A Fractured America?

Red State, Blue State. So the media says. But is our country really that divided?

The Culture War

It's taken as gospel now: America is a deeply divided country. Red states and blue. We're locked in a bitter culture war, pitting secular liberals against religious conservatives, with the first casualty of combat being the moderate middle.

That's the irresistible media story that we hear over and over. So the real story may surprise you: For the majority of Americans, the culture war barely exists. Right and left may be flinging fists, but most of us are somewhere in the broad political center, content to sit out the brawl. Whether Republican or Democrat, more moderate voters have found common ground on even the thorniest issues, such as abortion and gay rights.

If this is news to you, there's a reason. Conservative and liberal activists are the ones who set the tone and define the rhetoric of our political parties. "They are the small percentage of Americans who turn out for primaries, who join organizations like Moveon.org, who show up at demonstrations like those for Terry Schiavo," says Morris Fiorina, a professor of political science at Stanford. "And they make headlines because the media loves stories about conflict. These activists are important in politics. But they are also unrepresentative."

Since vocal partisans have so much influence, it makes sense that we put them under a microscope. And it is why we followed closely an experiment set up by the Discovery Channel: What would we learn if two families, one very red, the other very blue, swapped lives for a while? The documentary that resulted -- and airs on November 17 -- is strong confirmation that ardent conservatives and liberals do view the world very differently.

The program is just as valuable, though, for what it sets in stark relief: the centrist majority you won't see on the screen.

Partisan Turf
Topanga, California, a community of 5,400 nestled in the Santa Monica Mountains just west of Hollywood, is the kind of place where conscientious liberals eschew gas-guzzling SUVs, buy organic foods, and attend lectures on social justice. No surprise that Topanga voters battered George W. Bush in their 2004 vote, going 76% for John Kerry.

No surprise, either, that James and Rebecca Catterall found Topanga to be a congenial home for themselves and their three children: Lisa, 32, Hannah, 21, and Grady, 18. James, an education professor at UCLA, is committed to social and political causes, but Rebecca is more of an activist. A secondary school history teacher, she worked on the Kerry campaign and is a devoted member of the Topanga Democratic Club. In accepting the offer to move into a red state home, Rebecca thought of it as "our blue mission to promote liberalism."

Clinton, Louisiana, is an even smaller community than Topanga, located some 30 miles north of Baton Rouge. Steve Cambre lives there with his wife, Anita, and their 14-year-old daughter, Madelyn, and has a business servicing office equipment. Their friends and neighbors in Clinton tend to hold strongly conservative views, but, as a rule, they don't go "walking around wanting to talk about politics," says Anita. Steve, meanwhile, is passionate about policy issues: He devours books by such authors as Newt Gingrich and Laura Ingraham, regularly reads conservative journals, and never shies away from a political debate.

An Alien World

When the Catteralls and Cambres agreed to switch homes for ten days, they shared the same concern: Would they get a cold shoulder from their new neighbors? In fact, they were warmly received. But in no time, both families felt like they had entered an alien world.

Faith Factor
The Catteralls came to a southern town of 2,000 people that has no fewer than 30 places of worship. Rebecca quickly realized "how front and center religion is to many people in this area." The Catteralls were even more struck by overt displays of religious faith, such as a food trailer at a town festival that was covered with Bible verses. According to James, his daughter Hannah -- who attended a study group at Faith Presbyterian Church -- was put off by "the One and only One Way beliefs of fundamentalists."

For his part, James was troubled by an "uncritical acceptance" of government policies and saw a "scary" parallel between that stance and the unquestioning religious faith he encountered.

Steve Cambre, a devout Catholic, was bothered that religious faith was not more in evidence in Topanga. "Religion is our guidepost," he says. "[In Topanga] I was struck by the lack of any religious grounding."

When he spoke to local residents about religion, "some of them would say they were religious but none of them would say they attend church regularly. The proof is in the pudding." And that's in keeping, he thinks, with a red/blue divide where faith and politics intersect. "For the most part, the views of conservatives are based in the morality of religion," Steve said.

These reactions are consistent with the big political chasm between the deeply religious and the more secular. But among all Americans who say they are believers, there is a much more even split. After all, 90% of us profess to believe in God, yet the last two Presidential elections have been extremely close. So the votes of "religious" Americans, defined as those with a firm belief in God, are dividing more narrowly than we sometimes think.

Look at the evidence. White evangelicals went strongly for Bush -- 78% to 21% -- while people professing no religious belief went for Kerry, 67% to 31%. That's a real divide. But once you go beyond these groups you find the gap closes sharply.

Among all those who attend religious services a few times a year, Kerry won more votes than Bush; the two candidates were tied among those who attend a few times a month; and Bush won when it came to once-a-week churchgoers. Most Americans of faith aren't at war over religion. The huge partisan gap is between fundamentalists and the nonreligious. The poles, not the center.

Abortion Truce?
So if faith is not necessarily as polarizing as portrayed, what explains the bitter conflicts over moral issues like abortion and gay rights?

Everyone has heard the heated arguments on abortion, which were on display when the Cambres attended a July 4th picnic in Topanga. Anita Cambre cringed when one person in the group said firmly, "It's a woman's choice to do what she wants to with her own body." The three women talking to Anita looked equally appalled when she said that teaching abstinence was the solution. It dissolved into a flurry of heated words: "What about in cases of rape and incest?" "Do you know how it feels to lose a child?" "These kids are having ten babies and they aren't taking care of them."

The Issues

"It shocked me that they were saying abortion is okay," Anita said later. "One woman there had a child and I said to her, 'Did you have an ultrasound? Didn't you see the heartbeat? Didn't you see that was a child?' "

As it happens, abortion barely came up in the Catteralls' conversations with the residents of Clinton. But Rebecca Catterall would have had a ready answer. "Eliminating access to abortion won't eliminate unwanted pregnancies. Whose daughter, friend, or sister will be the first to die or become maimed from a back-alley abortion?"

Both sides were eloquent surrogates for the abortion activists who have enormous influence within the two political parties. For some of those people in the pro-choice camp, any restrictions on a woman's control over her own body is an assault on her personal freedom -- and Democrats running for national office had better get on-board with them. For pro-lifers at the opposite end of the spectrum, abortion under any circumstances is murder and must be made illegal -- and good luck to the Republican candidate who begs to differ.

It's a debate with no room for compromise, we're told. And today's political climate may make it so. But a lot of Americans seem to wish it were otherwise.

There's a reason that Bill Clinton came up with the ultra-nuanced line that he wanted to make abortions "safe, legal and rare." Personal convictions aside, he was a master at reading the public mood. And on abortion, the majority of Americans are not wholly comfortable with the activist positions.

Consider that when delegates to the 2004 Republican and Democratic national conventions -- a fine definition of activists -- were asked in a New York Times/CBS News survey if abortion should be "generally available," their replies showed a gaping divide of 62 percentage points; when the same question was put to everyday people who merely identify themselves as Republican and Democratic voters, the gap shrank by half (with Democrats, in particular, separating themselves from their party's delegates). Polls show that a majority of Americans feel that abortion should remain legal, but only under certain circumstances. Clear majorities are pro-choice if the pregnancy results from rape, if the woman's life is endangered, or if it's determined within the first three months of pregnancy that the child would be born with a life-threatening illness. Yet majorities are against abortion once the woman is in her third trimester of pregnancy (unless her life is at risk or the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest), when abortion is a tool for gender selection, or when it's based on personal inconvenience, such as a married couple not wanting more children.

Despite this consensus, numerous politicians on Capitol Hill are following the dictates of their party's activists and interest groups, fearing they'll otherwise be targeted for extinction. In other words, the national debate over abortion is being framed by absolutists, while most Americans have congregated in the middle.

Civil on Unions
Gay rights ignited nearly as much divisive rhetoric as abortion during the 2004 campaign. On that topic, however, there was more conciliation than controversy in Topanga and Clinton.

On gay issues, Anita Cambre says her Topanga neighbors seemed "really surprised" to discover that she thinks gays should have the right to marry. "My mother has quite a few friends who are gay," Anita says, "and I was raised with an open mind about it." She acknowledges that she and Steve have "different views" on gay marriage. In fact, Steve says, "I'm against it. It would cheapen the institution of marriage and open a Pandora's box." He's in step with the majority, as more than half of Americans oppose gay marriage.

The New Silent Majority

But if the blue state expectation is that red staters are homophobic, if not overtly anti-gay, the Cambres gave that bias a jolt.

While Steve opposes gay marriage, he's "okay with civil unions." And he feels strongly that gays should not be discriminated against. "Everybody should be treated equally," he says. "What they do in their private life is their own business." Anita adds that, in their tolerant attitude toward gays, "maybe Steve and I are the odd men out in the South."

Not really, according to Gallup polling. Even in the socially conservative South, four in ten people surveyed thought homosexual relations should be legal. And nationwide, nearly nine in ten say homosexuals should have equal job opportunities.

The Catteralls were relieved to find more than just acceptance of their gay daughter and her partner, who came to Clinton on a three-day visit. "Lisa and Tina didn't know what to expect," says James, "but everyone treated them warmly right from the start. And there were hugs at the end when they left."

Looking at recent national polling, more Americans say gay relations should be legal than illegal (by 49% to 44%), with younger people especially accepting of these relationships. What about those activist delegates at the 2004 political conventions? Asked if gay couples should be denied legal recognition, there was a large gap -- 44 percentage points -- between their responses.

That tells you who gay and anti-gay activists are speaking to when they describe a nation in the grip of either cruel bigots or culture-wrecking perverts: the fellow activists who constitute the political "base." As for the rest of the country, Morris Fiorina has concluded that, even when it comes to gay marriage and civil unions, relatively few Americans "have any wish for a vitriolic conflict over the issue."

The Cambres and Catteralls got into plenty more discussions that highlighted splits between conservatives and liberals. The Iraq war was high on the agenda, as were debates over tax cuts and gun control. But those are the sorts of policy disputes we've had since the country's founding. It's a stretch for anyone to claim that matters of war and peace, or taxation, or gun rights are components of a newly erupted "culture war."

Liberals and conservatives do differ significantly on any number of issues. But as a nation, we're still more bound together than torn apart. And the centrist core might well grow larger, according to William Frey, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic trends. "If you look at which areas of the country are losing residents and which ones are attracting them, you'll see that people from red and blue states are blending together in more and more communities. Over time, this could moderate the politics in some of the more partisan places."

So the sexy story may be that there's an all-out war between red and blue, but the bigger news is about the forgotten middle. These centrists lack power and influence, but they've got the numbers. Put another way, America has spawned a new silent majority.