Month: November 2004

The post-election conventional wisdom that “values voters” swung the election to President Bush is finally receiving some critical scrutiny. John Hood of the John Locke Foundation offers some pretty persuasive analysis:

The problem with all this is that, while comforting to many Kerry supporters and exhilarating for some social-conservative leaders, the notion that Bush won primarily because religious voters turned out for him does not seem to be backed up by any real evidence. Few reporters or commentators appear to have gone back to examine the 2000 exit polls, which would seem to be necessary if one wishes to assert a trend.

I did. I found that the percentage of voters sampled who said they attended church at least weekly was the same—42 percent—in both 2000 and 2004. The percentage never attending church was also the same, at 15 percent. The middle group, those attending occasionally, was, you guessed it, 42 percent each time. Interestingly, while Bush slightly improved his standing among frequent churchgoers, by about a point in 2004, his support grew by 3 to 4 points among those attending seldom or never.

Yep, it was the atheist vote that really put Bush over the top in 2004. […]

That leaves the initial assertion about 22 percent of voters citing moral issues as most important, higher than the share citing terrorism, Iraq, the economy, or other issues. When I looked more closely at this question, however, doubts immediately presented themselves. For one thing, the answers were broken out in ways that biased the analysis. While the poll did not attempt to distinguish the various moral issues that voters might be thinking about—abortion, marriage, wars for oil, etc.—it did list “taxes” and “the economy” separately, as well as “terrorism” and “Iraq.” Of course, for many voters, these are not separate issues. You may disagree with them, but most voters sampled in the exit poll said that the war in Iraq was part of the overall war on terrorism. And many right-leaning voters see tax policy as inextricably linked with economic growth and job creation (at least a few freedom-loving folks even see tax cuts as a moral issue—imagine that!)

In short, the question is flawed and the answers easily misunderstood. Moreover, it doesn’t compare well with the 2000 exit poll, in which “moral issues” was not listed as an option. On the other hand, you can track the impact of foreign policy over time. In 2000, only 12 percent said that “foreign affairs” was the most important issue in the presidential race, and they broke 54 percent to 40 percent for Bush over Gore. In 2004, a combined 34 percent identified foreign policy (either Iraq or the war on terrorism) as the most important, and they appear to have broken for Bush by 59 percent to 40 percent. Put it all together, and the increase in salience and small increase in Bush preference for foreign policy constitutes a gain of 13.5 percentage points in the Bush vote in 2004.

Obviously, he didn’t win by that much. He lost ground on economic issues, because of the recession. But without his edge on war on terrorism, Bush would have lost. And that proposition—unlike the “it’s all about gay marriage meme”—is testable and fits the available data. Voters worried about partial-birth abortion, same-sex marriage, and other cultural issues are obviously an important constituency within the current GOP majority, but they are no more responsible for Bush’s national victory on Tuesday than voters motivated by other issues to re-elect the president.

The left seems to have internalized the impending takeover by a Christian Taliban as its new metanarrative. Will the facts pierce this (in many ways self-flattering) illusion?

In yet another article on our divided electorate Michael Kinsley writes:

It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

This is a common, indeed nigh-universal, fallacy on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate. It is the notion that pro-lifers want to “impose” their views on everyone whereas pro-choicers simply want to live and let live.

But this simply begs the question since what is at issue is who shall count as a person, and therefore who is being imposed upon. From the pro-life perspective, to permit legal abortion is to condemn an entire class of human beings to living only at the sufferance of others. If this isn’t an imposition what is?

If you’re a libertarian (as I once thought I was) or just interested in libertarian ideas, you might be interested in this debate between minarchist and anarchist libertarians. The participants include Charles Murray (he of the (in)famous Bell Curve) and economist David Friedman (son of Milton).

As far as I’m concerned, the anarchists are wrong because they assume that the weak and vulnerable won’t be trampled (even more) in a society without government. The minarchists are wrong because once you’ve justified coercive government to protect person and property, it’s hard to see why it’s not also justified in providing basic economic goods to those who are unable to provide for themselves and in protecting against the externalities (physical, social and moral) generated by the market.

As G.K. Chesterton remarked, the poor object to being governed badly while the rich object to being governed at all.

Beliefnet‘s Steven Waldman is, as usual, full of good sense:

Let’s be clear about who these “values voters” were in 2004. Somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of Americans are born-again Christians. About 15 percent of the population is religious conservatives of the sort we used to call the “religious right.” The other born-agains consist of a group that Beliefnet has labeled “freestyle evangelicals”—Bible-centered, religious, church-going, and politically moderate.

How could Democrats reach freestyle evangelicals? Bob Wright nailed one way: cultural pollution. Violence and sexual explicitness in the media are something on which red-state and blue-state parents can agree.

But it wasn’t just evangelical Protestants who gave Bush the margin, it was also moderate Catholics. Last time, Gore won Catholics; this time, Bush did. In fact, with the exception of the 1984 Reagan landslide, John Kerry did worse among Catholics than any Democrat since the Gallup organization start measuring such things in 1952. And the most ominous trend in the election for Democrats was Bush’s strong performance among Hispanic Catholics.

For that reason, I think the Democrats must swallow hard and reassess their approach to abortion. No, Catholics are not all pro-life, but even the ones who are pro-choice are uncomfortable with partial-birth abortion. On that issue, Bush came off as the sensible, moral moderate. Kerry, on the other hand, came off as an amoral extremist.[…]

Democratic politicians should never forget something simple: Most Republicans and most Democrats are religious. Using faith language is not just about sucking up to their voters, it’s about talking to your own base, too—and those Catholics who abandoned the party this year.

On some level, the hardest thing that Democratic leaders, activists, and journalists have to do is honestly ask themselves this: Do you hold very religious people in contempt? If you do, religious people will sense it—and will vote against you. And there are more of them than there are of you.

I think Waldman correctly identifies two things that Democrats would do well to keep in mind. First, winning “red-state” voters isn’t just a matter of dressing up liberal positions in religious language. Many religious people disagree with liberal Democrats on substantive matters of policy, not just on the language used to convey those policies. Secondly (and this works to the Dems’ advantage), apart from the hard-core members of the “religious right,” whom Waldman identifies as about 15% of the electorate, many theologically conservative Christians are open to liberal political positions on a host of issues.

Here’s evangelical Ron Sider from an article in this Sunday’s Inquirer:

Sider notes that 55 percent of U.S. evangelicals – who number about 50 million – favor strict environmental regulations, and 45 percent think homosexuals should have the same civil rights as others. Forty-three percent say the middle class should be taxed to fight poverty, and 29 percent support more government spending.[…]

The National Association of Evangelicals adopted a landmark statement last month calling its 30 million members to have “a biblically balanced concern that reflects the full range of God’s concerns for the well-being of marriage, the family, the sanctity of human life, justice for the poor, care for creation, peace, freedom and racial justice.”

The statement, which Sider helped draft, said that “no longer dare one accuse evangelicals of being ‘one-issue’ voters focused exclusively on one or two issues.”

Moreover, it’s not good for Christians to be (or to be seen as) wedded to one party. The temptation there is to identify the positions of that party as the Christian position.

President Bush’s re-election doesn’t mean that real differences don’t still exist within the broader conservative movement. The NYT reports here on the continuing struggle between conservatives who supported the Iraq war and the “antiwar Right”:

The euphoria of Mr. Bush’s victory postponed the battle, but not for long. Now that Mr. Bush has secured re-election, some conservatives who say they held their tongues through the campaign season are speaking out against the neoconservatives, against the war and in favor of a speedy exit.

They argue that the war is a political liability to the Republican Party, but also that it runs counter to traditional conservatives’ disdain for altruist interventions to make far-off parts of the world safe for American-style democracy. Their growing outspokenness recalls the dynamics of American politics before Vietnam, when Democrats first became identified as doves and Republicans hawks, suggesting to some the complicated political pressures facing the foreign policy of the second Bush administration.

The question is: how much of the opposition to the war is the disaffection of a handful of conservative intellectuals and activists compared to that at the grass-roots level?

Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh reports on the G.K. Chesterton Society and considers the virtues and vices of GKC as a writer.

Matthew Yglesias has two good posts that should both please and challenge Christians.

First:

Mark Schmitt is bored of all the Jesusland business and wants to ask the right question about religion, namely “why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice?”

I think the answer is that it does have a strong element of social justice. Who’s working to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa? Who’s trying to help refugees in Darfur? Who’s trying to stop global trafficking in women? Why, that would be socially conservative religious movements. For that matter, who’s charged off on a neo-Wilsonian quest to spread democracy at gunpoint. The efficacy of the religious right’s preferred means of spreading liberty around the world can and should be questioned, as should the sincerity of at least some of the architects of the strategy, but there’s every reason to think that many — if not most — of the people who vote for George W. Bush and his forward strategy of freedom are perfectly sincere in their belief that this is what’s happening and that it’s a good idea.

Again, in response to comments from philosopher T. M. Scanlon:

The distinction between charity and social justice is important, and I shouldn’t have overlooked it. But the question of requiring “sacrifice” isn’t especially relevant to the distinction (though it is important in understanding the popularity of moral concern about gay rights and so forth, which amounts to self-righteousness rather than a requirement that anyone actually do anything) since charity and justice alike demand sacrifice from their adherent. The point about legitimacy, however, is spot-on. A true demand for social justice necessarily calls into question the legitimacy of the social order, the legitimacy of my having what I have, and does not just ask me to sacrifice some of my property and my position, but admit to myself that my possession of my property and position is, to some extent, unjustifiable and unjust. This is a hard thing to admit, and while it’s possible to conceptualize efforts to admit it and change the world as part of doing God’s will, I think it’s equally easy to reason that it can’t have been God’s will to erect an unjust system.

The point here is well-taken. The distinction between charity and justice is not just that the former depends primarily on private efforts while the latter is the result of government action. Justice, as Yglesias rightly points out, can require systematic changes to the social order. This is something that some conservative Christians, for all their admirable humanitarianism, have been reluctant to engage in.

This may be a legacy, at least as far as Protestants are concerned, of Luther’s “two-kingdom” schema which tended to see social structures as providentially ordered. The family, the state, the economy, etc. were the means through which God cared for his Creation and created a space for the Church to go about the business of spreading the Gospel. But this perspective tended to see those social structures as given and not amenable to substantial change.

Fellow Pennsylvanian Eric Miller on why he voted for Bush:

The next day the mood was low at the college where I teach, at least among the faculty; many were Kerry supporters, and, more to the point, Bush despisers. As we soaked in the day together, it hit me hard that I, like them, would have preferred (if often not by much) to see a Kerry administration taking the lead on many pivotal issues: race relations, the economy, environmental policy, the deficit, the war, health care, Iraq. […]

But I could not vote for your side, not this time. […]

I believe that all of life finds its source in the divine, and is sustained by the grace of a God who finds pleasure in our guarding and nurturing of this world, his world. He has filled the Earth with gifts beyond our capacity to imagine, gifts that merit our joyous, careful gratitude. Among these gifts are our very lives, and with them our individual and collective ability to respond freely to him and his world. We, his creatures, are free to make choices. But not all of our choices are equal; neither, within the structures of reality, may all choices be sanctioned, let alone celebrated.

Herein lies the heart of my quarrel with the Democratic Party. In the vast arena symbolized by the single word “abortion,” your party is not only permitting a category of choice that humans must not sanction, it is intent on enlarging that sphere to permit a kind of experimentation that will only further diminish our experience of being human. To be complicit in such conduct is not just to despise the gifts of the creator. It is to despise him.

(via the Japery)

Miller had a very good essay called “Alone in the Academy” in First Things a few months ago as well.

Leave it to me to throw my 1/300 millionth of the vote to a party on the verge of fizzling out.

From Jeffrey St. Clair:

The Green Party, notorious spoiler of Democratic aspirations in 2000, not only wasn’t a factor in this election; its very existence was scarcely mentioned by the press … or by anyone else.

This sorry state of play was hardly surprising since the Green Party’s presidential candidate, a mortician-like lawyer named David Cobb, told CounterPunch a few weeks ago that he wasn’t the least bit concerned about how many votes he might come his way on election day.

Well, Mission Accomplished, Commander Cobb. And, in case you missed it, you and your running mate, Pat LaMarche, only convinced a mere 106,264 voters nationwide to pull your lever or punch your chad.

By contrast, Ralph Nader, rejected by the Greens in favor of Cobb, vilified by the Democrats and denied ballot status in such key states as California, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Oregon, still pulled in 503,534 vote, nearly five times Cobb’s microscopic accumulation.

Cobb was also trounced by Michael Badnarik, the California computer programmer who replaced Harry Browne at the head of the Libertarian ticket this year. On the ballot in 49 states, the vocally anti-war Badnarik got 360,000 votes. Cobb’s dismal showing now puts the Greens in the catacombs of third party politics, resting in a musty chamber beneath even the Constitutionalist Party, whose candidate Michael Allen Petrouka received 131,000 votes from 36 states.

More here.

From Alexander Cockburn[!]:

Moral values this brings us to the well-known fact (greeted with amazement on Wednesday morning by the pundits) that the United States is a Christian nation. Tocqueville noticed this some time ago, and anyone driving today down any county road or state highway will see a lot of churches, still well ahead of casinos which are facilities also predicated on a relationship with Providence. The 2002 edition of the University of Chicago’s regular surveys reported that the adult population of the homeland is 53 per cent Protestant, 25 per cent Catholic, 3 per cent Christians of some other stripe, 3 per cent other religions, 2 per cent Jewish and 14 per cent holding “no religion”. Of the Christians, 25 per cent go to church once a week or more.

Even though the highest reading on any chart of Intolerance is that nourished towards Christians by secular liberals (after all, Christians believe in forgiveness and the possibility of redemption) I suppose we’ll have to put up with much earnest journalism from sensitive liberal writers driving into the Christian heartland to inspect and commune with the natives. I read one patronizing prospectus from a Californian free-lancer that sounded like an application by an anthropologist in 1925 for funding to inspect an African tribe.

More here.

(Via Get Religion)