Some of the credit for Bush’s success in appealing to Republican values belongs to him and his advisers. To some extent, though, the Bush camp is merely lucky: Republicans are much more coherent, in both their demographics and their values, than are Democrats. This coherence makes them easier to please and easier to mobilize. The Republican party derives much of its support from the rich and from religious conservatives, and it is more uniformly white than its rival party. Many Republicans fit all three categories: affluent, white, religious.
The values of these Republicans are not difficult to intuit. They see themselves as rule-followers and honest brokers. Their affluence is their just reward for hard work, ingenuity, and personal virtue. Their enemies abroad – terrorists – play by no rules and believe in the wrong God. Their enemies at home – liberals – are godless and seek to undermine America’s greatest strengths: individualism, religiosity, moral certitude. They believe in their president almost unconditionally and distrust those who do not.
The Democrats, by contrast, are faced with the challenge of trying to attract the votes of several more widely divergent groups. The Democratic Party relies on support from the black and Hispanic communities, organized labour, and liberal progressives; in partisan terms, these groups are the remnants of the old Democrat coalition from FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, but to call them a coalition today is to overstate their unity. On values, Democrats are much more prone to fundamental divergence than the main Republican sub-groups. The Democratic sub-groups would have a harder time sitting down for dinner together than the Republicans. Whereas the Republicans could agree on meat and potatoes, Democrat fare would range from fast food to fusion – the trouble would start before anyone had even ventured a political opinion.
To a great extent, liberal progressives are defined by their rejection of core Republican values (e.g., religious and patriarchal authority, the belief that the only legitimate definition of family is the traditional nuclear one, and strict meritocracy). To them, the rich have a moral obligation to help the poor and protect the environment. They are wary of the hail-to-the-chief hierarchy embraced by Republicans (and fanned vigorously by the Bush administration). Liberal progressives support heterarchy, a relatively flat model of human organization in which leadership is fluid – Dad is the boss on one matter, Mom on another, this senior executive might lead one project and that junior manager another, with everyone compromising and debating points of view.
Values surveys find that Hispanic Democrats espouse a stronger belief in the family than do liberal progressives, and report greater acceptance of patriarchal authority. They basically trust the free market, have considerable faith in big business and advertising, and believe that people generally get what they deserve in life. In many cases, these citizens have come from places – Puerto Rico, Cuba, Mexico – devoid of the opportunities promised by the American Dream and, unlike much of the African-American component of the Democrat coalition, have yet to conclude that the dream is a myth for all but an exceptional few.
Black Democrats and Hispanic Democrats share more common ground with each other than with liberal progressives, but values research reveals significant differences between them. Black Democrats, like Hispanic Democrats, are reasonably deferential to patriarchal authority, and exhibit relatively high levels of faith in business, media, and advertising. But black Democrats diverge from Hispanic Democrats in their belief in activist government, and in their conviction that the rich have an obligation to help the poor. Black Democrats are also set apart by their attitudes toward status and consumption. Whereas black Democrats register an attraction to conspicuous consumption, liberal progressives are more likely to spend money on experiential hedonism.
Democrats who live in households that include at least one union member display another distinct set of values to which John Kerry must cater. Like liberal progressives, union Democrats are flexible with respect to the definition of family and don’t embrace the religious and authoritarian values of Republicans. The values that stand out among union Democrats that do not stand out among the other three sub-groups relate to personal fiscal restraint: union Democrats believe in saving on principle and reject impulse consumption.
Clearly, a relatively scattered picture of the Democratic Party emerges when the values of its most important component groups are considered. Self-identified Democrats eschew the ostentatious religiosity and patriarchal authoritarianism of Republicans, and are more open-minded about family structure, but that’s where the consensus ends. Republicans, by contrast, have a strong web of shared values and myths that Bush can leverage with ease and effectiveness. Republicans do sometimes disagree, as when religious conservatives and states’ rights advocates clashed over the constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage. But in the wake of particular policy disputes, their shared values – God, country, family – make it easier for them than for Democrats to reunite under some symbolically resonant banner. In a media-saturated age when sound bites and rapid-fire images are the main currency of a campaign, the fact that Republicans can more easily invoke symbols and core cultural values that will be meaningful and appealing to their supporters is an enormous advantage. Thus, it is safe to say that if the 2004 election were solely about values, the Republicans would have it.
Values play another role that may work to get George W. re-elected: influencing who turns out to vote. In the 2000 election, 51.2 percent of the voting-age population turned out to vote. Even setting aside the debate over the legitimacy of the Bush victory, it is uncontested that Al Gore received the larger proportion of the popular vote. This means that less than a quarter of U.S. voters chose the man who became president.
Obviously, getting the vote out is a crucial task for any candidate. Campaign organizers salivate over swing voters, but the number of non-voters is vastly greater. In a race as close as 2000 was, or as 2004 is, a candidate who could mobilize some portion of the electorate that would otherwise not vote (turnout among the American poor is particularly dismal) would have a huge advantage. But that scenario is unlikely; voter disengagement is a difficult, if not impossible, tide to turn.
