One Nation, After All

...Wolfe, however, found that the answers to pollsters' most pointed questions remove all subtleties and force people to declare themselves too abruptly and too artificially...

...They want to be just, but their favorite New Testament verse seems to be "Judge not, that you shall not be judged...

...Attali predicted that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tides of history were now turning...

...The militants, in that imagery, are the partisans in those culture wars...

...Here is where l think Wolfe, an instinctively moderate person who uses methods that imply moderation, comes close to failing us: his suburbanites are chatting in circumstances where there are not many signs of stress or distress...

...After all, the interviewer can set up a framework in which distorted responses emerge...

...Commonweal | 9 April24, 1998 So Wolfe is surprised to see how at least casually patriotic most Americans are...

...It is in such company that Wolfe is most at home...

...This is not to say that there are no issues on which Americans should be divided as they seek ways to live, to be just, to be productive...

...But it is too soon to say "after all" when we are still in the midst of things where majorities are potential recruits for those tending to profit from sidetaking in the culture wars...

...The crisis has dramatized beyond any doubt that Wail Street and Washington are and Commonweal 2 0 April24, 1998...

...A community may express itself genially on racial issues, but when sudden racial change comes, everytlling is cast in a new and often blinding light...

...Culture wars, have we not noticed, are not conversations or arguments...

...Cameras have a way of reaching for the most colorful people, the most incendiary scenes...

...Polls will show that on most substantial issues, perhaps 10 percent of citizens can be counted at the activist extremes...

...Pure "prolife" says, "Abortion is murder" or "Better two deaths than one murder...

...What culture warriors call disagreement tends instead to be confusion...

...And they do not think that the cannonading of elites or leaders of interest groups represents an instrument for enabling them to be productive...

...The Asian miracle has revealed itself to be largely a mirage sustained by foreign capital...

...To test the "culture wars" thesis, Wolfe wondered what most of the people think...

...Reporters get Ix)red by bourgeois apathy or by moderates...

...One nation, yes, in a way...

...His most recen...

...But he may help more of the leadership of that (now I have to say "putative") moderate four-fifths of the nation find symbols, definitions, leaders, and causes so that they can at least start conversations or arguments about the good and common life...

...I do...

...By now it is well-known, for this is a frequently noticed book, that Wolfe interviewed middle-class citizens in a nation where most people consider themselves to be middle class...

...This majority may care about the issues that have led to the hostilities, but they do not care as much or in the same manner, or they have other things to do than to fire away...

...Mention abortion (as Wolfe almost doesn't) or homosexual rights and lifestyles (as he chooses to do), and a very different America is likely to be manifest...

...In his informal and intuitive way, Wolfe provides a new agenda for those who will seek to do more precise pollings, more ample interviewing, and more revisionist judging...

...This is an image of "the culture wars" that has made sense to me...

...Often in middle-class luxury we profess tolerances and sympathies that fade when tested...

...As militants constantly fire across at each other, some of the shells fall on the valley below...

...Often they take their positions in the middle plain by distancing themselves from the camp that fired last or by taking refuge from the anticipated next fire...

...Seven years later, it seems that Attali got it almost exactly wrong...

...Take "prolife" and "prochoice," in the pure sense of both...

...Wolfe would help us with a second volume, where he would find eight middle-class communities at white heat over racial, ethnic, or religious matters--the cr6che on the courthouse lawn, the Ten Commandments on the courthouse wail, or Sikhs wearing knives or Muslims wearing scarves to school--and listen to troubled and agitated citizens...

...With the approach of the new millennium, a new unified Europe would, akmg with Asia, play the leadership role in world events and the new global economy...

...I don't want to get into the abortion issue--author and sociologist Alan Wolfe, who evokes my mesa image, has only three brisk references to it--except to say that either side may have a case...

...But massive data suggests that about 80 percent of the American people, most of whom say they are against abortion and are for choice, will side with neither extreme...

...The polls I've seen suggested that there were not nearly so many profound fissures or revolutionary calls and reactionary restx)nses as people on campuses or in the media suggested there were...

...If young people today had nothing to go on but opinion polls, it is unlikely they would be able to discern much of a generation gap resulting from the response to events in that stormier time...

...His is by no means a first word and by no means the last...

...It is to say that most of them have lives to live without the noise of the artillery firers...

...I wish he had been around in the fabled 1960s, the time of putative polarizations of the whole public...

...book relevant to this theme is The One and the Many: America's Search for the Common Good (Harvard...

...There are exceptions, and in the religious camp Wolfe finds one big one: otherwise tolerant heterosexuals are benumbed and bemused by, or resentful of, homosexuality...

...Pure "prochoice" really means, "A woman's body is her own, to do with what she wants...

...Now that these resources have vaporized, what is left is a treacherous financial and political sinkhole that will remain for some time to come...

...Wolfe went to eight suburbs in four sections of the nation, listened carefully, and reports...

...By the way, the cannonaders will be middle class, too, so class is not everything...

...Perhaps he trusts interviews more than he should...

...Mentioning that suggests that I have positive regard for Wolfe's effort, his ability to express himself well to a public, many aspects of his method, and most of the tentative conclusions he draws...

...Most of us answer yes...

...His book will not force a cease-fire from the warriors or beguile them into one...

...how generous they are in their thinking about immigrants...

...how eager they are to be tolerant and the beneficiaries of tolerance...

...ONE BIG, UNHAPPY FAMILY Jorge Pedraza he subtitle of John Newhouse's new book, "The Conflicting Demands of Unity, Nationalism, Economic Security, Political Stability, and Military Readiness Now Facing a Europe Seeking to Define Itself," brings to mind Millennium, a 1991 best-selling future forecast by Jacques Attali, the prolific French captain of industry cure cultural critic...

...They won't make up a pack of conformists given to consensus, as the citizens of the 1950s were portrayed as being...

...America and Russia, crippled by intractable internal social and political conflict, would be pushed to the periphery of tile new world stage...

...Just why majorities chose that issue as the place to hold the line for prejudice Wolfe can't quite get clear from his interviewers...

...Between them, in the valley, are 70 or 80 percent of their compatriots...

...But in the case of the gifted reporter, from Alexis de Tocqueville and a host of other foreign visitors to the present, we have learned that the right pairs of eyes, ears, and hands can serve well to sum up and present this or that element of American life...

...They represent fluid, dynamic, viscous forces that can be reshaped and that can reshape themselves with more diversity and richness than the culture warriors will let them...

...One Nation, After All confirms the prejudgments or conclusions of the mesaimage inventor, namely this reviewer...

...They want to "judge not" but often feel they are being judged and forced to judge by activists on the gay and lesbian front...

...Far away, Serbs now fight Croats, so their cousins here suddenly draw on passions they did not know they had...

...We Chicagoans used to be familiar with Serbo-Croatian picnics and weddings...

...Polls tell you much that is useful...

...We who observe the American scene often discuss questions like this: Do you trust pollsters, interviewers, or gifted reporters to provide data and perceptions of American outlooks...

...i Martin E. Marty directs the Pub/ic Religion Project of the University of Chicago, where he taught for thirty-five years...