Originally Posted by KaiserD2

Don't get me wrong--I'm as eager for the crisis as any of you, and probably more than some. I don't want four more years of going nowhere. But I was depressed after Saturday night's debates because no one wanted to say anything substantive if they could possibly avoid it.

I took something slightly different from the NH debates the other night.

Mostly I felt I was witnessing the implosion of the Repubs. Nearly all exhibited poor debate manners, many words were spent on sniping and personal attacks on each other and, as you say, little of substance was said. It seemed the discussion went, many times, back to who was/wasnt in support of GWB's current policies. In essence, they reflect the fractures in the GOP: a party afraid to go in any direction, because all directions mean inviting fractures in a rigid base.

For the Dems, I saw the "agents of change" side up (if only temporary) against the powers of 3T stasis. Change is the catch phrase for 2008 now, and it didn't come from the GOP.

I'm not suprised that nobody articulated full positions. I wouldn't expect them to at this still very early stage in the process. I really feel Obama is playing his cards close to his chest. When it comes down to the finish policy positions and lots of planks will be pulled out and put in place. To do so too early is to give your opponents (in-party and GOP) too much time to draw up defenses and counter plans.

Nor is there any problem so desperately crying out for a solution that it will force all Washington to get its act together.

I think there is. It's the economy. It's under way, it'll get worse over the spring and summer. It has tenticles that reach into all other problems from Iraq to the environment. "its the economy.......still"

Barack is obviously very intelligent and charismatic. I like the things he has said on foreign policy--particularly about talking to enemies--very much. The Democrats are ready for him. I don't know whether the country is or not. We'll know a lot more tonight, but we won't know anything for sure until November.

Yes on all counts. Even if Obama fails in his bid for POTUS, he serves a critical role in kicking the gears in place.

This is an interesting essay in which the election of 2000 is compared to 2008. One thing I agree with is that the political landscape is unrecognizable from the one in 2000. Looking back, this decade was largely spent in increasing political and social turmoil and change. A lot has happened in public life since the 9/11 event.

Voters showing a darker mood than in 2000 race


By Kevin Sack


Thursday, January 24, 2008


KANSAS CITY, Missouri: Whatever their ideological differences this election year, Americans seem able to agree on one thing: the political landscape being crisscrossed by the 2008 candidates is barely recognizable as the one traveled by George W. Bush and Al Gore a mere eight years ago.
Obviously, Sept. 11 and its aftermath have changed the country in countless and irretrievable ways. But even beyond the emergence of war and national security as pre-eminent concerns, there has been a profound reordering of domestic priorities, a darkening of the country's mood and, in the eyes of many, a fraying of America's very sense of itself.

While not universal, that tone pervaded dozens of interviews conducted over the last week with Americans of all political stripes in 8 of the 24 states that hold primaries or caucuses on Feb. 5, as well as with historians, elected officials, political strategists and poll takers. As the candidates fan out to New York and California and here to the heartland, they are confronting an electorate that is deeply unsettled about the United States' place in the world and its ability to control its own destiny.

Since World War II, the assumption of American hegemony has never been much in doubt. That it now is, at least for some people, has given this campaign a sense of urgency that was not always felt in 2000, despite the dramatic outcome of that race.

Several writers and historians remarked on the psychological impact of such a jarring end to the Pax Americana, just as it seemed that victory in the cold war might usher in prolonged prosperity and relative peace (save the occasional mop-up operation). Its confluence with an era of unparalleled technological innovation had only heightened the nation's sense of post-millennial possibility.

Now, Americans feel a loss of autonomy, in their own lives and in the nation. Their politics are driven by the powerlessness they feel to control their financial well-being, their safety, their environment, their health and the country's borders. They question whether each generation will continue to ascend the economic ladder. That the political system seems so impotent only deepens their frustration and their insistence on results.
As she considers this campaign, Susan Powell, a 47-year-old training consultant who lives in a Kansas City suburb, said that what she feels is not so much hopelessness as doom.

"I know plenty of people who are doing worse than they were," Powell said, "and nobody's helping them out. People's incomes are not keeping pace with inflation. People can't afford their homes. People in their 30s and 40s, middle-income, and they don't have jobs they can count on or access to health care. How can we say that we're the greatest country on earth and essentially have the walking wounded?"

Carter Eskew, a top strategist for Gore in 2000, recalled the factors that drove public opinion then � like a modest increase in fuel prices and the bursting of the technology stock bubble � as "na�vely quaint by today's standards." His Republican counterpart, Mark McKinnon, who advised Bush in 2000 and now works for Senator John McCain, said the electorate saw this campaign as far more consequential. "It feels like we're collectively more mature, or collectively more evolved," McKinnon said.

The change in tone came through in interviews in coffee bars, barbecue joints and shopping malls as people vented about unaffordable health premiums, porous international borders, freakish weather, government eavesdropping, Chinese imports and customer service calls that are answered in India.

Like many of those interviewed, Robert Jennings, a 45-year-old Kansas City landlord who considers himself politically independent, said he thought the stakes were higher than in 2000, when the country last chose new leadership after an eight-year incumbency. Two years ago, after the adjustable-rate mortgage on his apartment building kicked in, Jennings had to take an hourly job for the first time in a decade, at the Home Depot. It also provided him with his only health insurance since college.

"I used to be master of my universe," he said from a bar stool at McCoy's Public House. "Now I work for this soul-less corporation. I used to make the rules. Now I have to follow them."

Jennings also does not like the war in Iraq, or its impact on the country's international standing. "Most of the times I go overseas I say I'm Canadian," he said. "I just get a better response."

Public opinion polling is also detecting an erosion of the country's self- image. A CBS News/ New York Times poll taken this month found that 75 percent of respondents thought the country had "pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track," up from 44 percent in May 2000.

Not surprisingly, that judgment varies by political affiliation. But even 42 percent of Republicans agreed, not far shy of the 52 percent who said so in 1999, in the twilight of an eight-year Democratic presidency.

That year, President Bill Clinton hailed the economic momentum of the 1990s by declaring that "the state of our union is the strongest it has ever been."

"Never before," he said in that speech, "has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats."

This year's dissatisfaction seems to have less to do with any fundamental shift in the nation's ideological and partisan leanings than with its broadening displeasure with the Bush administration's handling of the war and the economy. In CBS News/New York Times polls taken in February 2000 and January this year, the percentages of respondents who aligned themselves with a given party or ideology were almost precisely the same.
It is not yet clear how the discontent may be affecting the primary races.

The Republican race remains a muddle, and the one Democratic candidate who has made the most populist appeal to change the nation's direction � former Senator John Edwards � remains a distant third. So far, at least, his message has not caught on in a race that has been marked more by the historic nature of the campaigns run by Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Nonetheless, any of the Democrats would represent a sharp break with the policies of the last eight years, and polls suggest that the Democrats began this year with a political advantage they could not have imagined eight years ago. Asked a year before the 2000 election which party's candidate they were likely to support, respondents were evenly divided. Asked the same question this month, they favored the Democrats by 18 percentage points. Much of the shift is thought to have been among independents.

That swing, fueled by antiwar sentiment, helped the Democrats win control of Congress in 2006. In some states, there is evidence of its impact well down the ballot. In Denver's once reliably Republican suburbs, for instance, Democratic voter registration has grown since 2000 at 10 times the rate of Republican registration.

John Brackney, president of the South Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce, and a former commissioner in suburban Arapahoe County, recalled being mocked when he wore one of his old campaign shirts to the neighborhood pool last summer. "Oh, you're wearing a Republican shirt," someone said.
"That wouldn't have happened eight years ago," Brackney observed.

The issues have also shifted. Of the top eight political concerns found in a CBS News/New York Times poll this month, only three were on the list eight years ago. Terrorism, immigration, the environment and fuel prices did not register a blip back then. (The other top concern identified in recent polling was the Iraq war.)

In the 2000 campaign, it was possible for Bush to deride Gore's environmentalism to considerable effect. Eight years later, Gore is a Nobel laureate, and coiled light bulbs and hybrid cars are status symbols.
"Before, I didn't feel personally guilty if I left a light on," said Meg Campbell, director of a charter high school in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in Boston. "It just wasn't in the drinking water back then. Now it's almost a religion."

Since the campaign of 2000, the United States has lost 4,400 men and women in wars overseas, and nearly 3,000 people in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Hispanics have become the country's largest minority, accounting for nearly half of annual population growth. Gasoline prices have doubled, and the home foreclosure rate has increased by 55 percent.

The proportion of Americans without health insurance, which was declining at decade's end, has grown by 2 percentage points. Both the unemployment and poverty rates are a percentage point higher. War spending has helped convert a $236 billion U.S. government budget surplus into a $163 billion deficit (reduced from $413 billion in 2004).

Some of those interviewed, like Raymond Dixon, a Kansas City computer programmer, said they were confident their children would not enjoy the same standard of living they had, calling it a reversal of the American dream. Several said the force of such rapid change, reinforced by the foreboding symbolism of airport security lines and orange alerts, had left the country gimlet-eyed, and wary.

"There was something out there we got blindsided by," said Emily Kemp, a 30-year-old investment worker in Boston who was an Army officer until 2004. "At least now we know, and we are actively attempting to thwart that threat."

Certainly, some Americans remain bullish. Charles Spencer, a 71-year-old investment adviser who lives in the Kansas City suburbs, said he was "unabashedly optimistic" about the future facing his four grandchildren. Technology and the free market will provide them with unlimited opportunity, Spencer said, so long as they are willing to relocate and retrain.

But the more common theme, that of innocence lost, was voiced by Erwin L. Epple, 54, and his wife, Fumiyo, 64, who were in Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, and saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon. "We said that day that our grandchildren will grow up in a different world, assuming the worst about people instead of the best," said Epple, who owns a pizza franchise in Knoxville, Tennessee
Many of those interviewed remembered the emphasis placed in the 2000 campaign on restoring personal integrity to the Oval Office. Several volunteered that the focus of the current campaign should be on the rectitude of the country's role in the world.

"In 2000," said Philip Dupont, a Kansas City lawyer, "one of Bush's big platforms was that he'd restore honesty and integrity to the White House. Then he went out and attacked a sovereign nation that had done nothing to us."

As issues like health care, climate change and immigration have become more urgent, Americans seem less willing to dismiss failures of government and political polarization as business as usual. It feels more personal to them now, and they are demanding results.

Epple boiled with frustration as he vowed to vote for the candidate who convinces him that he or she is most able to solve problems. "I'm sick and tired of the party line and the platitudes," he said. "I'm hearing hope. I'm hearing trust. But I'm not hearing solutions."

Excellent contribution Mr. Reed!!!

Originally Posted by Skabungus

Excellent contribution Mr. Reed!!!

Thank you.

One way in which we will probably tell if we have turned the corner is if the proposed economic stimulus really works. If not, then we are undoubedtly past the 4T threshold. I have been one of the doubting Thomases on this board in that regard. I feel that as long as the continued upscaling of damn near everything continues at the expense of the lower 98 percent, then we are still 3T. If the city of Chicago is any indication of the rest of the nation, then we are definitely not there yet. Much of the city within two miles of the Loop is now unaffordable to most of the lower 98.

Originally Posted by Brian Beecher

One way in which we will probably tell if we have turned the corner is if the proposed economic stimulus really works. If not, then we are undoubedtly past the 4T threshold. I have been one of the doubting Thomases on this board in that regard. I feel that as long as the continued upscaling of damn near everything continues at the expense of the lower 98 percent, then we are still 3T. If the city of Chicago is any indication of the rest of the nation, then we are definitely not there yet. Much of the city within two miles of the Loop is now unaffordable to most of the lower 98.

The cost of living in this sleepy little beach town of around 60,000 in population from what I've heard, ranks up there at the top with the likes of places like Manhattan and San Francisco. In fact, the price of gas is usually about 5 to 10 cents higher than it is in Oakland!

With the last three realistic choices for president in 2008 being Senators Clinton, McCain and Obama, the string of 'governor first' presidents has been interupted. This is a nationalized election, the idea that executive experence at the state level is needed first is out. The Senators are going to have an opportunity early in this 4T to set a different tone. #44 is guarenteed to have a different resume from the presidents of the 3T.

Originally Posted by stab1969

The cost of living in this sleepy little beach town of around 60,000 in population from what I've heard, ranks up there at the top with the likes of places like Manhattan and San Francisco. In fact, the price of gas is usually about 5 to 10 cents higher than it is in Oakland!

Are we talking about Santa Cruz, Calif. by any chance?

Originally Posted by Roadbldr '59

Are we talking about Santa Cruz, Calif. by any chance?

heh... yep, that be the one... i guess i coulda just said that... it's kinda sad too, because when i first moved here, i assumed it would be at least a little cheaper, but no... In fact, it almost seemed like the NYC/SF comparisons was the talk of the town... that and all the Y2K hype going on at the time.

Originally Posted by Brian Beecher

One way in which we will probably tell if we have turned the corner is if the proposed economic stimulus really works.

The "economic stimulus" is 3T claptrap. It's nothing more than a rendition of the "lets hold our hands and buy a SUV" rubbish I heard a few years ago. Besides being an utter waste of time and money, it's not going to work. The problem in the US economy is too much spending and not enough "real" investing ( infrastructure, getting off of the oiil addiction,
etc. For the record, I ain't going to Walmart to buy anything with this "rebate". It's going straight to savings, one way ticket baby. I think a 4T would entail a transition from the live for today/shop til you drop to real svings and investment. (Future oriented) Then of course it's not going o work because it's bad policy. It does nothing to address all this debt that needs to be discharged. House prices must fall to be aligned with real wages, all carry trades much be unwound, and bad debt (subprime) must be written off, etc. before any real economic recovery can begin.

If not, then we are undoubedtly past the 4T threshold. I have been one of the doubting Thomases on this board in that regard. I feel that as long as the continued upscaling of damn near everything continues at the expense of the lower 98 percent, then we are still 3T. If the city of Chicago is any indication of the rest of the nation, then we are definitely not there yet. Much of the city within two miles of the Loop is now unaffordable to most of the lower 98.

As far as the above, I couldn't agree more. Good job.

This 62 year old Boomer believes that music can no longer change the world (at least relative to the 2T and 3T eras). I would have to say that the public mood and the generational alignment makes this so. During Boomer youth, Rock and Soul were world changing music styles as Boomers sought to inject spirit into technologically dominated society. But now, among Millies, technology has pretty much replaced music as a dominant agent for "changing the world".

Neil Young: Music no longer can change world

Singer says ‘it would be very naive to think that in this day and age’The Associated Press


updated 12:01 p.m. CT, Fri., Feb. 8, 2008

BERLIN - Neil Young has a pessimistic message: Music has lost its power to change the world.

The 62-year-old singer brought his new movie, "CSNY Deja Vu," to the Berlin film festival Friday. The film was shot during the 2006 Freedom of Speech tour by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

Young, who directed the movie under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, wasn't making any big claims about its effects.

"I think that the time when music could change the world is past," he told reporters. "I think it would be very naive to think that in this day and age."
Young added: "I think the world today is a different place, and that it's time for science and physics and spirituality to make a difference in this world and to try to save the planet."

"CSNY Deja Vu" intersperses footage from the tour, which featured performances from Young's "Living With War" album, with archive and television news material — and unfavorable reactions from critics.

"If we didn't do that, it would just feel like a bunch of old hippies up there saying what they thought — and who cares?" Young said.

Young said he called his fellow band members before the tour and told them: "This is all I'm going to do, I won't be doing anything else and I don't want to sing any ... pretty songs; we can only sing about war and politics and the human condition."

"The goal was to stimulate debate among people, and I hope that to some degree the film succeeds in doing that," he said.

"CSNY Deja Vu" is showing outside the main competition at the annual Berlin festival, which runs through Feb. 17.

Neil Young Still Doesn't Get It

This is a little rough still, but I need to head out for most of the day and wanted to get something posted. I think I'm getting my point across well enough, though it could be more eloquent and a little more developed. Consider it food for thought.

Neil Young . . . I love the man's music, and have much respect what he did back in the day, but he does not at all understand the current state of politics or culture. And that blindness has twice in the past 2 years caused him to grossly misrepresent the current state of youth activism and the roll that music in particular can play in driving change in our contemporary political environment. It's a shame.

Earlier this week, at the Berlin Film Festival, Neil Young was quoted as saying:

"I know that the time when music could change the world is past. I really doubt that a single song can make a difference. It is a reality," Young told reporters.
"I don't think the tour had any impact on voters."

The tour to which he was referring was his 2006 anti-Bush tour. A documentary of the tour debuted at the Film Festival this week.

As I said, this is the second such comment from Young in the last 2 years. The first came in 2006 when he said:

I was waiting for someone to come along, some young singer eighteen-to-twenty-two years old, to write these songs and stand up… I waited a long time. Then I decided that maybe the generation that has to do this is still the '60s generation."

There was a strong response from the Music/activist community in response to this first statement. Singer-songwriter Stephan Smith published a letteran excellent article in WireTap describing the work of organizations like Punk Voter and Music for America in organizing the live music community in 2004 and 2006 in the San Francisco Chronicle outlining the ways in which the corporate media severely limits the reach and career prospects of activist musicians. He followed that up with

Mark Ristaino of Music for America also posted his own response that hits a few important nails on the head:

Though "Living with War" may have been a potent protest album, the truth is that Neil's most recent release comes way too late, and the reasoning behind it is way off the mark. It’s time for older progressives everywhere to wake up and realize the truth. The Youth Movement is here. We’ve been here. And we don’t listen to our parents' protest music.

Many people like to wax poetic about the cultural movement that surrounded the music of the 60s, but the truth is that today’s young musicians are speaking out just as loudly and powerfully as the musicians of 30 years ago, despite attempts by big media to silence their voices. Musicians today understand that it takes more than singing a song to create real change. "Let's impeach the President" is a catchy chorus, but it's no stained blue dress, if you get my drift.

What Neil Young missed two years ago, and what he's missing still today, is that the media landscape and the culture itself have both radically changed since Crosby Stills Nash and Young first voiced their protest through music.
As Mark and Stephan Smith both pointed out, the media (radio, record companies, music television, etc) all actively discourage political viewpoints in music - particularly topical ones. As I've outlined in my article, Who Will Rock the vote in 2008?, back in 2003, when Music for America was just getting started, musicians wanted nothing to do with politics. They watched the Dixie Chicks get tarred and feathered and wanted no part in speaking out. They saw their own tarnished record of civic participation and recoiled from any chance at being labelled "hypocrite."

But somewhere along the way that changed, and in 2004 hundreds of artists - not just P. Diddy and Russel Simmons - took part in a civic and cultural movement to initiate change. They did this not through protest, as Neil Young would have it, but by encouraging participation in the political system. By registering young concert goers and activating their live music scenes at over 3,500 shows in 2004 alone.

But somehow, Neil Young missed that. I guess he didn't go to any of those shows. I guess that sort of engagement wasn't happening at his shows.
There's a reason for that, and it's simple but fundamental. Neil Young came of age, protested, and got famous in a broadcast media era, and that's how he thinks. Imagine one song ringing through the culture, igniting change where ever its melody could be heard. It's a nice image. And maybe Lennon or Buffalo Springfield, or some of those other folks from back in the Vietnam era did achieve such change through the power of a single song that reverberated through a unified, common youth culture.

It seems like a simplistic understanding to me. After all, 1968 wasn't just about protests. The kids that went "Clean for Gene" McCarthy actually organized and registered their peers and went to the polls. Ditto for McGovern's kids in the 1972 primary. Even back in "the 60s" changed happened both within and outside of the system.

Regardless, even granting Young that much, we're in a different cultural space now. Youth culture is not nearly as monolithic now as it was then. There are dozens of niches, and no one cultural artifact - a song, a movie, an internet video clip - will reach all those people. This is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. The end of the broadcast era means the death of the activism models of the past, but it's given rise to new ones as well. Young people are not just consumers of culture and news anymore, they are also producers, putting out their own music and art online, engaging in politics through social networking and the blogosphere - a whole new culture of (peer) production has emerged that is infinitely more rich and diverse than the broadcast culture that preceded it.

We need to find ways to get all of those cultures activated as Music for America and Punk Voter did in 2004, and as HeadCount does today. We need to find ways to make sure that these niche scenes produce dozens of songs calling for change, and that they register their fans to vote. We need to break out of the old mentality that thinks raising your voice in protest is enough. It's not enough, and it's not effective. If you want change, you have to work for it. You have to organize inside and outside of the system. Anything less is doomed to failure.

Along the way, music and culture continue to have a vital role to play. One song may not be able to change the world anymore, but hundreds and thousands of songs by as many artists, supported by fans that are smart and organized can. Neil Young should stop singing laments for activism of the past, and channel his anger and frustrations into aiding these new artists and activism models that are in part following in his footsteps.

February 11th, 2008

Interesting column by E.J. Dionne in this morning's Washington Post:

http://http://www.washingtonpost.com...l?nav=hcmodule


He compares the 1928 Presidential Election to 2004, and the current election to the transformative 1932 election. Discusses the end of that cycle of Culture Wars as well.

Originally Posted by JK1957

Interesting column by E.J. Dionne in this morning's Washington Post:

http://http://www.washingtonpost.com...l?nav=hcmodule


He compares the 1928 Presidential Election to 2004, and the current election to the transformative 1932 election. Discusses the end of that cycle of Culture Wars as well.

You beat me to the punch! I was going to post that, but I've been busy all day and didn't have a chance to hit the site until now. Boy, I could have used that extra hour!

Originally Posted by JK1957

Interesting column by E.J. Dionne in this morning's Washington Post:

http://http://www.washingtonpost.com...l?nav=hcmodule


He compares the 1928 Presidential Election to 2004, and the current election to the transformative 1932 election. Discusses the end of that cycle of Culture Wars as well.

Just as when the children of the Puritan Generation chafed at the overpowering and impractical religiosity of their parents, so it is today with the anti-intellectual, joyless, fanatical religiosity of Boomers. Boom religious fanatics could tow their kids to church, but once they lost authority over the kids, the new adults quite attending, or at least sought something else.

If people are to moralize, then at least let their moralizing suggest a better world -- not simply one more constrained and superstitious.

Originally Posted by JK1957

Interesting column by E.J. Dionne in this morning's Washington Post:

http://http://www.washingtonpost.com...l?nav=hcmodule


He compares the 1928 Presidential Election to 2004, and the current election to the transformative 1932 election. Discusses the end of that cycle of Culture Wars as well.

Yeah it sounds like an interesting read... if only the link worked .

Originally Posted by Roadbldr '59

Yeah it sounds like an interesting read... if only the link worked .

Here's the link: Dionne's Epitaph for the Religious Right

My bad - I thought I had catured that elusive link correctly - apparently not . Here is the full text of the column:

Culture Wars? How 2004.
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B01
If you were looking for a presidential election that revolved around religion and "moral values," you wouldn't start with President Bush's victory in 2004 -- nor, indeed, with any recent election. You'd go back to 1928. Now there was a culture war.
At that moment of great prosperity, the two big issues were whether the United States should continue its experiment with Prohibition and whether it should elect Al Smith, New York's Democratic governor, as the first Roman Catholic president. It wasn't even close. The "drys," who favored the ban on booze, overwhelmed the "wets," who wanted to be rid of it. And the Catholic Smith was clobbered by Republican Herbert Hoover, who carried several Southern, predominantly Protestant states that had been voting Democratic since the aftermath of the Civil War. "We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation," Hoover declared, and most Americans believed him.
Then, a little more than a year after Hoover's buoyant prediction, came Oct. 29, 1929. After the great stock market crash, the question of whether Americans could legally consume alcohol seemed rather less pressing. The controversies over Smith's Catholicism abated. By 1936, the year of Franklin D. Roosevelt's landslide election, the culture war was forgotten, replaced by a nonviolent class war against those whom FDR called "economic royalists."
Ancient history? Hardly. The lessons of that earlier age are eerily relevant to the current moment in American politics. When major crises intrude, culture wars can fade awfully quickly. They did so in 1936. There are many signs that they're fading again in 2008.
We are at the beginning of a new era in which large, secular problems related to war and peace, economics and the United States' standing in the world will displace culture and religion as the electorate's central concerns. Divisions on "values" questions will not disappear, but they will be far less important to voters and campaigns.
Just four years ago, we were arguing over whether Bush was reelected primarily because of his strong support from voters who told the exit pollsters that "moral values" had guided their decisions. We parsed the political preferences of those who attend religious services frequently and those who never go -- and found the former group rather staunchly Republican, the latter strongly Democratic. It was 1928 all over again. Culture and religion ruled.
In truth, Bush's victory rested both on 9/11 and on enthusiasm from religious voters. But what's most important is that 2004, like 1928, is destined to be the last in a long line of contests in which culture and religion proved central to the outcome.
This shift is already obvious from the results of the 2008 primaries. Focusing relentlessly on national security, Sen. John McCain has clinched the Republican nomination despite robust opposition from the party's cultural and religious conservatives.

On the Democratic side, cultural and religious questions have played almost no role in the battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. They have spoken instead about economics, health care and the war in Iraq. Strikingly, both have been intent on putting an end to religious divisions in the electorate and have sought to welcome the devout to the Democratic Party.
Obama has been explicit about the need to broker political peace between Democrats and believers. "If we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway," he said in an important speech at a 2006 meeting organized by the progressive evangelical Jim Wallis. "More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms." Clinton has also spoken movingly of the role of faith in public life. "I'm living by the Scripture that says we are all members of God's household," she told a Baptist convention in Atlanta in January.
In their efforts to push cultural issues aside, Obama and Clinton resemble no one so much as Roosevelt. He knew that maintaining a Democratic majority required overcoming the cultural divisions of the 1920s. And just as large events -- the Depression, the threats of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- helped him in his effort, so will the large questions of economic dislocation, the aftermath of the Iraq war, the continuing struggle in Afghanistan and concerns about long-term U.S. global influence allow Democrats to transcend the cultural battles of the recent past.
It is a human habit to assume that whatever defined the era we have just lived through will necessarily define the next. The rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s came as a surprise because most Americans had come to assume that the long, relatively secular political period that followed FDR's electoral revolution was inevitably the way things would be. We had forgotten how often religion proved decisive in the creation of new electoral alignments.
American history offers many examples. In his magisterial new history of the antebellum United States, "What Hath God Wrought," Daniel Walker Howe shows that religious divisions and the rise of evangelical Protestantism were defining characteristics of the party system built by the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. But the republic has also had moments in which religion was less important to public life, and it is easy to be blinded when we find ourselves at a turning point.
The last long secular era endured from 1932 to 1980. Presidents throughout that period continued to use religious language in their speeches, declared their devotion to God and invoked faith on behalf of the great causes they pursued. FDR saw Nazism as a "new German pagan religion" and insisted in 1942 that "the world is too small to provide adequate 'living room' for both Hitler and God." Dwight D. Eisenhower assailed "godless communism" that "strikes at the jugular vein of freedom." John F. Kennedy proclaimed in his 1961 inaugural address: "Here on Earth, God's work must truly be our own."
But Kennedy's line also signaled the distance between politics and specifically religious questions. His emphasis was on the work to be done here on Earth. In his famous speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, designed to reassure Protestants that his Catholicism would play no substantive role in his presidency, Kennedy said, "I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair." Religion was private, not public or political.
But the secular period that Kennedy spoke for ended with Ronald Reagan's election, the rise of the Moral Majority and the emergence of the Christian Coalition. If my theory is right, we will come to see this era of religious polarization as having lasted from 1980 to 2008. The era that is beginning will likely be more religious than the long post-FDR secular period. It's hard to imagine Obama, Clinton or any other Democrat giving a speech quite as relentlessly secular as Kennedy's Houston address. But compared with the period that is just ending, the new period will be more secular, more pluralistic and more focused on issues outside the cultural realm.
The era of the religious right is over. Even absent the rise of urgent new problems, Americans had already reached a point of exhaustion with a religious style of politics that was dogmatic, partisan and ideological.
That style reflected a spirit far too certain of itself and far too insistent on the moral depravity of its political adversaries. It had the perverse effect of narrowing the range of issues on which religious traditions would speak out and thinning our moral discourse. Precisely because I believe in a strong public role for faith, I would insist that it is a great sellout of those traditions to assert that religion has much to say about abortion and same-sex marriage but little to teach us about war and peace, social justice and the environment.
With the United States turning its attention again to very large, post-9/11 issues -- as our forebears did during the Depression, World War II and the Cold War -- we will certainly be asking for God's blessing and help. But the questions that will most engage us will be about survival and prosperity, not religion and culture.

Originally Posted by JK1957

With the United States turning its attention again to very large, post-9/11 issues -- as our forebears did during the Depression, World War II and the Cold War -- we will certainly be asking for God's blessing and help. But the questions that will most engage us will be about survival and prosperity, not religion and culture.

So he's basically called the Turning... with 9/11 as the Catalyst and the '08 Election as the Social Moment.

Guess we should stay tuned.

Originally Posted by JK1957

My bad - I thought I had catured that elusive link correctly - apparently not . Here is the full text of the column:

Culture Wars? How 2004.
By E.J. Dionne Jr.
Sunday, March 9, 2008; B01
If you were looking for a presidential election that revolved around religion and "moral values," you wouldn't start with President Bush's victory in 2004 -- nor, indeed, with any recent election. You'd go back to 1928. Now there was a culture war.
At that moment of great prosperity, the two big issues were whether the United States should continue its experiment with Prohibition and whether it should elect Al Smith, New York's Democratic governor, as the first Roman Catholic president. It wasn't even close. The "drys," who favored the ban on booze, overwhelmed the "wets," who wanted to be rid of it. And the Catholic Smith was clobbered by Republican Herbert Hoover, who carried several Southern, predominantly Protestant states that had been voting Democratic since the aftermath of the Civil War. "We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation," Hoover declared, and most Americans believed him.
Then, a little more than a year after Hoover's buoyant prediction, came Oct. 29, 1929. After the great stock market crash, the question of whether Americans could legally consume alcohol seemed rather less pressing. The controversies over Smith's Catholicism abated. By 1936, the year of Franklin D. Roosevelt's landslide election, the culture war was forgotten, replaced by a nonviolent class war against those whom FDR called "economic royalists."
Ancient history? Hardly. The lessons of that earlier age are eerily relevant to the current moment in American politics. When major crises intrude, culture wars can fade awfully quickly. They did so in 1936. There are many signs that they're fading again in 2008.
We are at the beginning of a new era in which large, secular problems related to war and peace, economics and the United States' standing in the world will displace culture and religion as the electorate's central concerns. Divisions on "values" questions will not disappear, but they will be far less important to voters and campaigns.
Just four years ago, we were arguing over whether Bush was reelected primarily because of his strong support from voters who told the exit pollsters that "moral values" had guided their decisions. We parsed the political preferences of those who attend religious services frequently and those who never go -- and found the former group rather staunchly Republican, the latter strongly Democratic. It was 1928 all over again. Culture and religion ruled.
In truth, Bush's victory rested both on 9/11 and on enthusiasm from religious voters. But what's most important is that 2004, like 1928, is destined to be the last in a long line of contests in which culture and religion proved central to the outcome.
This shift is already obvious from the results of the 2008 primaries. Focusing relentlessly on national security, Sen. John McCain has clinched the Republican nomination despite robust opposition from the party's cultural and religious conservatives.

On the Democratic side, cultural and religious questions have played almost no role in the battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. They have spoken instead about economics, health care and the war in Iraq. Strikingly, both have been intent on putting an end to religious divisions in the electorate and have sought to welcome the devout to the Democratic Party.
Obama has been explicit about the need to broker political peace between Democrats and believers. "If we don't reach out to evangelical Christians and other religious Americans and tell them what we stand for, then the Jerry Falwells and Pat Robertsons and Alan Keyeses will continue to hold sway," he said in an important speech at a 2006 meeting organized by the progressive evangelical Jim Wallis. "More fundamentally, the discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religion has often prevented us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms." Clinton has also spoken movingly of the role of faith in public life. "I'm living by the Scripture that says we are all members of God's household," she told a Baptist convention in Atlanta in January.
In their efforts to push cultural issues aside, Obama and Clinton resemble no one so much as Roosevelt. He knew that maintaining a Democratic majority required overcoming the cultural divisions of the 1920s. And just as large events -- the Depression, the threats of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan -- helped him in his effort, so will the large questions of economic dislocation, the aftermath of the Iraq war, the continuing struggle in Afghanistan and concerns about long-term U.S. global influence allow Democrats to transcend the cultural battles of the recent past.
It is a human habit to assume that whatever defined the era we have just lived through will necessarily define the next. The rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s came as a surprise because most Americans had come to assume that the long, relatively secular political period that followed FDR's electoral revolution was inevitably the way things would be. We had forgotten how often religion proved decisive in the creation of new electoral alignments.
American history offers many examples. In his magisterial new history of the antebellum United States, "What Hath God Wrought," Daniel Walker Howe shows that religious divisions and the rise of evangelical Protestantism were defining characteristics of the party system built by the Whigs and the Jacksonian Democrats. But the republic has also had moments in which religion was less important to public life, and it is easy to be blinded when we find ourselves at a turning point.
The last long secular era endured from 1932 to 1980. Presidents throughout that period continued to use religious language in their speeches, declared their devotion to God and invoked faith on behalf of the great causes they pursued. FDR saw Nazism as a "new German pagan religion" and insisted in 1942 that "the world is too small to provide adequate 'living room' for both Hitler and God." Dwight D. Eisenhower assailed "godless communism" that "strikes at the jugular vein of freedom." John F. Kennedy proclaimed in his 1961 inaugural address: "Here on Earth, God's work must truly be our own."
But Kennedy's line also signaled the distance between politics and specifically religious questions. His emphasis was on the work to be done here on Earth. In his famous speech before the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, designed to reassure Protestants that his Catholicism would play no substantive role in his presidency, Kennedy said, "I believe in a president whose views on religion are his own private affair." Religion was private, not public or political.
But the secular period that Kennedy spoke for ended with Ronald Reagan's election, the rise of the Moral Majority and the emergence of the Christian Coalition. If my theory is right, we will come to see this era of religious polarization as having lasted from 1980 to 2008. The era that is beginning will likely be more religious than the long post-FDR secular period. It's hard to imagine Obama, Clinton or any other Democrat giving a speech quite as relentlessly secular as Kennedy's Houston address. But compared with the period that is just ending, the new period will be more secular, more pluralistic and more focused on issues outside the cultural realm.
The era of the religious right is over. Even absent the rise of urgent new problems, Americans had already reached a point of exhaustion with a religious style of politics that was dogmatic, partisan and ideological.
That style reflected a spirit far too certain of itself and far too insistent on the moral depravity of its political adversaries. It had the perverse effect of narrowing the range of issues on which religious traditions would speak out and thinning our moral discourse. Precisely because I believe in a strong public role for faith, I would insist that it is a great sellout of those traditions to assert that religion has much to say about abortion and same-sex marriage but little to teach us about war and peace, social justice and the environment.
With the United States turning its attention again to very large, post-9/11 issues -- as our forebears did during the Depression, World War II and the Cold War -- we will certainly be asking for God's blessing and help. But the questions that will most engage us will be about survival and prosperity, not religion and culture.

I disagree that the secularism will not be as strong as during that era. The Netroots vanguard certainly appears very secular, as do the posters on the main blog/RSS news sites. As of now, Millennials are the most secular generation in American history.

Originally Posted by Roadbldr '59

So he's basically called the Turning... with 9/11 as the Catalyst and the '08 Election as the Social Moment.

Guess we should stay tuned.

Yes... One does get the impression that he might possibly be aware of The Theory.

Originally Posted by Mr. Reed

I disagree that the secularism will not be as strong as during that era. The Netroots vanguard certainly appears very secular, as do the posters on the main blog/RSS news sites. As of now, Millennials are the most secular generation in American history.

I of course would suggest a very long term centuries duration trend towards secular values. This trend might ripple with the cycles, but in the long term religion is not as central to cultures as before, say, gunpowder, steam engines and the printing press.

Originally Posted by Roadbldr '59

So he's basically called the Turning... with 9/11 as the Catalyst and the '08 Election as the Social Moment.

Guess we should stay tuned.

No question - I think Dionne says exactly so, and certainly has more than a passing understanding of the Theory. He essentially equates this year's election to 1932, although if 9/11 is the catalyst (which I agree with him), then this year is closer to 1936 on the continuum. Imagine if in '32, FDR was not the Democratic nominee, and Hoover won re-election - that was GWB in 2004 (this cycle's Hoover - or a meaner version of Coolidge). Of course, I don't think every 4T transpires exactly in sync with prior timelines - this one is taking longer to play out.

It is interesting to see the MSM referring more often - even if obliquely, to the theory of turnings.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Yes... One does get the impression that he might possibly be aware of The Theory.



I of course would suggest a very long term centuries duration trend towards secular values. This trend might ripple with the cycles, but in the long term religion is not as central to cultures as before, say, gunpowder, steam engines and the printing press.

I agree with Bob - secularism is one of those long-term megatrends that advances from one cycle through the next. I recall that several years ago, Life Magazine did a special issue naming the most important people of the past Millennium (1001-2000). At the top of the list, ahead of luminaries like Newton, Da Vinci, Shakespeare and Einstein, was Johann Gutenberg. The argument was that prior to the invention of the printing press, the Church essentially held a virtual monopoly over knowledge. The Church was the only segment of society at that time that could be called an educated elite. They controlled the libraries, with all books being hand-copied by monks. With Gutenberg's printing press, came the ability to disseminate knowledge more widely through society. The Church lost an important position, and Western society has become gradually more secular ever since.

I think that where E.J. Dionne is going (he is a devout Catholic, I understand) is that he thinks that the short-term trend in the U.S. will involve a reassertion of more traditional religious sectors - and less power and influence from the Evangelicals.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Yes... One does get the impression that he might possibly be aware of The Theory.



I of course would suggest a very long term centuries duration trend towards secular values. This trend might ripple with the cycles, but in the long term religion is not as central to cultures as before, say, gunpowder, steam engines and the printing press.

Religion of course can serve as a brake upon ultra-rational ideologies devoid of morality, including fascism, Marxism, and plutocracy. It's a fallback position when unintended consequences arise. Humanity keeps asking the same questions about the meaning of life -- questions that science can never answer for the simple reason that science is itself amoral, and especially that self-interest ad instant gratification can't answer.

It's possible that the opposition to the amoral policies and practices of Dubya and his cronies increase not so much as people reject religion as much as that they find those policies morally objectionable.

Originally Posted by Mr. Reed

I disagree that the secularism will not be as strong as during that era. The Netroots vanguard certainly appears very secular, as do the posters on the main blog/RSS news sites. As of now, Millennials are the most secular generation in American history.

I am constantly suprised by how secular my fellow Millies are. Even in my little rural hometown a lot of people my age pay lip-service towards religion out of habit and cultural upbringing and because of negitive stereotypes of atheists, but religion seems to play a significantly lesser role then among Boomers and Xers and when it does play a role it's of a more mainline protestant variety.