The Great Cultural Divide.

AuthorBRESLER, ROBERT J.
PositionCultural differences among voters - Brief Article

NOTHING WAS MORE STRIKING about the 2000 presidential election than the deep cultural divide that it clearly exposed. The agonizing post-election struggle in Florida only exacerbated the divisions and the partisan lines. Florida was a microcosm of the nation itself, with a large Democratic population in Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade counties of African-Americans, Jews, and Hispanics, and the Republican counties of north and central Florida, predominately white Christian and conservative. Nationally, George W. Bush's constituency is geographically based in the L-shaped curve from the Rocky Mountain and Great Plains states and moving into the South and the Border States. Gore and the Democrats find their constituency in the urban centers of the Mid-Atlantic, Great Lakes, and Pacific Coast states.

The Democratic base consists of single females, African-Americans, union members, Jews, government workers, academics, and media members. The Republican base is churchgoing Christians, white males, and small-town and rural people. One group is Starbucks; the other, McDonalds. One watches "The West Wing" with its romanticized liberal White House; the other listens to Rush Limbaugh. Looking back, it seems clear that the late 1960s and early 1970s marked not only the birth of a counterculture, but the slow demise of our common culture. There was a time when most of us watched the same television programs and movies and listened to the same music. People flocked to the films that became fixed stars in our popular culture--"Gone With the Wind," "The Wizard of Oz," and "The Godfather," to name a few. Today, cultural tastes are fragmented, and many think debased. As Peter Bart, editor-in-chief of Daily Variety, put it, "This is not a nation that is coalescing in terms of tastes or values, but rather is pulling further apart, which helps explain why network programmers find it increasingly difficult to come up with an across-the-board hit show and why the niche-marketers of cable continue to gain ground."

What divides us has little to do with prescription drug benefits, privatization of Social Security, and perhaps even tax cuts. It is, rather, a worldview about such things as marriage, homosexuality, abortion, pornography, and centrality (or the danger) of religion in public life. Despite the talk years ago about the generation gap, the legacy of the 1960s seems to have divided the baby boom generation against itself. Bill Clinton was a poster boy of...

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