Scrooge’s nightmare

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 17:17:00 +0000

Cowed by exit polls showing that "moral values" motivated one in five American voters on Election Day, chastened journalists have begun to spin a new narrative about our national political culture: that "ordinary Americans" can be found only in socially conservative red-state pews. "Ordinary people, the people in the red states" is how conservative media critic Bernard Goldberg puts it, and many in the press seem to be saying amen.

But once again the media have it wrong. Missing in this discussion is that most Americans -- even many Bush supporters -- would recoil and rebel if the evangelical right ever got its way and began to limit the personal freedoms most of us now take for granted.

All the claims about mandates and values notwithstanding, the very fact that one-fifth of voters cited moral values means that four-fifths didn't. In fact, we heard much the same talk about the rise of conservative social values in the Reagan '80s, yet scholars who have studied attitudes in that period have found little evidence to suggest any reversal of the social liberalism that began in the '60s, particularly on issues involving family, women, morality, sexuality and overall tolerance. We must be careful not to confuse election results with cultural trends.

Salon.com > Leonard Steinhorn

Scrooge’s nightmare