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Of all the public statements made by various candidates for the Republican and Democratic presidential nominations, the two most revealing issued from Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama. Last December, Huckabee aired a TV ad in which he declared that “at this time of year . . . what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ.” Four months later, Obama, speaking at a fund-raising event in San Francisco, said that conservatively inclined working-class voters are “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

What was noteworthy about these statements was the clarity with which they reflected the cultural chasm that separates the two men who made them—as well as the segments of the electorate to which each was speaking. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister turned more-or-less conservative Republican politician, was appealing to evangelical Christians; Obama, a liberal Democrat who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii and attended Columbia University and Harvard Law School, was appealing to secular up-market urbanites.

In framing their respective statements, each candidate, whether knowingly or not, invoked terms that might have been calculated in advance to antagonize the voters to whom the other was appealing. It is as though both were operating on the assumption that there is no middle ground in American politics. True, it is customary for a candidate to play to his base in the primary season, then tack to the center once he has secured his party’s nomination. But the “center” of American politics has been shrinking, and so has the difference between primary and general campaigns. Indeed, it may have become possible for serious candidates to aim their general-election campaigns almost exclusively at their bases—this is the so-called “51-percent strategy”—rather than reaching out to undecided voters.

Up to a point, George W. Bush ran just such a campaign in 2004. If either presidential candidate should do so successfully this year, it will mean that identity politics, in which a voter’s political choices are best understood not as a set of rational responses to external circumstances but as a near-reflexive manifestation of his group affiliation, has come to dominate the American political process.

A quarter-century ago, identity-based campaigning was far less common, in part because in their internal composition the two major political parties were not so ideologically consistent as they are today. In 1980 it was possible—just—to be a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican.

But the change in the political landscape goes deeper than that. Today, a voter’s decision to support one candidate over another may well have little to do with that candidate’s positions on specific issues. It is, rather, an ideological fashion statement, a declaration that one is a certain kind of person, whose tastes on a wide variety of cultural matters can be reliably inferred from his political preferences—and vice-versa. “If you drive a Volvo and do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat,” said Ken Mehlman, who managed President Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign. “If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you’re voting for Bush.”

The now-familiar phrases “latte liberal” and “NASCAR conservative” are expressions of this development. So is the widely read satirical web site stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, whose authors catalogue the cultural preferences of urban white liberals:

[W]hen white people have a nice new car such as a Prius or an Audi station wagon, the fear of losing resale value prevents them from applying more than one sticker. Therefore that one sticker must properly capture the essence of the car and the political views of the driver. The safest and most accepted choice for a sticker is always one that supports a Democratic presidential candidate (Ralph Nader is an acceptable substitute). As of February 2008, white law requires an Obama ’08 bumper sticker to be placed on the back of every Prius.

The prevalence of such cultural markers is no laughing matter, however, to the postmodern American presidential candidate for whom—to paraphrase the radical slogan of the 1960’s—the political is cultural. To the contrary, it is his bread and butter. In order to put together a winning electoral coalition, he must first of all find out what his kind of people like—and where they live.

 

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In the wake of the 2000 election, commentators noted with surprise that the candidacies of George W. Bush and Al Gore had been regionally distinct in their appeal. Here is how I put it in a post-election essay for COMMENTARY:

Except for Alaska and New Hampshire, all 29 of the states won decisively by Bush are geographically contiguous, forming a vast L-shaped curve that sweeps down from the Rocky Mountains across the Great Plains, then through the Midwest and South. By contrast, except for California and Washington, most of the states won decisively by Gore are bunched tightly around the urban and industrial centers of the Northeast and the Great Lakes. . . . Gore won in urban and suburban America, Bush nearly everywhere else.¹

I went on to suggest, as others had before me, that the U.S. was splintering into “two geographically and culturally distinct units . . . that are competing for political control of the country as a whole.”² Moreover, the emergence of these two “nations,” I argued, was the result of a long-term “sorting process.” The “gradual segregation of the electoral map into two geographically discrete belts” was, as I saw it, the manifestation of a larger disintegration of America’s common culture.

That disintegration in turn had been accelerated by the rise of “information-age capitalism,” whose sophisticated marketing techniques were now being embraced by a new generation of media-savvy, demographically conscious politicians. The result:

Today, a young voter who opposes gun control, or supports public-school vouchers, will quickly see that there is no place for him in Democratic Nation, no matter how his parents may have voted in bygone days. So instead of choosing a party out of familial loyalty, as once was generally the case, he will end up choosing it out of cultural convictions—just as he is more likely to settle in a community where his next-door neighbor shares those convictions.

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To the extent that my 2001 essay was noticed by other commentators, it was mostly dismissed as an exercise in alarmism. Andrew Sullivan, among others, had already contended that the geographical divide between the parties was factitious: “What’s that blue [i.e., Democratic] sliver meandering up the Mississippi? Look at the bluish enclaves in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Check out the red inland counties of California.” A year later, David Brooks, while acknowledging that the divide was real, nonetheless claimed that the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 had “neutralized the political and cultural leaders who tend to exploit the differences” between the two nations. Thus, in Brooks’s view, “although there are some real differences between Red and Blue America, there is no fundamental conflict. There may be cracks, but there is no chasm.”

By 2004, though, the cracks were widening again, and the two-nations thesis had become a staple of political analysis. In a New York Times column titled “Age of Political Segregation,” Brooks acknowledged that younger “information-age workers” now tended “to cluster in places where people share their cultural, aesthetic, and, as it turns out, political values. . . . Once you’ve joined a side, the information age makes it easier for you to surround yourself with people like yourself.”

Brooks, it seems, had changed his mind after reading a series of articles published in 2004 by Bill Bishop, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. Drawing on the statistical analysis of Robert G. Cushing, a sociologist at the University of Texas, Bishop had concluded (in Brooks’s summary) that

the number of counties where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled over the past quarter-century. Whole regions are now solidly Democratic or Republican. Nearly three-quarters of us . . . live in counties that are becoming less [politically] competitive, and many of us find ourselves living in places that are overwhelmingly liberal or overwhelmingly conservative.

The consequence of this self-sorting, according to Brooks, was that “every place becomes more like itself, and the cultural divides between places become stark.”

Which brings us to this year’s race, in which, as Brooks has noted, the cultural divides have became so sharp that they have been reflected for the first time within the two major parties themselves. Thus, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton competed for the loyalty of a Democratic electorate that turned out to be as deeply split along cultural lines as was the larger voting public, with Obama appealing mainly to blacks and well-to-do urbanites, Clinton to older women and working-class voters. Obama, Brooks wrote in April,

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© 2008 Commentary Inc.