A divided nation votes

Lawrence Powell World Watch

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." - Abraham Lincoln

As IT prepares to vote this Tuesday, the 'United' States finds itself more divided ideologically than at any time since the Civil War. So it's eerily appropriate that the nation's first black president, Barack Obama, has, on a number of occasions, cited Abraham Lincoln as the role model for his attempts to orchestrate peace among the factions in modern America's bitter 'culture wars'.

There is also an eerie resemblance between the red state-vs-blue state electoral map of this season, and the slave state-vs-free state map of 150 years ago - with the polar opposition of a reactionary South and a progressive North having changed very little in all that time.

You would think that a natural disaster like Sandy, plunging the eastern seaboard into chaos, would bring the nation together - shunting aside these intense cultural differences. But there was little sign of that last week - aside from Chris Christie's backslapping of President Obama. All indications are that leading into Tuesday's election, the country remains deeply divided along ideological, regional, racial, gender, class, and generational lines. The unmistakable impression one gets is of a 'disunited states' (as John Rapley called it in his column last Monday), which is fragmenting along all of those cleavages at once - a nation whose former democratic consensus is now in the process of breaking apart.

THE REGIONAL DIVIDE

But is there actually any evidence of this 'fragmentation', as revealed in polls leading into the 2012 election? Unfortunately, yes … plenty. Though most polls show Obama's and Romney's share of the 2012 vote to be about equal nationally, voter support for the two candidates differs radically by region of the country. In particular, Romney is preferred over Obama by double-digit margins in most of the old South (Louisiana +23, Arkansas +27, Mississippi +18, Tennessee +25, Oklahoma +26, Texas +17, Kentucky +14, Georgia +12).

The opposite holds true in the old Northeastern states, where Obama is consistently ahead by lopsided margins in Massachusetts (+22), New York (+26), Vermont (+37), Maryland (+21), Rhode Island (+25), Maine (+15), New Jersey (+12), and Connecticut (+11). Surely, this is no historical accident. Somehow the ghosts of ugly Civil War divisions continue to haunt the US political culture, to this day.

THE RACIAL DIVIDE

In addition to region, there are also lingering divisions among Americans according to race - that have stubbornly persisted long after the hard-fought Civil War and civil-rights battles were supposedly 'won'. These voting patterns are extremely skewed in the 2012 election. Romney and the Republicans are obviously - and one suspects intentionally - attracting disproportionate 'reactionary' support from angry white voters, in an attempt to overtake Obama. Fifty-nine per cent of whites intend to vote for Romney, compared with just five per cent of blacks, and 25 per cent of Hispanics.

Obama has a correspondingly commanding lead among blacks and other 'non-white' ethnic minorities - with 90 per cent of blacks and 69 per cent of Hispanics intending to vote for him next Tuesday, compared with only 37 per cent of whites.

If the aversion to Obama's presidency were simply a matter of Americans not liking his policies, or of poor governance - as is usually claimed by Republicans - one would not expect to see such large ethnic discrepancies in support, with the fiercest opposition to him curiously originating from the South. These aggregate figures do not lie.

THE CLASS DIVIDE

At least some of this divide might be attributable to income and class differences since, on average, American whites continue to have higher incomes and class status than non-whites. Thus we see that support for Romney among persons with annual incomes above US$90,000 is 52 per cent, compared to 44 per cent for Obama within that income bracket. Conversely, Obama gets 56 per cent of those with incomes below US$36,000, to only 38 per cent for Romney.

THE GENDER DIVIDE

But in an increasingly fractured America, these widening divisions extend even beyond region, race, and class. There's a major political disagreement going on between the sexes as well, as to whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney would make a better president - a major 'gender gap' in political preferences. Obama is much more popular than Romney among women, by about 10 per cent. The flip side of this is that Romney is more popular than Obama among men, by about nine per cent.

If we combine the effects of race and gender, looking at the voting intentions of white men, the differences in relative support for Romney (63 per cent) and Obama (33 per cent) become even more pronounced, revealing a very important dynamic in this election - the political impact of angry white males.

GENERATIONAL DIVIDE

And as if that were not enough, in addition to all this, there are emergent generational disagreements in this election as well. If we compare the youngest and oldest voting groups, it's clear that Obama appeals much more to the former (59 per cent), and Romney to the latter (56 per cent). This new 'generation gap' rivals in strength the one that occurred during the 1960s (between 'Archie Bunker' and 'Meathead' hippie types, for those old enough to remember).

IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE

Finally, there is the increasingly vicious 'ideology gap' that has festered over the last several decades. This is perhaps the most divisive cleavage of all. For some time now, American 'liberals' like Obama and 'conservatives' like Romney have been living in separate, self-enclosed reality worlds, each supported by their own preferred mass-media outlets - incessantly talking past each other, without communicating or compromising in pursuit of the common good.

On the political right, this ideological divide has been worsened by the rise of radical, antiliberal talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, thinly disguised propaganda networks like Fox News, the rise of Tea Party anti-government activism, and a 'no' approach to legislative compromise in the US Congress - which intentionally blocks reform and stalls progress, effectively paralysing the government.

The result of all this has been severe deadlock between Congress and the president, and more and more hateful relations between liberal- and conservative-minded citizens. This severe polarisation in support patterns for Obama and Romney is evident in this latest Gallup poll - attesting to the increasingly separate symbolic universes in which they live and think. Fully 80 per cent of self-described 'liberals' intend to vote for Obama; 78 per cent of conservatives will vote for Romney. There is not much room for compromise in such figures.

Taken together, these multiple social divisions, and the sense of a society coming apart at the seams, keep reminding me of the lyrics to a sad, meandering blues tune that Roberta Flack recorded many years ago, during a similar time of deep cultural distress. As it did then, her song captures the widening social divisions that are occurring today in America:

Tryin' times, is what the world is talkin' about,

You got confusion, all over the land.

Mother against daughter, father against son,

The whole thing, is gettin' out of hand ... .

I can't understand it, from my point of view,

Somebody said do unto others

As you would have them do unto you

Then maybe folks wouldn't have to suffer,

If there was more love for your brother,

But these are tryin' times, tryin' times ... .

Lawrence Alfred Powell is honorary research fellow at the Centre of Methods and Policy Application in the Social Sciences at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the former polling director for the Centre for Leadership and Governance at UWI, Mona. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and lapowell.auckland@ymail.com.