Polarisation penetrating US culture

WORLD VIEW:Sharp divisions are emerging within the Republican and Democratic parties

‘THE REPUBLICANS are in complete disarray about who they are, split between a right-wing social agenda and more traditional fiscal conservatism. Yet they are benefiting from the hangover after Obama’s honeymoon.”

Mayor Ralph Becker of Salt Lake City, Utah, put his finger on a theme raised by many who met an Irish group from North and South on a recent trip to examine political identities in the US. We visited Boston and Salt Lake City as part of an exchange programme which has brought 800 Irish people to the US to study lessons that can be drawn for Irish reconciliation.

Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue: An American Life, was published while we were there, accentuating the contrast between overwhelmingly Democratic Massachusetts and overwhelmingly Republican Utah, and divisions in both parties. Yet it is a mistake to generalise too much about these differences because they are checked and balanced by the country's scale, diversity and constitutional structure.

A former Republican office holder in Massachusetts explained how its voters have often elected Republicans as governors to curb Democratic free-spending and cronyism.

Becker’s city is a Democratic enclave in solidly Republican Utah, and has established a definite scope for political experimentation.

Another common theme is how polarised US politics has become between the two main parties and their political bases as the Republicans regroup and US president Barack Obama defends his ambitious legislative programme. There is little sign of the cross-party co-operation that previously sustained congressional politics.

Party discipline has hardened, partly because more moderate Republican leaders in Congress respond defensively to the radical right-wing mobilisations.

Most of the popular political noise has come from that base in recent months. Radio and TV talkshow hosts, together with a burgeoning grassroots tea-party movement modelled on the Boston rebels of the 1770s, have been protesting against healthcare reform, bank and car company bailouts, ballooning deficits, immigration and gay rights.

In doing so, they have created a right-wing populism so full of hate and vituperation that many wonder whether we are in the middle of a political sea-change.

It is sustained by an anti-elitism and scepticism about government that was on view last week in Salt Lake City, where these fissures inside the Republican Party have opened up a political space for hard-right candidates to stand against well-established incumbents.

The tea-party movement elsewhere in the US brought together thousands of people in rallies against Obama’s politics and the response to the economic crisis. These are loosely attached to the Republicans, and Palin’s aim is to capture them for a possible presidential bid in 2012.

In Utah, Cherilyn Eagar, a right-wing activist, is standing against senator Bob Bennett in next year’s Republican caucuses. She held a tea-party meeting in the state house addressed by Samuel Joseph “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, who upbraided Obama during the 2008 campaign about high company taxation.

“I’m a Christian, an American and proud of it,” he told about 60 of Eagar’s supporters. He had no sympathy for the Guantánamo inmates – “I would torture prisoners every day myself” if necessary, he said.

At a larger campaign rally that evening, he advised the audience to be politically active.

Eagar said he successfully turned the question around on Obama last year by asking what his reference to “spreading the wealth around” really means. “It is not for Washington to tell us how much we pay our employees. That is pure socialism and even goes beyond it.”

Becker described the tea-party movement as an “incredibly narrow, bigoted, angry, nasty, mean view of the world”. It would have no place in his city, which was in the news recently after passing ordinances protecting employment and anti-discrimination rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual citizens.

In Boston College, Prof Alan Wolfe told us there was more convergence in everyday opinion on issues involved in the culture wars than can be gleaned from paying attention only to the polarised congressional, media or popular debates.

But he is worried that the major religious movements may decide to treat Islam not as another partner with which to confront secularism, but as an evil and mistaken religion to be dealt with as an enemy, following the Fort Hood shootings. Such multicultural battles have to be fought and won continuously.

According to Prof Christopher Karpowitz of Utah’s Brigham Young University, a Republican decision to adopt the tea-party route would ensure a landslide victory for the Democrats in 2012.

The radical right certainly do not have a working majority among the US electorate, nor could they become part of a winning coalition. The greater part of the electorate converges on the centre, including a growing number of independents.

Yet polarisation penetrates US culture, egged on by this right-wing populism. Obama has not been able to outflank it so far because he has incorporated his own grassroots campaign movement into his White House team. It is a peculiar and confusing mixture.

pegillespie@gmail.com