as diverse as the American Jewish Committee and the Women's League for Conservative Judaism actually take positions far more nuanced than those put forth in their name by the "agenda for public affairs.") It is therefore questionable whether the will of the people is fairly represented by the public policy arm of the Jewish community.
A third justification for Jewish activism is that it serves the group interests of Jews to encourage those forces in society that are tolerant and socially "conscious." Certainly, this was a major lesson that Jewish policy
In the end the most plausible justification for the positions espoused by the community is a frankly political version of the above logic of group interest. As a small minority, the argument goes, the Jewish community must forge links with coalition partners in the hope that these partners will speak for Jewish interests. Here, at last, is a rationale that lends itself to hard-nosed evaluation. Specifically, we can ask if the Jewish community's coalition partners have "delivered" in return for Jewish support of their agendas. For example, has Jewish cooperation with other minority groups on racial or urban matters been rewarded with support for Israel or a strong effort by these groups to root out anti-Semitism in their own ranks? Have efforts to form coalitions with one set of partners foreclosed the possibility of joint action with other groups? And has the strong tilt of the Jewish community toward the social program long advocated by the left wing of the Democratic Party impeded coalition building with those in the center and those on the right of the political spectrum? Unfortunately, these important questions are rarely debated by organizations most directly engaged in setting the public-policy agenda for the Jewish community.
TOWARD PARTICULARISM: WHAT ARE JEWISH INTERESTS AND VALUES?
Perhaps the divided world of American Jewry cannot be made whole. But as we look to the future, we may reasonably ask whether it might not prove quite salutary to expose the divisions in American Jewish life so that a healthy public debate might ensue.
Circumstances have changed radically since the terms of discussion in the Jewish community were set in the immediate postwar period. Simply put, American Jews have achieved virtually everything that the post-war
But this myopic nonchalance neglects the critical feature of today's circumstances. Only the character—and not the condition—of threat facing Jews has changed. Today internal Jewish weakness is a far greater present danger than anti-Semitism. The community is losing large numbers of members to the twin processes of assimilation and intermarriage. The very Jewish population that is succeeding so well in integrating into American society is simultaneously almost devoid of a strong sense of distinctiveness. And the organized Jewish community lacks the sharp boundaries that would confidently clarify to its members who is a Jew or what is Judaism. In sum, the current Jewish communal "agenda for public affairs" is preoccupied with fighting the last war and is disregarding the present crisis.
Conditions in contemporary culture are only intensifying this dilemma. These include the growing inability of most American families to transmit their religion and culture intact to the next generation; "religious switching" is endemic in American society, and ethnicity is rapidly melting away. More generally, families are hard-pressed to serve as vehicles for the transmission of a strong identity as they are buffeted by massive dislocation and social change. Extended families tend to scatter widely. And even the nuclear family is under great strain because of high divorce rates, the multiple pressures faced by families with two wage earners, and a popular culture that is hostile to traditional family life and to the concept of religious obligation. The result is a growing "culture of disbelief" subversive to Judaism no less than to other religions.
As a result the public policies favored by the Jewish community may actually contribute to subverting Jewish survival. Certainly, it is no longer clear that the particularistic values of Judaism and the long-term interests of the Jewish community neatly coincide with liberal universalism. All this increases the urgency for a rethinking process in the Jewish community and a reassessment of the terms of discussion of the postwar public-policy consensus.
Fortunately, the mood in the Jewish community has been shifting, and there is now a new openness in a number of quarters to such reconsideration. As we go forward, several policy areas will warrant further scrutiny: First, Jews need to reexamine their embrace of American individualism, which in our time is increasingly untempered by countervailing values of altruism and voluntarism. A Jewish community preoccupied with individual self-advancement will look favorably on individualism, but that ethos is hostile to the maintenance of Jewish identity. American individualism, for example, frowns on young people who accept their parents' values uncritically and favors the collapse of ethnic and religious boundaries. Similarly, religious syncretism, unbounded choices, and constant self-invention render the task of teaching basic Jewish techniques for group survival far more difficult.
Second, the Jewish community must reconsider its reflexive fear of any potential breach in the wall of separation between church and state. Communal leaders have justified such an approach by citing, often incorrectly, historical precedent and by arguing that only an impenetrable wall of separation will guarantee Jewish rights and interests. But here too, much depends on one's definition of Jewish interests. It is not "good for the Jews" to keep religion out of the public square when religion—including Judaism—has something important to teach about morality and civilized behavior. It is not a Jewish interest to deprive parochial schools of government funding or to fight voucher programs when Jewish day schools, a critical vehicle for strengthening Jewish life, are starved of funds.
Third, the Jewish community must reassess its historical fear of asserting Jewish perspectives and interests in an unembarrassed fashion. The old habit of homogenizing Jewish teachings to blend smoothly with prevailing mores needs to be reconsidered. Under the bland banner of tikkun olam, the repair of the world, the Jewish community has taken positions in favor of a host of policies that cannot be squared with a fair reading of traditional Jewish texts. A more rigorous reading of those texts would force the community to reexamine its policy positions on what truly constitutes social justice, philanthropy, proper family structures, and sexual morality.
Such a reassessment of fundamental issues will not reknit the Jewish community into a unified body. Strong differences in outlook undoubtedly will remain on how to read, let alone apply, specific texts. At the least, however, the shibboleths that have so long dominated communal discourse will come under scrutiny—and the underlying disagreements
NOTES
Sections of this essay have appeared in different forms in Commentary and the American Jewish Yearbook. My thanks to the editors of those publications for their help.
1. For a detailed discussion of the Yale Five and their case see Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), chap. 5.
2. The major exception to this generalization is the periodic eruption of communal debate over the policies of the state of Israel. Going back to the early 1970s, with the emergence of the dovish "Breira" organization, American Jews have fiercely contended with one another over what Israelis ought to be doing. One could speculate as to the psychological roots of this displacement: do American Jews need their Israeli brothers and sisters to play some kind of surrogate role, or are American Jews acting out their sibling rivalry? However we regard the decades-long engagement of American Jews in telling Israelis how to manage their Arab neighbors, it is nonetheless striking how little American Jewish groups debate each other over how their own members ought to live in the United States.
3. Most denominational organizations, in fact, take positions on a range of public-policy questions, but this is not their primary work.
4. Walter Jacob, ed., American Reform Responsa: Collected Responsa of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1889–1983(New York: CCAR, 1983), 550.
5. The Reconstructionist movement, with which approximately 1 percent of American Jews identify, adopted a version of this position already in 1968.
6. Arthur A. Goren, "A ‘Golden Decade’ for American Jews: 1945–1955, " Studies in Contemporary Jewry 8 (1992): 4–8.
7. Commission on Law and Social Action of the American Jewish Congress to Jewish community leaders and workers, memorandum, n.d., Blaustein Library of the American Jewish Committee.
8. Naomi W. Cohen, Not Free to Desist: A History of the American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 383–85.
9. Quoted in Peter Y. Meddin, "Segmented Ethnicity and the New York Jewish Politics, " Studies in Contemporary Jewry 3 (1987): 32–33.
10. Murray Friedman, "A New Direction for American Jews, " Commentary (Dec. 1981): 37–44, esp. 41.
11. Norman Podhoretz, "A Certain Anxiety, " Commentary (Aug. 1971): 10.
12. Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5–6.
13. From Marvin Schick, ed., Government Aid to Parochial Schools—How Far?, excerpted in Naomi W. Cohen, "Schools, Religions, and Government—Recent American Jewish Opinions, " Michael 3 (1975): 377.
14. Jonathan D. Sarna, "Christian America or Secular America? The Church-State Dilemma of American Jews, " in Jews in Unsecular America, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1987), 18.