The great values debate has commenced.
Four camps have emerged thus far. There's the camp that says, essentially, change the subject -- Democrats have to win back values voters by fighting the morals argument with economic populism. Second, there's the triangulation camp, which says Democrats have to win them back by closing the "culture gap," which would presumably entail taking a sterner line against, for example, gay marriage. Third, there's a hybrid camp, arguing that Democrats have to reach values voters by finding a way to couch populist messages in moral rhetoric. Finally, there's the values-were-overblown-by-the-media camp. All have a point, in their own way, but all have made the same mistake of assuming that values voters are monolithic.
Before Democrats even start having this argument in earnest, they need to define its terms and be clear on a very important point. Values voters are not monolithic. They are, to coin a word, duolithic. There's the religious right, and then there are voters who are religious. They are not the same thing. The former are not persuadable; they want to extinguish modernity, they privilege mystical belief over physical evidence, and they will never vote Democratic. They are about a quarter of the population, and there's a similar quarter of the population who will never vote Republican, so they can at least be fought (and fighting is the proper concept with respect to this cohort) to a draw.
But somewhere in the remaining 50 percent are voters who are deeply religious but not in any way members of the religious right. They can have qualms about gay marriage without wanting to go back to Victorian morality. They can find themselves disturbed by the way Democratic politicians talk about abortion without wanting all women to be housewives. (Indeed, they can be disturbed by the rhetoric while still supporting the notion that abortion should remain an option.) These voters are the ones Democrats must try to reach.
They are not in opposition to every intellectual development since Freud. They're not interested in building a Christian nation and in fact are likely to be quite against that idea. But they go to church (maybe temple, but usually church), and faith is important to them, so they need some signal from the Democratic Party that it has respect for that aspect of their lives.
We have crossed, with this election, an important historical marker. The reelection of a president such as George W. Bush for the reasons the exit polls tell us he evidently won is a culminating event in the political retreat of modernity, a condition of existence whose fundamental tenet was the triumph of scientific skepticism over what used to be called "blind" faith. (Yes, lots of scholars of modernity would offer other fundamental tenets, but that's mine.) Modernity's golden age lasted about a century (a century that included, tragically, the 12-year interregnum during which modernity had to marshal its forces to defeat fascism). It coincided -- and not, as it were, coincidentally -- with the age of liberal consensus. It's not for nothing that I was raised by two good liberal parents who told me that religion and politics don't mix. Back then, they didn't, and they didn't because modernity and liberalism had taught people that they didn't, and the consensus held firm for the most part from the Scopes trial until the age of Reagan.
The age of skepticism has won a few and lost a few since Reagan's time. But let's face it: That age is now, in this country, dead. Today, religion and politics do mix. And they will keep mixing for the foreseeable future.
This does not mean that Democrats and liberalism should placate the Christian right or willingly succumb to Christian Nation. They should not. But it does mean that Democrats and liberals should work much harder to understand and win over the voters of the religious center. The Democratic Party should invest money in talking to -- not polling or focus-grouping; talking to -- these voters, learning the true extent to which they feel alienated from the party, finding out how they think about their religious and political selves, how they weigh their own interpretations of the Scriptures with regard to gay rights on the one hand and helping people in poverty on the other. And liberal intellectuals -- who do tend to be secular, myself admittedly included, and who do sometimes exhibit contempt for religion, myself (I hope) very much not included -- need to understand clearly that the religious right is hardly speaking for every religious person. And we need to understand that we're beyond the point in history when the old arguments will be persuasive.
The religious right has opened up a new battlefield, and, like it or not, we have to play on it. And the way to begin is by understanding clearly the difference between religious extremists and religious people.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The American Prospect.
