I went to hear David Gergen give a lecture a few years ago. From his perspective as someone who'd been in the White House as an advisor to presidents from both sides of the aisle -- Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton -- he thought the polarization was a clear generational thing.
Before the '90s, the Presidents and all the Washington power players were of the World War II generation. That shared experience and sacrifice gave them the understanding that, at the end of the day, all their political disagreements notwithstanding, they were all still Americans fighting on the same side on behalf of one another.
The Clinton era, Gergen pointed out, marked the rise of the Vietnam generation to the top ranks of power -- and when you get right down to it, the culture clash of the '60s was never fully resolved, its bad feelings never entirely healed. The idea that large masses of Americans could assert their own moral compasses above the government's call to war -- at the same time that they were throwing away society's sexual mores, no less! -- was one that pushed an awful lot of conservatives and liberals from identifying their partisanship as merely political to identifying it as existential. Too many people on either side, politicians and regular citizens alike, now consider the other side to be philosophically anti-American -- and that's a really hard obstacle to get around.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-09-27 12:04 am (UTC)Before the '90s, the Presidents and all the Washington power players were of the World War II generation. That shared experience and sacrifice gave them the understanding that, at the end of the day, all their political disagreements notwithstanding, they were all still Americans fighting on the same side on behalf of one another.
The Clinton era, Gergen pointed out, marked the rise of the Vietnam generation to the top ranks of power -- and when you get right down to it, the culture clash of the '60s was never fully resolved, its bad feelings never entirely healed. The idea that large masses of Americans could assert their own moral compasses above the government's call to war -- at the same time that they were throwing away society's sexual mores, no less! -- was one that pushed an awful lot of conservatives and liberals from identifying their partisanship as merely political to identifying it as existential. Too many people on either side, politicians and regular citizens alike, now consider the other side to be philosophically anti-American -- and that's a really hard obstacle to get around.