Is America Still Red Vs. Blue, or Purpler?

ERIN McCLAM

Dial back to a year or so ago, to the wrenching, vicious, partisan escapade that was Campaign 2004, to a time when we were told by a thousand pundits that America was deeply, hopelessly divided.

And it felt that way: Family dinners became shouting matches. Bush and Kerry signs were snatched from yards. Blue and red were at war.
But 12 months have passed since then, ample time for the nation to relearn the principles of civil discourse. We have had time to heal, to start listening to each other again. To become, in a word, purpler.

So have we?

If you want signs of hope, you can read about the hundreds of millions of dollars that poured in for relief after a nation watched, united in its horror, as a humanitarian nightmare took hold in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. You can remember the nomination of John Roberts for chief justice, which sailed through the Senate.

And if you want reasons to despair, you can flick on your computer and read the blogs, where conservatives accuse liberals of being unhinged "moonbats," and liberals fire back that the right is a collection of "wingnuts." Or you can reflect on the immediate partisan warfare that broke out over President Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.

Ask political experts around the country about the state of American discourse. You could ask 20 of them, actually, and come back with 20 different answers.

Put another way: The nation is divided over whether it's still divided.

"I think there has been a calming down," says Morris Fiorina, a Stanford University political scientist. "Maybe it's wishful thinking, but I see signs here and there that people are just getting tired of it."

He points to the Gang of 14, the bipartisan group of senators who headed off an historic battle over the threat of Democratic filibusters to stop President Bush's appeals court nominees.
And he cites the confirmation of Roberts — a nomination that had left- and right-wingers spoiling for a fight, only to end in overwhelming approval.

"There is some turning away from this hyperpartisanship," Fiorina says. "It focuses people's minds on the idea that there real issues, real problems, that need to be solved."

But ask Guy Burgess, who leads the Conflict Research Consortium at the University of Colorado, and he will paint a bleaker picture.

He believes, to his disappointment, that we are still a nation of scorekeepers: Two points for the Bush administration if the day goes well in Iraq, two points for the war opposition if the body count pushes higher.

To Burgess, this is still a nation of dueling political slogans rather than of real, substantive discussion.

"I'm not sure that it's gotten any better," he says. "It may be a little more polite and a little less focused than before the election. But that's just because the election was an immediate power contest that tends to bring out this kind of thing."

Any discussion of how the American landscape has changed since last November must include
Hurricane Katrina. In an already divided nation, the apocalyptic storm and flood pointed up more divisions in the nation's social fabric — painful, searing, difficult-to-address problems of race and class.

In some ways, Katrina's aftermath appeared to line up along the standard red-and-blue divide — right-leaners blaming the Democratic-led state and local governments in Louisiana, left-wingers blaming the Republican-led federal response.

Edwin Fuelner, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, said the polarization after the storm was "instantaneous."

Pressed to cite examples, he was quick to name two.

One came from a Republican: Rep. Don Young of Alaska, who dismissed as "moronic" the notion that money should be diverted from perceived home-state pork projects to rebuild the Gulf Coast.

And one came from a Democrat: Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, who was so fed up with federal criticism of the local response that she said on ABC, of Bush: "One more word about it after this show airs and I might likely have to punch him. Literally."

"Here we are, the whole country, kind of in a state of shock over what happened," Fuelner says. "In mourning over loss of life. Everybody should be pulling together, and instead we're all calling each other names."

Zizi Papacharissi of Temple University, who has studied civility — or the lack of it — in online political groups, believes some of the polarization arises from the extraordinarily large number of traumatic events the nation has lived through in just the past several years.

She lists them: Impeachment, the Sept. 11 attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a seemingly
countless string of deadly hurricanes. Not to mention two very different presidential administrations.

"I would be even more likely to use the word cynicism," she says. "It has to do with the fact that it's a public that's very seasoned. So there's skepticism, cynicism, disillusionment."

It all reminds Stathis Kalyvas, a professor at Yale University who studies international politics, of Europe in the 1970s, when all politics was about division and it seemed no one could agree on anything.

Today, he notes with irony, governing in Europe is about moderate platforms, appealing to the center.

"In the U.S. today one gets the sense a lot of people have difficulty just discussing things with one another," he says. "There seems to be a lot of bad feeling. The bloggers, the public — you get a sense that people are much more fanatical."

But Fiorina argued in a book, "Culture War?", that the notion of a polarized America was a myth to begin with. The true polarization, he said, was always in the politicians — offering starkly different choices to voters — and in the media, eager to portray a conflict and more exposed to political junkies in New York and Washington.

"The quick finding is, if you look at people's positions, there's not that much difference," he says.
Still, David Bennett, a professor of history at Syracuse University, called last year's climate the most divided America since World War II. He believes polarization may be abating, citing eroding support for Bush over the Iraq war and the slow federal response to Katrina.

Bennett blames divisive Bush policies for fostering the steady environment of polarization in the United States. Of course, it's just as easy to find those who blame obstinate Democrats.

Where do we go from here? "I think we're in a moment when political pundits and students of politics are not quite sure what the environment will be in 2006, whether we'll have this deep polarizing divide," Bennett says.

Burgess, of the Conflict Research Consortium, says he'll continue working on the political help-wanted ad he constructs in his daydreams. He wants a candidate who will stand up to "political manipulation," and explain to Americans how opportunistic politicians are distorting real debate for selfish purposes.

"Somebody's got to get up and explain to people how they're being manipulated," he says. "I think there's an opportunity for someone to run against it."

Then he considers what he has just said.

"I might be being naive."