I haven’t read anything that just took the vacuity and indolence of the American chattering class, put it into words, and nailed it to the church door quite as well as this thumbsucking ‘conversation’ between Gail Collins and David Brooks in the New York Times.

Please, God. put them behind a paywall so I can ignore them, like the rest of America.

Here’s the premise, an interesting one, actually: There are three ‘wedge issues’ in modern politics – values-driven issues that fracture interest-based coalitions, and are a large part of why blue-collar labor abandoned its political sponsors in the Democratic Party. They are:

Guns, Gays, and Abortion (add Affirmative Action to the list and you’ve pretty much got all the wedge issues covered).

Here are our two pocket intellectuals setting the stage:

Gail Collins: David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but you’re the go-to guy on how America lives, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.

If you think of abortion, gay rights and gun control as the Big Three, it seems to me the nation is moving in very different directions…

David Brooks: Gail, I confess I do shy away from these issues, not because I don’t have views but because I find the tenor of the debates so unpleasant. For example, I have the impression that we’re in the middle of their weird battle of the murders. Liberal media outlets play up the murder of the abortion doctor by a pro-life extremist. Conservative outlets play up the murder of the Army recruiter by a Muslim extremist. Some people on both sides seem to feel that their view of the world has been affirmed by the atrocities of a certain set of extremists, and so seem to feel a sense of vindication from these crimes.

Brooks – who speaks for the ‘average American’ in these circles, believes that they really don’t think about these things…they just want to be nice to each other:

I think there is a consistency to how most Americans view these Big Three social issues. People are seeking the positions that will help them reserve the invisible bonds of community.

Americans increasingly see gay relationships as just another part of the fabric of connections that make up their communities. As a result Americans are becoming more accepting of civil unions and gay marriage.

People also treasure the specific subcultures they inhabit. Guns are an essential part of life for people who live in rural communities. Well, it’s not the guns per se. Rather the threat to limit gun ownership is seen as an assault by urban people on rural life and rural communities. That is the reason gun rights are defended so fiercely and why it is politically dangerous for anybody to challenge them.

Finally, on the subject of abortion, Americans are pulled by conflicting communitarian impulses. On the one hand, I think most people sense viscerally that somehow an abortion is a tear in the moral fabric – whether they are pro-life or pro-choice. On the other hand, they don’t feel communities can be formed on the basis of compulsion and they are uncomfortable imposing such complex and uncomfortable moral decisions on one another. So they seek out some mushy middle ground, while oscillating, sometimes in a more “liberal” direction and sometimes in a more “conservative” one, as now.

Yeah, we’re brainless cattle who decide important issues based on our connections to others…not.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people on a variety of sides of all three (all four, actually) of these issues, and the reality I’ve experienced is that people think very hard about them, hold deep beliefs about them, and while they may not be able to give broad historic or ideologically grounded arguments for their beliefs – they manage to articulate them – even in passing conversation – far better than the luminaries sucking at the NYT teat. Yes, we’re all human, and our opinions are formed in part by our ‘tribes’.

But that does not – nearly – mean that we have no ability to articulate our understandings or beliefs, to discuss them, and to move and be moved in those discussions. The hard reality is that many of us have deep-rooted beliefs that, in essence decide those issues for us. Let’s look at Gail Collins on gay marriage:

Gay rights is just a matter of time. Look at the polls. Worrying about gay marriage, let alone gay civil unions or gay employment rights, is a middle-age issue. Young people just can’t see the problem. At worst, gays are going to win this one just by waiting until the opposition dies off.

Note that to her, there’s no … issue … around gay rights. They simply ‘are’. No one, or at least no one worth talking to, could possibly make any kind of substantive argument against gay rights worth considering.

Yet almost all of us were brought up in a culture that has for a millennium ostracized homosexuality; and it would be good if she would recognize that breaking those cultural bonds is hard – and made harder when the images of what it means to be gay come from Castro Street or Santa Monica Boulevard and not the PTA or house next door. So there’s a measure of cognitive dissonance because when the average American family thought about gays, it thought about Sodom, San Francisco bath-houses (not that most people were clear about exactly what was going on in those places…), pedophiles, and that spinster piano teacher and her ‘cousin’ who lived down the street, and then it became about Will and Grace and then about that handsome and brave young Olympic diver and then about Doogie Hauser MD – and suddenly the cultural messages about what it meant to be gay or be in contact with gays were all confused and suddenly not nearly as clearly negative as it used to be.

In part, I’ll argue that was helped along by a substantial change in gay culture itself; it became mainstream and relatively nontransgressive.

She feels the same way about guns (i.e. there is no real substantive issue, only a political one):

Gun control currently feels like a lost cause. If a big Democratic majority doesn’t have the will to stop an amendment to the credit card bill permitting people to carry concealed loaded weapons in national parks, I don’t have much hope.

The idea that there are people … me, for example … who might be able to make a moral and practical argument for why allowing concealed carry in national parks located where concealed carry is itself legal never occurs to her.

It never occurs to Brooks either:

People also treasure the specific subcultures they inhabit. Guns are an essential part of life for people who live in rural communities. Well, it’s not the guns per se. Rather the threat to limit gun ownership is seen as an assault by urban people on rural life and rural communities. That is the reason gun rights are defended so fiercely and why it is politically dangerous for anybody to challenge them.

No, no, a thousand times no. I don’t live in the country, my neighbors who shoot don’t live in the country, we’re not a part of some weird secret subculture that only allows membership to those with guns. That’s patently absurd.

People who own guns and who think that owning and possessing guns is OK often think that it’s a positive good, and can … shockingly … make arguments to that effect. The concern about gun regulation has only a little to do with concern that the ‘city folk’ will dominate; people who fear widespread gun ownership don’t believe people can or should be responsible for their own safety, and people who fear banning guns don’t believe in anything else.

And here we begin to see why these are fracture lines; not because of some sociological or anthropological explanation, not because of the politics of the issue (although such explanations are available to us), but because people’s beliefs are vastly different.

And no where is this more true than abortion, where short of the most dedicated pro-life activists, people I know are perfectly capable of having an ‘on one hand and on the other but this is trumped by’ discussion about the value and costs of abortion, but where each side – even the uncomfortable committed on each side (like me) have a deep belief about what is right that closes the argument.

Brooks goes on:

I’m not sure I’m expressing myself very clearly, but what I’m trying to say is that people seek to preserve the orderly bonds around them. Most people, even on these hot button issues, gravitate toward positions that seem to best preserve unspoken communal understandings. As a result, I don’t expect sharp change on any of these subjects. There is a gradual acceptance of gay and lesbian rights, but I think progress will take longer than people anticipate. On gun control and abortion, I don’t see much change of any sort.

There are fewer and fewer culture warriors in America. Most people want order and peace.

Yes, but each group wants the peace that comes from its values being uncontroversially widespread, and on these issues, we’re not likely to get that for quite some time.

I’d suggest that these are fracture line issues because they are not ‘instrumental issues’ where I can horsetrade a little loss here for a little gain elsewhere. They are issues which touch on the deepest values we hold as members of the society – what is an appropriate relationship; who will defend me and as a consequence have power over me; what does it mean to be human and have rights.

I’ll suggest that the better, more American solution is one that acknowledges that we are a people who live together who share many, but not all, values, and that those values change over time. That allows for a free competition of ideas and ideals, and that limits what we can and will do to coerce each other.

But most of all, one that acknowledges just exactly what these deep thinkers deny – that the people whohold opposing views to us do so genuinely, and are entitled to respect for those views with which we deeply disagree.
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