Michael Ennis
Centered
What the new silent majority means for Texas—and the rest of the nation.
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But the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, after confirming the values voters spike with its definitive post-election poll, soon downplayed its own conclusion, observing that “moral values” was the most nebulous of seven factors voters were offered to explain their 2004 presidential preference and thus the most likely to be chosen. However, this revision has had little effect on the vogue for values voters, which continues well after the 2006 midterm elections should have ended it. But while we’re still waiting for the incredible vanishing values voters to reappear, we’ve overlooked a more far-reaching political and cultural dynamic. Although the 2004 values voters are direct descendants of Nixon’s GSM, they have become a vocal, shrill minority. And as the GSM itself evolves, it is becoming ever more disenchanted with the worldview of its noisy ideological child.
Nixon’s GSM was mostly white, suburban, often Southern, usually religious, and deeply unsettled by LBJ’s expansion of the “welfare state” as well as the federally mandated remedies—busing, affirmative action—that had followed the civil rights legislation of the sixties. And as the counterculture of the sixties became the mainstream culture of the seventies, the GSM could believe that both big government and big media were conspiring against the American way of life.
By the end of the decade the silent majority had given birth to the Moral Majority, the organization founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell in 1979 to voice the discontent of religious conservatives. Those who feared that the pernicious growth of government was matched only by the precipitous decline in morality quickly found a kind of ideological shorthand in Falwell’s twin demons: the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion and an alleged “homosexual agenda.” These remain the banner issues for Moral Majority heirs like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council, and they were the two issues cited most often by the 2004 values voters, who were really just moral majoritarians by another name.
But along the way, the Moral Majority abandoned the defining reticence of its parent. Falwell set a loudmouthed, combative tone, one echoed by anti-abortion activists who protested as angrily as the antiwar crowd of the sixties and similarly fostered a fringe that believed its violence was justified. This cacophonous counter-counterculture leaped successfully into the cultural mainstream, with Fox News dominating cable and intimidating the broadcast networks, while conservative superstars like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh stood atop the media elite even as they railed against it. And of course the born-again Christian in the White House hardly let an opportunity pass to remind the nation of his faith, even transforming a complex struggle against Islamic extremists into a battle, as much metaphysical as physical, against “evildoers.”
If never silent, values voters did have a moment when they looked like a majority, but it wasn’t 2004. The September 11 tragedy offered Bush an entirely unforeseen opportunity to lead a broadly bipartisan new GSM, and the president and his party rode the wave of resurgent patriotism through the 2002 midterm elections. But like LBJ with Vietnam and Nixon with Watergate, Bush lost the trust of the GSM, with a war he’s never been able to adequately justify or competently wage. What carried the president’s reelection in 2004 wasn’t Karl Rove’s gay marriage—bashing values voters but the Swift Boaters, who used Nixon-era smear tactics to raise fatal doubts about an already too liberal, too elitist John Kerry. In putting his Vietnam service at the top of his résumé, Kerry had set himself up for a backlash from the GSM, who gave him few points for winning medals in a war it hadn’t liked—and who liked him even less for having thrown away those awards to protest it.
As it turned out, Bush’s disastrous second term has only hastened the long-term leftward drift of the GSM—and created a widening rift with its values voters’ progeny. Earlier this year the Pew Research Center did a major trend-line study of American values over the past two decades, finding a new silent majority that remained unheard through six years of Republican hegemony. This majority favors expanding the government safety net and guaranteed national health insurance, even if it means raising taxes. The GSM looks favorably on unions, homosexuals, interracial dating (by a huge margin), affirmative action, a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and increased government regulations to protect the environment and place more emphasis on saving energy. By an ever-widening margin, it does not want women returning to “traditional” roles in society, and it does not believe we need to give up our civil liberties to fight terrorists.
On the other hand, the GSM isn’t a slam dunk for Democrats: It is for the death penalty, against gay marriage (but not other gay rights), and strongly convinced that the government can’t do anything well. But in 2006 the Democrats did a better job than the GOP of understanding this paradoxical majority, adopting a measured, protest-free position on ending the Iraq war and putting forward brawny populist poster boys like Montana senator Jon Tester and Virginia senator James Webb. For 2008 the GSM remains up for grabs, with both parties’ front-runners, Giuliani and Senator Hillary Clinton, sharing a lot in common: They’re both pro-choice, gay-friendly New Yorkers, both supposedly on thin ice with their parties’ polarized bases—and for months both held solid leads over their challengers. (If New York mayor Michael Bloomberg runs as a center-hugging independent, the November 2008 ballot could conceivably offer voters three pro-choice, pro-gay New Yorkers.) The new campaign paradigm isn’t the old Bush-Rove feeding-the-base frenzy, with screaming, screened crowds predictably devouring the partisan raw meat; now it’s Giuliani telling a Baptist group in Houston that he’s not going to change his mind on abortion or Barack Obama (for all his star quality, another disciplined centrist) telling automakers in Detroit he wants to raise mileage standards.
Not only is Texas not leading this great American march to the middle, but our state’s leaders are rapidly being left behind. A number of our legislators tried to play catch-up in the last session, attempting yet again to oust anachronistic House Speaker Tom Craddick and grapple with the fraught future of public education, our water and energy supply, and our chart-topping carbon dioxide—laden air. But the result was a near meltdown of the political process. The sobering truth is that Texas, whose huge coastal urban belt is prime demographic turf for the increasingly diverse, tolerant, leftward-drifting new GSM, faces a steep political learning curve after a century and a half of rule by insular, predominantly rural interests. When our Brigadoon state legislature reconvenes two years hence, lawmakers will finally dump the uncompromising Craddick, but we’ll still be in desperate need of the kind of visionary, results-driven centrism that has made Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s Republican governor, the nation’s most effective leader. Sure, we’ll eventually move on and find our own Arnold, simply because we’re so big and so economically and culturally vital. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves: Getting our rapidly evolving nation-state to the wise, progressive center is going to be a bumpy, ugly ride.
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