Poll Showing Culture War Used To Deny Culture War
This is most peculiar. Yesterday saw the release by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press of a national survey of Americans’ views on “hot-button” social issues.
According to the Pew researchers, the results show “a blend of pragmatism and principle” and that “Americans cannot be easily characterized as conservative or liberal on today’s most pressing social questions.” Both the report itself and news coverage of it argue that the results demonstrate that there is no Culture War.
“On none of the five issues,” says the report, “does more than 56% of the public line up on one side of the question or the other.”
Which means on the issues surveyed, America generally is split right down the middle. That divide, combined with the fact that many of the results display a staggering lack of rationality on the part of a significant portion of the population (56% in opposition to marriage equality and 52% in opposition even to adoption by homosexuals, for example), in fact seems to me to be a description of a Culture War.
What the report seems to argue is that because many individual Americans manage to hold both liberal views on some issues and conservative views on other issues, we don’t necessarily have a mass Liberal army facing off with a mass Conservative army — and therefore we have no Culture War.
That seems, to me, a somewhat limited conception of the Culture War. That war is not simply partisan politics between Left and Right operating under an assumed name. Rather, the Culture War is about an open and thoughtful rationality versus a closed-minded and reactionary demagoguery.
Ultimately, it doesn’t even matter how many Americans subscribe to anti-rational beliefs and seek to impose them upon everyone else. As long as some Americans (especially if half of them) do so, and as long as they have political leadership which shares their views, or at least exploits them for their own purposes, than the Culture War is very much real.