COLUMN LEFT / ROBERT S. McELVAINE : GOP ‘Values’? Read Their Lip-Service : Polarization of Americans, a staple since Nixon, looks really shabby on Columbus Day.

In addition to being the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ first landfall in the Western Hemisphere, today is the 100th anniversary of the first public recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. The pledge was used at the dedication of the grounds for the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a world’s fair that in 1893 celebrated the Genoese sailor’s transatlantic voyage.

Four years ago, George Bush laid claim to the pledge for the Republican Party as fully as Columbus laid claim to lands in the New World for Spain. But today’s juxtaposition of the two anniversaries highlights the hypocrisy of Republican lip-service to a pledge that speaks of “one nation, indivisible.”

The major long-term significance of Columbus’ voyage is that it led to the mixing of the people of the world on an unprecedented scale and set in motion the process of making what would become the United States the most ethnically diverse society the world has known.

It is against the centrifugal forces inevitable in such a society that the Pledge of Allegiance speaks. If such a nation is to survive, special efforts must be made to bring different people together and make them understand that they are one nation.

Yet there has been an abiding temptation throughout our country’s history to work the ethnic and cultural fault lines of this diverse nation for political gain. In recent years, the Republicans have frequently succumbed to that temptation by exploiting what are called “wedge issues.”

The Republicans’ success with this tactic dates back to the 1968 campaign of Richard M. Nixon. While Nixon was promising to “bring us together,” what he and his staff were doing was summed up later by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew as “positive polarization”--”to divide on authentic lines.” The polarization they promoted was negative for the country but positive for the party. Patrick J. Buchanan stated the objective succinctly in a memo to Nixon: “Cut . . . the country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”

The driving of wedges between larger and smaller parts of the population has been the essential Republican strategy for winning all but one presidential election in the past quarter of a century. Their 1992 national convention left no doubt that they are at it again.

The Republicans’ wedges put the lie to their pledges; they have greatly harmed our “one nation, indivisible.”

The wedge that the GOP has used most frequently and effectively is race. From John Mitchell’s “Southern strategy” of 1968, through Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” of 1980 and George Bush’s Willie Horton of 1988, to Buchanan’s “take back our cities” this year, Republicans have tried to pit the white majority against the black minority. The arithmetic is simple: Whites vastly outnumber blacks in the United States, so the party that can drive a wedge between the races and identify itself with the whites will win elections.

Four years ago, Bush called for a “kinder, gentler” nation. This year, his party’s platform is titled “Uniting Our Family, Our World.” Both themes echo Nixon’s “bring us together.” But the basis of all three campaigns was to use wedges to do the reverse. Wedges promote neither a kinder, gentler nation nor family values. Splitting the people and turning segment against segment prevents the nation from viewing itself as a family.

It was Rich Bond (has there ever been a more fitting name for a Republican?), chairman of the party that talks of “uniting our country,” who made the ultimate unkind, ungentle, us/them comment when he said of Democrats: “We are America. These other people are not America.”

The key question about the sort of society that issued from the mixing of people following Columbus’ voyage has always been whether diversity is a blessing or a curse. Since diversity is an essential part of what the United States is all about, most of us think it a blessing; but Republican wedges have contributed greatly to trying to turn it into a curse.

Turning Americans against one another for political purposes will make diversity our undoing, as it has been of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Then we will become what many schoolchildren think the pledge says: “One nation, invisible “--no nation at all.

A gentleman, Confucius said, is someone who does “not preach what he practices till he practices what he preaches.”

Now, there is some advice that the not-so-gentle men of the Grand Old Party should take to heart. We might add to it that a gentleman does not pledge allegiance to a nation that he is trying to split apart with wedges.