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Observers of contemporary American politics have apparently reached a new consensus around the proposition that old disagreements about economics now pale in comparison to new divisions based on sexuality, morality, and religion, divisions so deep and bitter as to justify talk of war in describing them. Yet research indicates otherwise. Publicly available databases show that the culture war script embraced by journalists and politicos lies somewhere between simple exaggeration and sheer nonsense. There is no culture war in the United States; no battle for the soul of America rages, at least none that most Americans are aware of.

To be sure, said Fiorina, there are noisy warriors on both sides who like to skirmish and joust, and, no doubt, “many of the activists in the political parties and the various cause groups do hate each other and regard themselves as combatants in a war. But their hatreds and battles are not shared by the great mass of Americans—certainly nowhere near ‘80–90 percent of the country’—who are for the most part moderate in their views and tolerant in their manner. A case in point: To their embarrassment, some GOP senators recently learned that ordinary Americans view gay marriage in somewhat less apocalyptic terms than do the activists in the Republican base.”

If centrist swing voters have vanished from American politics, said Fiorina,

how did the six blue states in which George Bush ran most poorly in 2000 all elect Republican governors in 2002 and how did Arnold Schwarzenegger run away with the 2003 recall in blue California? If almost all voters have already made up their minds about their 2004 votes, then why did John Kerry surge to a 14-point trial-heat lead when polls offered voters the prospect of a Kerry-McCain ticket? If voter partisanship has hardened into concrete, why do virtually identical majorities in both red and blue states favor divided control of the presidency and Congress, rather than unified control by their party? Finally, and ironically, if voter positions have become so uncompromising, why did a recent CBS story titled “Polarization in America” report that 76 percent of Republicans, 87 percent of Democrats, and 86 percent of Independents would like to see elected officials compromise more rather than stick to their principles?

No question, Republican and Democratic elites are polarized, Fiorina concluded, “but it is a mistake to assume that such elite polarization is equally present in the broader public. It is not. However much they may claim that they are responding to the public, political elites do not take extreme positions because voters make them. Rather, by presenting them with polarizing alternatives, elites make voters appear polarized, but the reality shows through clearly when voters have a choice of more moderate alternatives—as with the aforementioned Republican governors.”

Voters have recognized this. A Rasmussen poll taken in October 2010 (just before the midterm elections) found that a plurality—43 percent—of likely voters believed that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans in Congress were “the party of the American people.”

This disjunction is a major fact of the nation’s political life. It is a major reason that the United States has failed to address the four major challenges that it faces. It also bears on the question of what can and should be done to shock the political system into addressing those challenges, a question that we take up in chapter 15. How could this gap between American politics and American society have become so large?

The Way We Were

In the 1950s and 1960s, when the baby boom generation was growing up, both the Democratic and the Republican Parties were coalitions of liberals and conservatives. (Some political scientists at the time even called it a “four-party system.”) The Democrats included conservative Southerners, whose opposition to the Republican Party dated from the Civil War. They became known as “Dixiecrats