An interesting line in this Yglesias entry. It is not surprising, I suppose... with so many political boundaries for so long it makes sense that religion, ethnicity, language and region would be greater drivers of voter identity than in the US, so ironically we are on some ways a more class-ist society that some with a much more overt sense of class.
The Forever War
Ann Friedman has an excellent column revisiting Andrew Sullivan’s notion that Barack Obama could somehow end the “culture war” in American politics. As she observes, it doesn’t seem to have happened, and the belief that it might happen is something of a mirage: “One of the great errors of defining the culture war of the 1980s and 1990s as primarily about women’s and gay rights is that liberals got the idea that this was a war we could win.”
That frame saw the evident progress on specific issue as foretelling some kind of ultimate victory. We can all watch Mad Men today and agree—liberal and conservative alike—that the triumph of the civil rights movement was a good thing and that women should be able to undertake meaningful careers outside the teaching and nursing professions. Public opinion turns steadily more favorable to the claims of gay and lesbian equality. But Friedman says “The underlying sentiment that has fueled this conflict from the start — that only certain Americans are “real Americans” who deserve rights and respect — has not gone away.”
I think that’s right. Circa the year 2000 (plus or minus five years) you commonly heard that American politics differed from Europe in being primarily driven by cultural issues rather than economic ones. But as you can read in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State or Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches
the reverse is actually the case and in America income is a better predictor of voting behavior than in almost any other advanced democracy. That should tell us that insofar as things change, they’re likely to change in terms of more emphasis on culture/identity issues if the US became a more typical country. What’s more, if you look at the history of debates on race and American identity you see that the culture is remarkably adept at continually redefining boundaries in such a way as to make them perennially problematic.
For my part, I think this is a regrettable reality. Some of the questions that fall under this rubrik are really core questions of rights and human equality and they’re rightly the subject of hot political debates. But culture and identity questions also serve to have a poisonous impact on things like transportation and land-use policy, whereby issues that should be primarily about the allocation of scarce resources swiftly turn into cultural flashpoints in an unenlightening way. Still, the reality is that politics generally isn’t “about policy” in that kind of way and likely never will be.
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/the-forever-war/
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