A tale of two cities

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about the role that culture plays in determining political opinions. The war in Iraq has helped to define this matter for me. The gaps that exist among demographic groups within the United States, and between any given American and any given foreigner, give me pause.

At the moment, I divide my time between two geographic poles. One is Austin, a university city of half a million people. The other is Bastrop, a country town one hundred times smaller. These Texas cities are separated by thirty miles of highway. My experience with these two communities provides a case study in political culture during Gulf War II.

In Bastrop, I attend my family's conservative Baptist church, the largest congregation in town. The head pastor has been known to laud President Bush from the pulpit. There are some Democrats in the congregation, but the default perspective is that of the GOP. The congregation includes a lot of bankers and engineers, and everybody speaks with a twang.

Meanwhile, I take classes in downtown Austin. On the way back home in the afternoons, I listen to a live local music show. Most people speak in soft, cultivated non-accents. The default perspective for those in this student/artist culture is definitely not that of the right wing. Disenchantment with the President is a given and requires no thought at all to express. The war in Iraq is being waged for oil, and the religious right has an insidious social agenda. (Come to think of it, this group views the religious right with just about the level of alarm that the religious right shows when discussing the "radical homosexual lobby.")

Each side views its own political positions as the most sensible. The right, however, is more likely to ascribe the left's instransigence to spiritual blindness; the left is more likely to ascribe the opinions of the right to intellectual insulation. Both sides call each other liars.

Both sides have evidence for their ideas. Both sides have sources of news and analysis that back up their own thought. Both sides appeal to history. In fact, a person could switch from one side to the other without much difficulty, just by looking at one or two concepts in a different light. (As evidence, I cite the split among libertarians over Iraq; some supported the invasion and others opposed it, for roughly the same reasons.)

For the most part, I do not think that people fall into these opposing camps because they are persuaded by argument. Even if a person does go from one side to the other for purely cerebral reasons, he will probably stay in his new camp for cultural ones. A voter who concludes that the Democrats are right about health care will probably oppose the war in Iraq too, just because he now identifies with the thinking of that party. UN-skeptics who voted for Bush when he opposed nation-building will probably still vote for him now that he enforces UN resolutions as law, if only because that's the way their leadership has drifted.

This view of the situation is simplistic, I grant. For one thing, it needs to account for the consolidation of conservative opinion that occurred after 11 September. That would add another factor besides culture and cognition to the mix. Yet the opinions of the entire nation, both right and left, were consolidated after 11 September. President Bush achieved celebrity status even in the "liberal media"; I will never forget seeing CNN gush over a little girl who got a kiss on the cheek from Bush at a community rally in early December 2001. That only makes the subsequent polarization seem more startling.

As a rule, people stick to the worldview of their herd. They develop presuppositions that keep them from seeing other, equally rational perspectives as anything but stupidity or malice. This phenomenon is useful to the political operatives who rally the voters, but it can destroy community discourse.