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Retro v Metro: The book which divides America

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Centinel [OP]

2004-08-27 22:12 | User Profile

From The Scotsman: [url]http://news.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=988422004[/url]

Retro v Metro: The book which divides America

Alex Massie August 24, 2004

MEL Gibson and The Passion of the Christ are retro; Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 are metro. Smart kids are metro; smart bombs are retro. California is metro and Alabama retro. Newt Gingrich and George Bush are retro; Hillary Clinton and John Kerry metro.

On the one hand you have metropolitan, tolerant sophistication; on the other rural backwardness, religious superstition and narrow-minded intolerance. One America eats french fries; the other freedom fries. This is the reality of modern America.

Or so says John Sperling, author of a new book, The Great Divide: Retro vs Metro America, which has been heavily trailed by advertisements in the New York Times and Washington Post , declaring itself "a book that deepens our understanding of America as a polarised society".

Mr Sperling, a lifelong Democrat and a billionaire who founded the private, for-profit University of Phoenix, has written what he said this week was "the first coffee-table political book that we hoped would be widely read by people who never read political books". Mr Sperling said he hoped his book would lead to a "reformation of the Democratic party".

Like most coffee-table books, Mr Sperling’s is better to look at than read.

The opening sentence of Alexis de Toqueville’s masterpiece Democracy in America reads: "North America gives us, in its external contours, general features easily discernible at a glance." Toqueville was referring to America’s physical geography, but the country’s political geography seems, on the surface, to be just as easily discerned.

The coasts and the Great Lakes are bastions of liberalism; the south and the Prairie and Rocky Mountain states solidly conservative. This is convenient since it allows great swathes of the country to be coloured blue (for Democrats) and red (for Republicans) giving the impression that America is at war with itself, sharply and irrevocably divided. This is, we are constantly told, a bad thing. Like all clichés this has become as banal as it is widely accepted.

Mr Sperling suggests that Democrats should cease trying to be a party for all Americans and concentrate their efforts upon securing a permanent electoral majority in the "metro" states, ignoring the south and other "retro" states. Yet had Al Gore carried just one of the five southern states Bill Clinton won in 1996 he would have been president.

Mr Sperling argues: "America is not a unified country with common traditions, needs and desires. Rather it is an amalgam of antithetical entities: two nations, each with its own history, traditions, needs and aspirations."

Well, there is some truth to this. America is indeed a dizzying, vibrant melange of widely different peoples and cultures. But is it really the case that conservatives have different needs and aspirations from liberals? Or is it not more likely that they simply disagree on how best to meet those needs and reach those aspirations?

Mr Sperling continues: "Despite its defeat in the Civil War the South has remained an entity apart from the rest of the nation." Well, one could equally say that despite its victory in the Civil War, New England has remained an entity apart from the rest of the nation.

There is more of this stuff. To wit: "This modern Republican Party is an unholy coalition of interest groups held together with a shared rhetorical interest in small government and low taxes." But, again, one could equally accurately say that the Democratic Party is an unholy alliance of interest groups loosely bound together by a belief that bigger government and higher taxes is better government.

According to Mr Sperling, American foreign policy is driven by "religious dogma" not the national interest.

He suggests it has been hijacked by "Christian Zionists" and implicitly suggests that "neoconservatives" are placing Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. This is not a sentiment widely shared by a middle America that did not ask for the war it finds itself fighting but accepts that now that war has been thrust upon the United States it must be fought and won.

When Mr Sperling poses the important question for Democrats, "why do we lose elections when we are right on all the issues?" he assumes the existence of a genetic stupidity that explains the otherwise inexplicable appeal of the Republican Party. It does not seem to occur to him that any decent person could possibly be a conservative. Indeed, Mr Sperling’s condescension illustrates the Democrats’ difficulties. It is hard to win votes from folk you so clearly despise. He says: "If America is ever to be a true United States, it will be united with the metro values of inclusion, respect for science and rational discourse, and policies designed to provide physical, economic and social security for all families." OK then.

But facts are stubborn things. If America is so divided, how do you explain that New York City has had Republican mayors for the past decade? That South Dakota sends two Democrats to the Senate despite Mr Bush winning 60 per cent of the vote there in 2000?

Equally, Al Gore won "metro" Oregon by just 7,000 votes four years ago and Wisconsin by just 5,000 while in Mr Bush’s Texan stronghold Mr Gore received 38 per cent of the vote. Mr Bush, meanwhile, won 42 per cent of the vote in California’s liberal paradise.

The great majority of Americans shun extremism whether they encounter it on the left or right. Most Americans thoroughly disapproved of Bill Clinton’s liaison with Monica Lewinsky but that did not translate into enthusiasm for Congressional Republicans’ eagerness to proceed with impeachment proceedings. Equally, Michael Moore’s disingenuous populism has its audience, but he does not speak for middle America.

As the political analysts Michael Robinson and Susan Ellis argued in the Weekly Standard recently, "pundits and political scientists have equated ‘evenly divided’ with ‘polarised.’ Big mistake".

Democrat charges that Mr Bush has, in the words of a Kerry spokesman "divided our country like never before" are, it ought to be obvious, preposterous.

Retro vs Metro labels itself a playbook for the Democratic party, but it has a clearer message: you, dear voter, may think what you want so long as you think like us. In that it exhibits the same divisiveness it condemns in conservatives.

Political discourse, in this imaginary world, can never be conducted between good people who happen to disagree. Instead it is a Manichean struggle between the forces of darkness and enlightenment.

Retro vs Metro fails to appreciate that civil society thrives on disagreement. America has been a disputatious, often fractious and openly divided nation since its foundation. Today’s disagreements are no greater than those between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Yet it has thrived on this rumbunctious spirit.

Americans can and do disagree on what makes the ideal America. And this has been true from the earliest days of the Republic.

More importantly, Republicans and Democrats alike agree that America remains the ideal. In a time of war, that remains the bedrock upon which American society is founded. It remains an ideal worth fighting for.