Fantastic article in yesterday's Washington Post, under the headline "Culture Wars? How 2004."
WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. makes a historical comparison between the times in the 1920's, the last time that religious zealots had any measurable political power in America, and present times, when Christian Wacko political influence seems to be in ebb tide. Here's some of the Good Stuff from Dionne's article:
Boiled down to basics, Dionne's political hypothesis is that, when economic times get tough, (like now) pragmatic American voters give the "small issues" the heave-ho, especially with respect to nutty American preachers.If you were looking for a presidential election that revolved around religion and "moral values," you wouldn't start with President Bush's victory in 2004 -- nor, indeed, with any recent election. You'd go back to 1928. Now there was a culture war.
At that moment of great prosperity, the two big issues were whether the United States should continue its experiment with Prohibition and whether it should elect Al Smith, New York's Democratic governor, as the first Roman Catholic president. It wasn't even close. The "drys," who favored the ban on booze, overwhelmed the "wets," who wanted to be rid of it. And the Catholic Smith was clobbered by Republican Herbert Hoover, who carried several Southern, predominantly Protestant states that had been voting Democratic since the aftermath of the Civil War. "We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation," Hoover declared, and most Americans believed him.
Then, a little more than a year after Hoover's buoyant prediction, came Oct. 29, 1929. After the great stock market crash, the question of whether Americans could legally consume alcohol seemed rather less pressing. The controversies over Smith's Catholicism abated. By 1936, the year of Franklin D. Roosevelt's landslide election, the culture war was forgotten, replaced by a nonviolent class war against those whom FDR called "economic royalists." [...]Ancient history? Hardly. The lessons of that earlier age are eerily relevant to the current moment in American politics. When major crises intrude, culture wars can fade awfully quickly. They did so in 1936. There are many signs that they're fading again in 2008.
Interesting read, to say the least.
And we wonder. According to Dionne's essay, which candidate, gentle readers, is the modern Herbert Hoover analogue... and which one is FDR... assuming the analogy is true?
Credits: A Tip O' the Weber County Forum Tam-O-Shanter to the Utah blog Democracy for Utah blog, for first putting us on to this story.
Surely there's someone who will comment on this.
