How to Explain America's Divide?

With the election just two months away, it is crystal clear that there is a profound division within the American electorate, with far more voters than usual already certain of how they will vote and extremely passionate about their choice.  George W. Bush is both widely admired and widely reviled personally as well as politically, and there is, between him and John Kerry, a deep split in the nation, perhaps a greater divide than at any time since Joe McCarthy was tearing at the national consensus in his hunt for Communists among liberals.

Exactly how should we characterize this split? Many journalists focus on what they consider an ideological division along red state/blue state lines, with conservatives preponderate in some regions, liberals in others.  Some writers stress that the United States is on a wartime footing, and emphasize that the split is between loyalty and criticism during a time of crisis. This is an Orwellian proposition, for it looks like the Republicans will use what appears to be permanent war to keep the American populace from concentrating on the economy, the environment or even foreign policy disasters like Iraq. It's 1984 20 years on.

I would like to propose as an explanation for this social duality, an analysis first proposed, as far as I know, by the gifted American philosopher and psychologist William James, more than one hundred years ago, in his brilliant book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. James suggested in that study that people could be divided between the "double-minded" and the "single-minded." The double-minded see the world in complex and indeterminate ways, finding contradiction, irony, skepticism, cynicism and uncertainly not only the institutions and in other people, but in themselves as well.  The single-minded shape their sense of self, others and society into simple divisions between good and evil, inside the boat and outside it, with righteousness always trouncing ambiguity. Modernism versus that good old-time values.

One half's 'stupid,' the other 'sins'

Clearly the single-minded are both militant and anti-intellectual.  They just hate uncertainly and sophisticated analysis and want to work through the projection of absolute categories on the world. The double-minded believe the single-minded to be intellectually moronic, incapable of realizing their own limitations and hypocrisies, uninterested in exploring the wider world with an open mind. The American population is now almost evenly divided between these two frameworks for viewing the world. And they are not communicating anything but mutual antipathy.

Most but not all of the single-minded are Evangelical Christians, while most but not all of the double-minded are secularists. John Edwards is a partial exception. Clearly so is Bill Clinton--as his autobiography makes clear, he is a deeply traditional Christian, and yet he is double-minded. In fact, born-again Christians, like other fundamentalists, ought to be able to see that they too are sinners and thereby avoid self-righteousness, but the dominant majority among them do not cultivate either this form of introspection or the toleration of others that such questioning of self would imply.

Bush's big conversion

In many ways the Evangelical conversion experience is an almost instantaneous emotional leap from the double-minded to the single-minded state--from confusion to clarity, from sinfulness to cleansing, from ambiguity to absolute truth, from introspection to faith. Take George W. Bush. Until age 40 he was a rude, alcoholic, cocaine-loving wastrel, a spoiled rich kid who failed at everything he accomplished.  Then he found Christ and all within him vaulted from corruption to salvation. I am quite certain that he became a better person for his conversion, but he also took his new religiosity and imposed it on the political world, as have many others of his ilk. His classic single-mindedness appeals to millions who have had the same religious experience. They share his deeply felt view of the world--they impose the same grid on experience as does he. In times of fear and potential chaos, he seems to them a tower of strength and decisiveness.

By contrast, John Kerry is clearly the other sort, and he appeals to the double-minded half of the electorate. Though he is a deeply religious Roman Catholic, he keeps spirituality to himself (as did Pierre Trudeau). He understands complexity in foreign policy and has an abiding interest in other cultures than the American one.  He even speaks French with his brother when they are having intimate conversations. He is in fact an intellectual and a modernist. The other sort. To the single-minded he is the flip-flop man; to his supporters he is capable of keeping contradictory ideas in his head at the same time.

Only God can cross over

Where is the potential common ground here? One Democratic tactic has been to nominate candidates like Clinton (and Edwards, who almost made it), who can use the evangelical language of the single-minded while somehow convincing the double-minded that they are part of that world too. In this election, John Kerry's handlers are stressing his Vietnam war-hero record (contrasted to the AWOLism of George Bush), to suggest that when it comes to the war on terror, it is Kerry who has the right, single-minded tough stuff. He is pushing something about himself that, while true, is not really characteristic of the man as a whole, while Bush's backers are selling exactly who he is.

This does not mean that Kerry is bound to lose, but that the election is based on a passionate and deep social-psychological division and not just on normal political disagreement.  It is a holy war of sorts, very visceral and depressing, and very untrue to the actual problems confronting Americans, and by extension Canadians too. Never the twain shall meet. And this division is not just one for election time.  Bush, more than any president for a long time, governs in a single-minded way. His style is not a disguise for something more complicated, not just bull feathers designed to sell him to single-minded voters. What we see is what we are getting.

Historian Michael Fellman is Director of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Simon Fraser University.