April 2, 2013
FEAR OF A LIBERAL AMERICA
If you’re one of the dwindling number of Americans who oppose gay marriage and think that illegal immigrants should not be allowed to stay in this country, these are not good days for you. On both issues, seemingly at the same time, the national conversation has turned decisively in the other direction. Several new polls have found that a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage; according to a CBS poll, fully a third of those asked changed their mind in favor over the past decade.
An NBC poll found that support among black and working-class Americans has increased dramatically in just two years, by around thirty-five per cent in each group; the only Americans whose support has actually diminished are Hispanics, those between fifty and sixty-four, and rural voters.
An NBC poll found that support among black and working-class Americans has increased dramatically in just two years, by around thirty-five per cent in each group; the only Americans whose support has actually diminished are Hispanics, those between fifty and sixty-four, and rural voters.
On immigration, during the years between 2006 and 2011, Gallup found that more Americans wanted to prevent illegal immigrants from coming to the U.S. than find a way to legalize the status of those who were already here. Last year, the balance shifted the other way, and last month, in a Pew poll, more than two-thirds of Americans expressed support for legalizing the status of undocumented workers in the country, while barely a quarter wanted them to be sent home.
These are the numbers that explain the sudden “evolution” among politicians of both parties on both issues, and their haste to embrace positions that, just a few years ago, seemed like electoral death. Red-state Democrats like Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, and Jon Tester of Montana have just come out for gay marriage; so has Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican whose son came out to him two years ago. Hillary Clinton—late to the prom, as a New York Democrat—has also joined the surge. Meanwhile, House and Senate Republicans, having crushed two efforts at immigration reform under two Presidents over the past seven years, are busy drafting bills that might be finished in just a few weeks.
These dramatic movements are the culture-war equivalent of the spring and summer of 1918, when both the German and Allied armies suddenly advanced dozens of miles across France after years of stalemate in the trenches. According to the Venn diagram of polls on both issues, if you’re over fifty, white, male, vote Republican, didn’t get past high school, and live in a rural area of Kansas or Kentucky, the chances are high that you’re not a bit happy about it.
There’s been so much written about changing political demographics since President Obama was reëlected last November that you could be forgiven for believing that we now live in a country called Liberal America, where the emerging majority of citizens are twenty-five years old, have a Hispanic mother and a Jewish father, reside in a big city, have doubtful employment prospects, spend most of their waking hours on social media, care intensely about pot legalization, and can’t fathom the fuss over gay marriage, while carrying a load of college debt they believe the federal government should force their lender to forgive. Over time, the forty-eight per cent of American voters who opposed Obama last year will somehow melt away or die off, and journalists will stop visiting those vast tracts of red America between the coasts, only to be reminded of its existence when a ban on assault weapons dies in a Senate committee. And as the prospect of perpetual defeat drives the Republican Party into the kind of public nervous breakdown that used to be the normal mode for post-election Democrats, it’s easy to think that Liberal America is the future.
Then you come across the comments in response to this Times editorial “The Immigration Spring.” Web commentary is a poor substitute for opinion polling and old-fashioned reporting. Still, a lot of people have written in to rain on the editors’ optimism. “If cheap labor was good for our country, then my home of California should have been always in the black. The opposite has always been true,” writes Donn Longstreet, now living in Pleasant Lake, Michigan. “Cheap labor, high volume consumers, and a docile populous; these are the true reasons for open immigration, and they are the antithesis of what this country was created to protect.” A lot of Times readers, who live in places like Pompano Beach, Florida, Malvern, Pennsylvania, and Vancouver, Washington, apparently feel the same way. You can hear in their tone the angry bewilderment of people who know that the country is moving away from them. They don’t sound like winners of the information age, or self-reinventing social entrepreneurs of the flat world. You heard a similar tone from anti-gay-marriage protestors outside the Supreme Court last week.
Writing recently on their behalf, Ross Douthat noted the “triumphalism” of gay marriage’s liberal supporters, and told them to be “magnanimous in what increasingly looks like victory,” before acknowledging, “magnanimity has rarely been a feature of the culture war.” Just ask Newt Gingrich. Douthat didn’t say why liberals should have malice toward none, charity for all. Here are some reasons: Because the wheel of history never stops turning, and no majority is permanent. Because the inhabitants of my Venn diagram, and millions more like them, have not disappeared—they will go on being compatriots of the triumphant citizens of Liberal America. Because neither side has an absolute lock on the truth.
Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/changing-american-opinions-on-gay-marriage-and-immigration.html#ixzz2PLjrqEDv
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/changing-american-opinions-on-gay-marriage-and-immigration.html#ixzz2PLjrqEDv