Middle America's Dirty Little Secret

...They’d say they were definitely “against” abortion - but perhaps not in cases of rape and incest, or if the fetus were horribly deformed, or if it meant putting women who have abortions in jail...

...They see contemporary life as so complex, demanding, and in flux that they, and only they - not their church, not their neighbors, and certainly not a bunch of politicians - can be trusted to figure out what the right thing to do is in any given situation...

...In particular, you think you can get away with behavior that taxes the generosity of the middle class over and over again and you believe that the person paying for your irresponsibility is not going to object...

...What they found was that while a certain fraction fall into one of these two categories, the majority do not...

...that we should keep out the “bad” immigrants, not the “good” ones...

...Driven by their own ideological certitudes, they failed to listen to the nuances of what voters were saying: that abortion should be better regulated, not banned...

...Wolfe formulates this belief thusly: “Our freedoms make us special...

...they believe in the absolute moral standards laid down by God in the Bible...

...Americans do feel that they have lost the distinction between right and wrong and desperately want it back,” writes Wolfe...

...They may think children are better off with Mom at home, but they see how happy their wives are working, and they like the extra income...

...Modernists have more flexible ideas about family structure...

...One of the most common and vehemently held beliefs among Wolfe’s respondents was that there is a difference between the deserving and undeserving poor...

...ture war pits conservatives against liberals - or, in the language of sociology, traditionalists against modernists - in a battle over whether American culture is in moral decline, and if so, how to reverse it...

...Traditionalists believe in old-fashioned families with stay-athome moms;, they, resent multiculturalism...

...they defend the right of women to have abortions and work outside the home...

...taken to extremes, they cause us problems...

...Middle America's Dirty Little Secret Behind the rhetoric of extremes lurks a nation of moderates Paul Glastris BY READING THIS BOOK, YOU could have predicted the public’s tolerant initial reaction to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal...

...This may seem crazy to conservatives...

...they oppose abortion...

...they are made uncomfortable by unquestioning patriotism, and on moral issues tend to be secular and relativist...

...To test this idea, Alan Wolfe and his research assistants conducted interviews with some 200 Americans in suburbs across the country...

...Should the allegations about Clinton’s irresponsibility eventually prove true, the voters may decide that he’s undeserving, too...

...But, as Wolfe observes, it is an inevitable outgrowth of the economic libertarianism conservatives admire: “Daniel Bell was right to point out two decades ago that culture is too integrated with economics for freedom in the one realm not to have spillover effects in the other...

...they are highly patriotic in a my-country-right-or-wrong way...

...Middleclass Americans admire capitalism and believe in the idea that allowing individuals to pursue their own economic self interest will lead to general prosperity, even if that means having to tolerate excesses that Americans detest (such as exorbitant CEO salaries...

...We called this reporting “outside the beltwaf) It was always possible to find one or two individuals who fit the profile...

...The Clinton agenda comes much closer to matching these demands than the GOP’s...

...What he is alleged to have done is not within the bounds of what even today’s tolerant middle class considers acceptable...

...As commonly understood, this culPAUL GLASTRIS, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a senior writer for U.S...

...They want others to give them the benefit of the doubt on how they conduct their private lives, and hence are willing to give the same to others - including, apparently, the president of the United States...

...Here’s how Wolfe sums up the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor: You become undeserving, not because of who you are, and certainly not because you did the wrong thing, but because something is amiss in the way you think...

...The resulting analysis rings true to my own experience...

...They may have moral qualms about divorce and abortion, but they also have loved ones who’ve had them, and aren’t altogether sure they made the wrong decision...

...By this analysis, conservatives are off the mark when they interpret the public’s reaction to the Lewinsky scandal as an example of America’s moral decline - and as evidence that Clinton is accelerating that decline...

...For all his faults, the president does have an ear for nuance...

...I’d think, “you’re blowing your chance to get quoted in a national magazine...

...Most of those interviewed generally agree with the conservative critique of America - that softness toward criminals, easy divorce and abortion, permissive parenting, welfare programs that encourage illegitimacy, and the secular ideology of elites, have conspired to erode our moral sense...

...I’ll tell you, we could use a lot more like him...

...they celebrate ethnic, racial, and religious diversity...

...We’re on uncharted ground here, but in other contexts it’s clear that middle-class Americans do not tolerate repeated irresponsibility...

...But they part company with conservatives in that they “no longer believe that right and wrong provide unerring guidelines for informing them about how to lead their lives...

...Conservatives famously misread the “voter anger” they were picking up in their polling, interpreting it (and their electoral success in 1994) as evidence that voters wanted them to ban abortion, restrict immigration, and dismantle the federal government...

...I really don’t like Newt Gingrich,” a Brookline, Mass., dentist says to Wolfe, but when it comes to welfare for unwed mothers “there have to be limits...

...Often people would begin with the “right” answer, briskly delivered, but then add so many qualifiers as seemingly to contradict the position they started out with...

...Likewise, they have come to believe that a sort of Invisible Hand operates in the moral realm...

...But then they’d make it clear that they weren’t against all immigrants, only the ones who come here illegally, commit crimes, take undue advantage of welfare, don’t work hard, and don’t become citizens...

...The book is about the moral views of the American middle class...

...Fools...

...None of which is to say that the voters will forever withhold judgment from Clinton...

...Americans have not become moral relativists, says Wolfe, but “moral libertarians” who believe individuals should be their own moral guides...

...But these same people also see the benefits that come with the liberal-modernist stress on personal freedom and moral autonomy...

...The rest are fine, they’d say, better than fine...

...Rather than merely ask his subjects yeslno questions about their opinions on issues, as a pollster might do, he focused on how they qualified their answers...

...But when they tried to do just that, they sparked a public backlash from which they have yet to recover...

...Usually those stories were driven by some poll we’d done about “voter anger...

...But should that teenage mother go on to have another child out of wedlock, and another and another, she enters the ranks of the undeserving, and middle-class people lose patience...

...The former category includes those who have made moral blunders - an unwed teenager who gets pregnant, for instance...

...By (so far) withholding judgment, the public is not condoning adultery but asserting the right of individuals, when it comes to their personal lives, to make their own choices, and their own mistakes...

...But to get to them I’d have to listen to a dozen others who would deliver their opinions with so much on-the-one-hand-on-the-other nuance as to make it almost impossible to convey their views fairly in a small amount of space...

...In particular, the author, a prolific Boston University sociologist, tests the wildly held assumption that there is a "culture war" going on out there among the geneneral public (as opposed to among humanities professors and editorialists...

...Or they’d say, “Yes, absolutely, too many immigrants are being let into the country...

...News & World Report...

...Instead, the battle between traditionalist and modernist positions is going on inside the hearts and minds of individual Americans...

...Bit by bit they’d reveal themselves to be, in a hedging, unenthusiastic way, pro-choice...

...Partly as a result of their own personal moral quandaries, the American middle class has become profoundly nonjudgmental, observes Wolfe...

...my job was to find people whose opinions illustrated the poll results...

...In the early OS, I spent a lot of time on barstools in places like Akron and Green Bay, listening to “average Americans” vent about abortion, immigration, the government, or whatever issue my editors in Washington wanted to do a story about that week...

...that the government should be fixed, not dismantled...

...why, I know this guy, came here from Palstan without a dime, now he owns four taxis, works like a dog...

...but when we experience those problems, our very freedoms will help us find a way out.’’ Wove gained his insights in part because of the way he conducted his research...