The Truce Behind the Culture Wars

Looking at a map, you’d swear the west side of Houston and the west side of Manhattan are both in the United States. But they might as well be different countries when it comes to impeachment and the culture wars raging in America.

“I hate Clinton. I hate everything about the man,” says Harvey Golden, a computer salesman drinking beer in a Houston sports bar. “I hate him for dodging the draft, for not inhaling, for treating women the way he does and for just being so damned insufferable. He’s a product of the ‘60s, and he has no sense of morality.”

On New York’s Upper West Side, writer Sidney Zion is equally intense: “You want to know why the left swallows hard and defends Clinton?” he asks. “It’s because they don’t want to give a victory to the racist scum, the anti-abortionists and the Christian right. That’s who’s trying to bring him down, and that’s what’s at stake here.”

These are the pure, venomous voices of America’s culture wars--a shouting match that has become increasingly strident in the media and Congress during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. But even though these sentiments echo through the public debate, especially among the political and media elite, pollsters and sociologists suggest that the clash isn’t at all reflective of what most Americans think. The real story, they say, is that the majority has reached a broad consensus on many social issues, ranging from personal morality to sexual behavior, and has consistently ignored the more extreme aspects of the impeachment debate.

Full of apocalyptic sound and fury, the culture wars are nothing new. Many historians view them as a continuation of battles dating back to the 19th century over issues such as temperance, religion, immigration and tensions between urban and rural America. Every decade, it seems, has had its own Armageddon: McCarthyism and Red scares in the ‘50s; the Scopes trial over teaching the theory of evolution in the ‘20s; the quest for women’s suffrage at the dawn of the 20th century.

“What we have now is a modern version of old battles,” says Morris Dickstein, author of “The Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties.” “But what is new is that many of the issues are settled; we are seeing broad agreement on them.”

This new American consensus, which grew out of the turbulent 1960s, awarded crucial victories to both sides, notes historian Theodore Roszak, who has written extensively about the baby boom generation.

Echoing views held by many observers, Roszak says the right fundamentally won the political war, given the dominance of conservative policies today. But the left won the key cultural battles over issues such as sexual freedom and tolerance for individual lifestyles. For many Americans, these questions have been resolved, and Roszak pointedly notes that “the boomers aren’t crazy college kids anymore. They’re 80 million people with families. They are mainstream Americans.”

Mainstream Has Spoken Loud and Clear

This mainstream has spoken loud and clear on the Clinton scandal: In a recent USA Today/CNN poll, 79% believed the president committed perjury, yet 58% said he should remain in office. Sixty-seven percent believed Clinton had broken laws, but 76% said the case involved sexual matters that should have remained private. The picture that emerges is of a prosperous, largely suburban majority that frowns on the president’s behavior yet is not swayed by calls to remove him from power.

It’s a far cry from the Sturm und Drang that flares on all-news cable TV, radio talk shows, in newspaper columns and on the Internet. For culture warriors, impeachment is less about legal culpability and partisan wrangling than a host of unresolved social issues that have divided the nation for decades: sexual freedom versus moral restraint; the values of boomers versus those of the World War II generation; the right to a “zone of privacy” in one’s personal behavior versus a more stringent code of ethics.

There’s also a revenge factor, a belief by some that Clinton’s impeachment is well-deserved payback for Watergate, and an angry response from others that Clinton’s crimes are not at all comparable to those of President Nixon. Yet all of this illustrates a key paradox: While extreme voices predominate in the debate, an exhausted public--the ‘90s version of Nixon’s famous “Silent Majority” during the ‘70s--tunes out much of the superheated rhetoric.

Sometimes it’s hard to ignore. Conservative pundit Patrick J. Buchanan has likened impeachment to a moral crusade, arguing: “It was in the mud at Woodstock that Clinton’s peers publicly embraced the morality of the Humanist Manifesto: Consensual sex has no moral component. Whether one does drugs is one’s own business . . . and there exists no objective moral order.”

Firing back, Katha Pollit wrote in The Nation: “The Republicans wanted a showdown on morality and they got one. People cling to Clinton because they don’t believe he’s done anything so terrible, [since] he is, after all, a politician; they hate and fear Clinton’s enemies, whom they see, correctly, as narrow-minded reactionaries with a dangerous agenda.”

Feud Grows Bitter; Accusation Traded

Undaunted by public apathy, the feud has grown bitter, like a stubborn playground fight that most students ignore. Both sides accuse the other of hypocrisy, an accusation that is intrinsically hard to defend against.

The resilience of this moral feud suggests that Clinton has become a human canvas on whom millions of people heap their insecurities, hopes, resentfulness and rage. He is a deeply polarizing figure, even as the two political parties battling over his future become more alike by the day. Few issues of consequence seem to separate them beyond budget squabbles, yet another indication that the culture wars are vivid but overblown.

“Democrats and Republicans are converging in so many ways,” says Christopher Caldwell, a writer for the conservative Weekly Standard. “But still, you don’t talk about sex the same way in the South as you do in the Northeast. . . . Southern California is not Ohio. . . . When you break it down by region, many of these quarrels look larger than life.”

‘Where Are the Feminists?’

At Shucker’s Sportsbar in Houston’s chic Galleria mall, Golden, 47, orders another beer and reflects on the source of his deep hatred for Clinton. It isn’t just the bad things he’s done, says the Houston native. It’s the fact that he smirked and lied on TV--and got away with it.

“This man violated rules about harassment in an office that would have gotten someone like me fired,” he says. “And I wonder, where are the feminists? They’re hypocrites too.”

It’s hard to find a kind word for the president in the affluent, solidly Republican precincts of West Houston. The 7th Congressional District, represented by Bill Archer, is a sprawl of upscale malls, elegant homes, churches and country clubs. West Houston is home to former President Bush and is “arguably the most Republican district in the nation,” according to the Almanac of National Politics.

There aren’t many people walking the tree-lined streets of Harris County, but when you track them down, these Houstonians are ready to unload on a president whose very name triggers anger.

“The Clinton thing isn’t about Lewinsky; it’s about the lack of morality in this country,” says Janet Chenoweth, toweling off after a vigorous workout at her health club. “He represents a disturbing change, something that came along with his generation, which is that there is no right or wrong on morality. You make up your own rules.”

Is Clinton a true symbol of the ‘60s? Austen Furse, a money manager and former director of policy planning for Bush, believes it’s unfair to tar all boomers, but he sees a troubling link between the president and his peers.

“Bill Clinton is like the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers in the ‘60s,” Furse suggests. “He’s not entirely representative of his generation, but he’s a super-concentrated distillation of its worst disabilities.”

Those disabilities, he says, include “sanctimony, moral hauteur, the presumption that all of your enemies are bad people, a moral relativism and an exaggerated sense of ethical mission.” Ultimately, Clinton is a person “who many on the left find hard to condemn without admitting their own values were mistaken.”

Clinton, Furse adds, has become his generation’s equivalent of Alger Hiss, the State Department official--and liberal cause celebre--who was accused of spying for the Soviets during the 1940s and later convicted of perjury. Clinton “makes liberals squirm, because for them to desert him now would be to question their most deeply held values.”

Nancy Palm, a 77-year-old activist who chaired Harris County’s Republican Party during Watergate, also considers Clinton a moral disgrace. “He’s a sad symbol of his generation, because he typifies the ‘if it feels good, do it’ belief of the ‘60s,” Palm says. “The man desecrated our civil life. If he wanted sex so bad, he should have gone to a Motel 6, not the Oval Office.”

On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Zion laughs at the thought that Clinton should be tormented anymore for private sexual behavior with a consenting adult. But he doesn’t think the current spectacle of impeachment is very amusing.

“You don’t destroy a man be-cause he had some yockahoola,” snorts Zion, a resident of New York’s 8th Congressional District, which also includes Greenwich Village, SoHo and parts of Brooklyn. “This ain’t the crime of the century.”

It takes more than a lurid sex scandal to shock residents of this middle-class neighborhood. A historic incubator of left-wing causes, the Upper West Side is filled with stately apartment buildings, bustling sidewalks and a graying population that looks like it came right out of the 1960s. The heavily Jewish area, represented by Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler, supported Republican Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani two years ago, but on most national issues it remains dependably left of center.

As he munches a bagel at Zabars delicatessen, attorney Bruce Cohen typifies many here who were irked by the graphic language and content of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report on the Lewinsky case.

“I wasn’t much of a Clinton defender until I read that report,” Cohen says. “And it was wrong, I thought. All that stuff should have remained private. It’s his own business.”

When people criticize Clinton as a symbol of the ‘60s, boomers here rush to their generation’s defense. Many of them take the attacks personally, as if their very integrity was being ridiculed.

“Thank God for the ‘60s!” says Alisa Mitchell, schlepping two small children and three shopping bags down Broadway. “The ‘60s got us more personal freedom and the right to abortion. That may be in danger now, if the right wins this war.” Does she fret over the president’s behavior? “I do, but people who talk about absolute morals scare me even more.”

A multitude of Clinton’s defenders don’t care much for him personally, yet they are alarmed by his enemies.

“A lot of us were disgusted by what he did, but we got in line behind him when we looked at the far-righters,” says Ronnie Eldridge, a Democratic City Council member. “They don’t believe in a woman’s right to equality. They aren’t very conciliatory on race. And so we fight back.”

As for the “moral virus” of the ‘60s, New Yorkers give as good as they get. Sal Nunziato, who runs a music shop, rolls his eyes when told that some on the right blame “rock ‘n’ roll ethics” for the nation’s ills.

“I once had an aunt who told me that the Beatles caused the Vietnam War,” he cracks. “And people who think like that are lunatics. How could you possibly bridge the gap with them?”

For most Americans, the gap is not a big concern in their daily lives. While disputes are normal in a democracy, there is a danger in exaggerating them, says sociologist Alan Wolfe, author of “One Nation After All,” a probing study of middle-class attitudes.

“The overwhelming majority of people in public opinion polls say they are fed up with this [impeachment debate] and not simply bored,” he notes. “They don’t like extremism or partisanship; they don’t like the fanaticism or name-calling that comes with culture wars, and so they tune them out.”

Harsh Judgment Aimed Inward

Examining in-depth the views of 200 people on religion, patriotism, family and racism, Wolfe found common ground emerging, a tolerance for virtually all lifestyles except homosexuality; he detected that while Americans are willing to judge themselves harshly, they are notably reluctant to criticize others. He studied eight middle-class communities in Massachusetts, Georgia, Oklahoma and Southern California.

“There’s no indication that people are viewing this [impeachment] as some sort of momentous battle that has ramifications beyond the fate of Bill Clinton,” says Kathleen Francovik, director of polling for CBS News. “This [culture war] is not part of the normal discourse of day-to-day life for most people.”

In a Washington Post-Kaiser Foundation survey last year, 74% said baby boomers share most or some of their values; roughly 60% said the same of both Clinton and members of the Christian Coalition. A majority gave full or grudging approval to divorce, sex before marriage, interracial marriage, abortion and having children out of wedlock. They did not approve, however, of adulterous affairs and homosexual marriages.

The great American consensus is alive and well, but it is often drowned out by politicians on the left and right, as well as a media increasingly driven by tabloid values. This is a big change, given the traditional roles of the two parties, the news establishment and the public.

Once, experts say, political leaders and a handful of news organizations had a moderating affect on extreme political views erupting from the grass roots; they tempered the national debate and pushed America to the center. Now, public opinion is braking the more extreme views emanating from Washington and a media filled with new, strident voices.

Amid the tumult, few expect culture wars to cease. Yet some predict a rapprochement may be possible.

The right, for example, may be reluctantly learning to live within an “expanded zone of toleration” when it comes to sex, suggests Norman Podhoretz, former Commentary editor and a father of neoconservatism. Meanwhile, he says, the left has had to swallow Clinton’s moderation of the Democratic Party and its embrace of potent conservative ideas, like welfare reform and budget surpluses.

Paul Berman, who has written about the political struggles of the ‘60s, believes feminists and others may be forced to rethink their automatic support of people who bring complaints under sexual harassment laws. “Some excellent principles have come back to haunt us in ways that we would never have predicted.”

Similarly, the right has seen its crusade against sexual permissiveness backfire, Berman says. “Their emphasis on family values made some good points, but conservatives ended up terrifying a large number of people in the population.”

Ultimately, there may be no way for the Harvey Goldens and Sidney Zions of this world to find common ground. But they may be the exception in years to come, says Wolfe, because America’s culture wars do not threaten national stability.

“The power of the majority is the best vaccine against such rancor,” Wolfe notes. “We used to hear the voices of authority saying: ‘Grow up, you’re still trapped in the ‘60s!’ But now, thank goodness, that’s the voice of the American people.”

Times researcher Lianne Hart contributed to this story.