The twin doctrines of identity politics and political correctness were at the peak of their influence when I arrived at college in 1986, part of the class born during that horrific year when Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated in a span of nine weeks. Twenty years after the marches that gave us civil rights, and barely a decade removed from the war over “women’s lib,” American campuses resonated with the tinny echoes of those titanic crusades — battles over what qualified as acceptable terminologies in race and sex (“woman” yes, “girl” no; “Latino” yes, “Hispanic” no) and competitions over who remained more oppressed than whom.
At Tufts, we took mandatory pass/fail classes in diversity, which, for white men like me, were essentially re-education seminars; we were to admit out loud, for instance, that when we thought of neighborhoods like the South Bronx as dangerous, we were making a value judgment having nothing to do with crime rates (still soaring at the time) and everything to do with our inescapable racism. That first year, a white sophomore from Kansas ignited peace rallies and made national news when he said he had been assaulted by thugs who called him “Jew boy” and “nigger lover.” This story struck us an entirely plausible, despite the fact that never in our upper-middle-class lives had we heard anyone actually use those terms. The university later concluded that the student fabricated the entire affair.
These experiences no doubt had their value, instilling in us an intense awareness of society’s fissures, and such a period of hypervigilance was probably unavoidable in any event. America in the Reagan years was reorienting itself after a dizzying and traumatic period of social upheaval, groping to find some balance between genuine enlightenment and a new kind of intellectual tyranny. (It was what a lot of white Americans perceived as the latter that was responsible, in part, for Reagan’s rise in the first place.) But looking back now, as the nation prepares to elect either its first black president or its first female vice president, the fierce identity wars of those years seem strangely passé, as much a relic of the age as those Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers and the Thompson Twins on vinyl.
In the years that followed, each successive crop of high-school and college graduates staggered out into a world where a white man was likely, at one time or another, to have a boss who wasn’t white or wasn’t a man; where notions of race became jumbled in the faces of children who, like Barack Obama, couldn’t check any one box on a census form; where discussions of gender were as apt to focus on sexual orientation as on the glass ceiling. Racism and sexism still thrive in America (witness the insidious e-mail messages about Obama’s secret Muslim past or the Hillary Clinton “nutcrackers” sold at Washington airports), just as a politics driven mainly by victimization still has its steadfast adherents on campus and elsewhere. But for many more Americans — at least those of us too young to be branded by the culture divide of the 1960s and 1970s — neither prejudice nor grievance seems sufficient to the complex realities of a country where our divisions are as likely to be about income and geography as they are about race and gender.
The new age has been slow to dawn on Washington, where cultural genomes stubbornly resist adaptation. Although elite men’s colleges began admitting women in the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1993, when Hillary Clinton arrived in Washington, that the country got a first lady who was an accomplished lawyer and policy expert in her own right. (Four women arrived in the Senate that same year, representing what came to be known as “the year of the woman.”) Even today, a modest 16 of the nation’s 100 senators and only 8 of its 50 governors are women. Among African-Americans, the numbers are even starker; Obama is the only black senator in Washington (a number unchanged from 40 years ago), and currently there are just two black governors.
No one should mistake this, however, for a useful measure of where most of the country really resides. Much as we’d like to think the reverse is true, politics is generally the last of our institutions to catch up to social change, probably because so much of it is conducted by parties and representatives whose experiences are, by design, rooted firmly in the past. After all, civil rights protests had been going on for almost 20 years when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. Radio and television were fixtures in the American living room before politicians ever got around to using them. And if politics in Washington has largely lagged behind the workplace and the local mall in reflecting a more integrated and less rigid America, then politics as depicted in pop culture certainly hasn’t.
It’s probably not a coincidence that important aspects of this historic presidential campaign were uncannily envisioned by television dramas of recent years. In the final season of the NBC show “The West Wing,” a young Latino congressman won the Democratic nomination and ran against an independent-minded Republican senator disliked by the base of his own party. In ABC’s shorter-lived “Commander-in-Chief,” Geena Davis played an inexperienced vice president who was selected by her conservative running mate in an effort to attract women voters. (The president in that series died in the first episode, leaving Davis in charge. Clearly, John McCain wasn’t watching.) Even the right-leaning drama “24” had the temerity to cast not one but two black presidents — a decision that seemed to have no effect on viewers’ abilities to suspend their disbelief. You might see in some of these depictions a liberal plot to create multicultural role models, or a condescending effort to create an alternate, feel-good America without its manifest inequality. But it’s also possible that those Hollywood types that so many of us like to revile — the most avid and self-interested monitors of changing American attitudes — simply understood better than the politicians and their pollsters where American politics was headed next.
And so, for younger voters at least, what’s truly remarkable, for all the discussion about the subtext of race and gender in the campaign, is how much of an afterthought history has actually been. Obama had already won his first caucus by the time racial tension entered the Democratic primaries; no one ever seemed to question his viability as a candidate in the way they did Jesse Jackson’s two decades years earlier. Clinton ran not as the woman in the race but as the establishment candidate, awash in money and endorsements. The criticism of Sarah Palin immediately after she was named to the ticket elicited some cries of sexism from the Republican camp, but her own biting response at the convention centered, instead, on the contempt displayed by big-city Democrats and reporters for small-town Americans. Attitudes about race and sex are certain to be factors in the minds of many voters (there must be a reason Obama fared poorly with white, working-class men in the primaries), but they are only a few factors among many others, rather than the decisive disqualifiers they would have been 20 years ago. It turns out that the biggest deal about racial and gender identity in the campaign is that, especially to younger Americans who live and work in a vastly changed country, it isn’t such a very big deal after all.
Maybe this is why John McCain’s selection of Palin, bold as it was, felt oddly retro — like another Republican moderate, George H. W. Bush, elevating Clarence Thomas over all the other judicial luminaries in America in 1991. Say what you will about Palin’s qualifications for the job (she does give a pretty great speech), but no one will argue that her elevation to the national stage wasn’t premised primarily on old-school identity politics, the ’80s-era idea that women pledge allegiance to the family of women more than they do to party or ideology. Palin was elevated from obscurity largely on the basis of her womanhood and treated by her party and the media, during the convention in St. Paul, as if she had just won “American Idol.” (During the night of Palin’s big speech, a CNN reporter sat at a restaurant in Anchorage with Palin’s sister, who recalled her response to the news of the selection: “Oh, my gosh, you’ve got to be kidding. This is great, but this is crazy.”) In this way, Palin has more in common with Geraldine Ferraro than she does with Clinton, her candidacy having been born of gimmickry even as it struck a blow for progress.
It will be a little while before we know whether Palin really does appeal to the sisterhood of persuadable voters, but the early returns suggest that the assumptions underlying the pick might have been outdated. In a typical survey, conducted for the liberal group Emily’s List, 59 percent of women — and an even higher number of women who identified themselves as independents — thought McCain’s choice had been mostly a result of political calculation. It probably doesn’t help that McCain telegraphs a paternal awkwardness in his appearances with Palin, as if he isn’t quite sure where he should be standing. A guy’s guy who cherishes gridiron heroics and whose closest aides have always been men, McCain seems slightly miscast as a gender pioneer. If, as the old joke went, the first President Bush reminded many women of their first husbands, then McCain may well remind them of their first bosses — well-meaning and eager to evolve but never really comfortable unless he’s helping you on with your coat.
The real danger here for McCain is not only that his vision of gender politics is stuck somewhere in the ’80s but also that his governing vision will follow suit. For much of the last decade, McCain gave the impression of having glimpsed the future more clearly than most of his party’s aging leaders; he seemed to understand, much to the dismay of Republican culture warriors, that old causes of right and left were giving way to a less dogmatic and divisive call for reform. As a presidential nominee, however, McCain has politely declined to shake his party from its ideological inertia. (Although surely even he winced when Mitt Romney exhorted the convention-goers in St. Paul to end the dominance of permissive liberals over Washington, as if this were 1972 and he were rising up to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment.)
In fact, Palin’s conservatism on issues like gun ownership and abortion enables McCain to placate, yet again, the most doctrinaire elements in his own party, while her being a woman is supposed to signal to McCain’s admirers that he remains a maverick at heart. This last theme is the one McCain hammered at again and again in his convention speech. Independent voters, it seems, are to believe that, after winning office as a conservative ideologue, McCain will throw off his evangelical cloak and there, just underneath, will be the red, white and blue tights of the antiestablishment superhero.
The problem with this plan is that such postinaugural transformations are never really possible. The way you win the presidency forecloses certain options for governing; factions you offend during the campaign don’t want to give you any victories once you take office, and if you then try to distance yourself from the people who did support you, you end up with a coalition of no one. This is largely why Bill Clinton, having antagonized much of his own base in 1992, found himself barely able to muscle a few pieces of big legislation through a Democratic Congress, and it’s why George W. Bush, after the long standoff in Florida, never had a chance of building bipartisan bridges in Washington. If McCain campaigns on the outdated platform of a culture warrior, then he will have little choice but to govern on it too.
This is, after all, the point of this election business — not simply the pursuit of power or social progress, but the task of governing. Voters seem to understand that, which is why most are neither consumed by their prejudices nor swept away by the promise of historic firsts. Race and gender will influence the outcome of the campaign, but to this point, at least, they are not the influences that count most; voters want to know whether Obama is ready to assume the presidency and whether Palin would have the instincts to inherit it. Twenty years ago, it might have been impossible to have either of those conversations without being shouted down by charges of oppression. Now it’s all politics as usual, and that’s a kind of progress, too.