And new divisions
David Warren makes the same point I was trying to make a few days ago:
The swing vote here is Catholic, almost one-quarter of the U.S. population and traditionally strongly Democrat. In the last several months, polls have shown the Catholic vote swinging dramatically from Kerry to Bush, who now leads it in the proportion 3:2. Most sudden changes are tenuous: the Democrats might still prevail by winning that back. But don't ask me how. Surprisingly, the much smaller, traditionally Democrat, Jewish vote has not yet fled from Kerry to Bush, though the Muslim vote is shifting modestly from Bush to Kerry. But no anomalies here: regular synagogue or mosque attendance is, in both cases, an indicator for Bush; secularity an indicator for Kerry. The reader would be right to read into this grand seismic events. The U.S. public is splitting along religious lines, not between one confession and another, but more vastly between the religious faithful, and the rest. Messrs. Bush and Kerry have, largely without intending, become surrogates in a battle between alternative Americas, and for each side, in the coming election, almost everything is at stake.
One of the more interesting things about having been around for a little while is developing a sense of when change might be in the air. You have to go through it once or twice and then you get something like s Spidey-sense: aha! something might be going on here. Knowing what it is is another matter. When you're young the tendency is always to assume, about the culture: thus it ever was, and thus it always shall be. Maybe we should call it the Mount Saint Helens factor. A smoking mountain in Washington State equals a stark election choice and a shift to the right.
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