America is more complex, obviously. But I think it's fair to say that there are two poles that define our politics, and every election cycle we find that we're split rather evenly between them. Call these poles Republican and Democrat or Conservative and Liberal, Reactionary and Progressive, or Red and Blue. They are ways of describing the different levels of intensity that define this fundamental split between left and right.
Blue America in the eyes of traditionalist Reds is effete and morally corrupt in its personal values and weak when it comes to confronting outside threats. Blue America at its best, in Red America’s eyes, is childishly naive about how things work in the “real world” and absurdly simplistic and soft-minded in its clueless jabbering about world peace and international cooperation. And Reds see Blues at their worst in their being morally weak relativists and ditherers who don’t have the rock-solid values that will help them to brace against the storm.
Blue America, of course, does not see itself the way Red America sees it. Most Blues see themselves as open to complexity and diversity, as curious cosmopolitans, interested in ideas, as tolerant, compassionate, idealistic, as change and future-oriented, and as having global vision. And while centrist Blues, whose values are still very much shaped by their religious heritage, don't like being painted with the same brush as the extremist elements among them, at the same time they have to admit that the secular left has had a significant influence in shaping the Democratic Party’s agenda in ways they don’t feel completely comfortable with.
But Blues, whether secularist or religious, see Reds on the cultural right as morally rigid, sanctimonious, intolerant, fearful and security obsessed, and as parochial, hate-filled, anti-intellectuals. And they see corporate and elite-class Reds in the country-club set as soul-less, amoral, disloyal, greedy, hypocritical and arrogant. Reds, to be sure, don’t see themselves that way. They see themselves as having character and moral clarity, of being plain-spoken straight shooters who know what they stand for and stand strong when the going gets tough.
They see themselves as the patriotic backbone and the moral ballast that sustains what remains of the American spirit, and when they look at Blues they see hardly anything that is in their minds recognizably American. Blues are gays and feminists, hippies, rock stars and movie stars, pornographers, socialists, left-wing secularists, and they feel that these people, who don’t really understand what America is about, are taking the country away from them.
So what we have here is a deadlock between two competing and very different imaginations about what it means to be an American. The Red America, based on a fairly clear and simple set of values derived from traditional norms passed down from generation to generation. And a Blue America, which is open-ended, diverse, and universalistic.
My own view is that Blue America, because of its embrace of diversity and a multilateral global vision, is in a better position to deal with the complex realities the nation will face in the 21st Century. I see the mind of Red America as still stuck in the 19th Century. Nevertheless, Blue America has to find a way of making it easier for Red America to respect the Blues' more catholic and less tribal vision. I think that one of the most important ways that Blues can do that is in finding common ground in the religious and spiritual traditions that they both share. They have to make the case that those values and traditions should be a source of moral strength and vision to navigate in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing world rather than as a source of bricks to build a wall to block that world out.
This, of course, is not interesting at all for secularist blues. But we're moving into a post-secularist era, and their secularism will become increasingly irrelevant–a holdover from a time when enlightenment thinking and ideals were considered the "bees' knees", so to say. Nevertheless, I think that religious Blues who understand this have to make a similar case to the secularists to their left. They have to make the case that substantive progressive change in this country isn't going to happen unless the secular left recognizes the importance of religious values and traditions and how they can be an essential resource that needs to be retrieved if a progressive politics is to gain a broad consensus among mainstream Americans.
The first goal of such a politics, because of its urgency, should be to preserve the republic, the last remnants of which are withering away as the country trends toward corporate oligarchy. The bottom line is that Red and Blue Americans have to find a way to join forces to take their country back from Big Money which has no loyalties except to itself. This is a huge, huge problem. But we have drifted into it so unconsciously and comfortably that most Americans still don't recognize it for the problem that it is. And it's going to take more than electing Barack Obama to solve it. If anything, he's part of the problem, not its solution.
Is it possible to have a culturally purple America that is radically blue when it comes to distribution of power and wealth?
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