Friday, May 9, 2008
Despite Bush's election, the cranky old conservatives' days are numbered. The future belongs to middle-aged boomers and their kids, who embrace the tolerant values of the '60s.
Nov 25, 2004 | Cowed by exit polls showing that "moral values" motivated one in five American voters on Election Day, chastened journalists have begun to spin a new narrative about our national political culture: that "ordinary Americans" can be found only in socially conservative red-state pews. "Ordinary people, the people in the red states" is how conservative media critic Bernard Goldberg puts it, and many in the press seem to be saying amen.
But once again the media have it wrong. Missing in this discussion is that most Americans -- even many Bush supporters -- would recoil and rebel if the evangelical right ever got its way and began to limit the personal freedoms most of us now take for granted.
All the claims about mandates and values notwithstanding, the very fact that one-fifth of voters cited moral values means that four-fifths didn't. In fact, we heard much the same talk about the rise of conservative social values in the Reagan '80s, yet scholars who have studied attitudes in that period have found little evidence to suggest any reversal of the social liberalism that began in the '60s, particularly on issues involving family, women, morality, sexuality and overall tolerance. We must be careful not to confuse election results with cultural trends.
As survey after survey of contemporary social attitudes demonstrates, social conservatives no more represent the mainstream or the future than Prohibitionists did in the 1920s. If anything, it's the baby-boom sensibility spawned in the 1960s that has become mainstream in America today. As conservative columnist George Will lamented a few years back, politics "seems peripheral to, and largely impotent against, cultural forces and institutions permeated with what conservatives consider the sixties sensibility."
How little the "moral values" voter represents the future is evident in surveys of today's youth, who may be the most inclusive, tolerant and socially liberal generation in our nation's history. From the media we hear all about the controversies of the so-called culture war, such as the occasional school superintendent who shuts down all school clubs to keep gay and straight high school students from forming "gay-straight" clubs. But what we don't hear is that these clubs have quietly formed in about 2,800 schools nationwide. In fact, research on young people confirms that they have little patience for intolerance, that they have no problem accepting homosexuality, that most even support the right of gay people to marry.
Indeed, today's youth reject many of the social rigidities, prejudices and orthodoxies of old. As many as half of all teens say they've dated across racial or ethnic lines, including more than a third of white teens, and most of these are "serious" relationships. On race, homosexuality, premarital sex, gender roles, the environment and issues involving personal choice and freedom, younger Americans consistently fall on the liberal and more tolerant side of the spectrum.
If younger voters were the only ones with these attitudes, social conservatives might be able to lay claim to a "moral values" mandate for a very long time. But younger voters represent the mainstream much more than the initial exit polling would indicate. The illusion of a predominant "moral values" voting bloc has much to do with the fact that the most traditional and socially conservative Americans, pre-baby boomers, are living much longer lives and voting in very large numbers -- skewing exit polls and thus our image of the mainstream. Once younger voters begin to replace them, the socially conservative vote will return to the margins of American life.
There's a good reason why young people feel the way they do, and that's because their baby boomer parents overwhelmingly agree with them. So forget any talk of a generation gap between boomers and their children. On a wide range of social and cultural issues, they are united in their attitudes of tolerance and inclusiveness. The only generation gap that remains is the same one that began in the '60s, between pre-boomers and the rest of us. What we have today is a pre-baby boom cohort that's steadfastly conservative, with the vast majority of everyone younger leaning the opposite way.
Take race, for example. Young whites who date across racial lines feel comfortable doing so because their boomer parents say they have no problem with it. Yet for older white Americans, who in surveys continue to oppose the idea of a close relative marrying a black, interracial dating remains a taboo. Should blacks push themselves where they're not wanted? Two-thirds of pre-boomers in one survey said no, a view rejected by a vast majority of everyone younger.
It's the same with the hot-button issue of gay and lesbian rights. Pre-boomers are the only group that believes society should not recognize homosexuality as an acceptable way of life, according to a 2002 poll by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Those who still oppose the idea of gay teachers may recall the glory days when Anita Bryant's antigay crusade to "Save Our Children" seemed to represent a broad national consensus, but today they are a minority.
So powerful is the new norm of tolerance and inclusiveness that more than 200 cities and counties now have laws protecting gays and lesbians from discrimination, and among Fortune 500 companies, 227 now offer domestic-partner benefits. Straight job seekers have been known to ask whether companies offer same-sex-partner benefits not because they're secretly gay but because they prefer a company that promotes diversity and tolerance. Even in this supposedly conservative political year, exit polls found three in five voters supporting marriage or civil unions for gays.
Nor is it any different in the way we view the family: The socially conservative attitudes held by many evangelicals and older Americans are simply out of step with what most Americans believe.
According to my cohort analysis of surveys conducted by the University of Chicago's highly regarded National Opinion Research Center, large majorities of Americans born from 1943 onward strongly reject the traditional view that families and children suffer if Mom works full time or if Mom works and Dad takes care of the kids. When asked during the 1990s whether it was better for men to work and women to tend to the home, 60 percent of those born before 1943 said yes, while nearly three-fourths of those born afterward said no. Young and old are united in support of families, but from boomers on down it's equality in a family that is believed to make it strong.
Many conservatives, of course, continue to resist the realities of the modern family, arguing that working mothers don't really want to work but have been hoodwinked by liberal elites who want to impose their feminist views. But when women are asked if they would continue working even if they didn't need the money, as many as two-thirds say yes. And when NORC asked in 2002 whether "both the husband and wife should contribute to the household income," fewer than 10 percent said no. The egalitarian model -- not the Donna Reed stereotype of 1950s sitcoms -- represents mainstream America today.
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