American culture is changing, affecting our politics and pointing toward a brighter future, but it creates significant dark spots.
Because of its speed, the most astonishing cultural trend is the movement for gay marriage. In just 17 years, the situation has changed completely.
National polls went from 27 percent for gay marriage and 68 percent opposed in 1996, to 40-56 in 2008, and to 53-39 in 2013. Recent state polls show majorities in most states support, or at least do not oppose, gay marriage. Only in the South and some midwestern states do majorities still oppose same-sex marriage. The change is significant because it represents a breakthrough for rationality. We’ve got to get over our harmful shibboleths regarding gays, guns, abortion and other social issues.
Guns have been front page news since the Sandy Hook school assault rifle massacre. Guns seem to bring out the worst in some of our conservative citizens. America, where there are 30,000 firearm-related homicides and suicides every year, is an irrational anomaly among other nations. For example, following another assault rifle massacre by a deranged individual who killed 35 and wounded 21 in 1996 in Australia, that country banned semiautomatic weapons including assault weapons, and mandated the buyback and destruction of more than half a million such firearms. The annual homicide rate is 1 to 2 per 100,000 in other industrialized nations, but 6 per 100,000 in the U.S.
It’s a real commentary on American antiintellectuality that, even after Sandy Hook, the National Rifle Association’s scare tactics can still pressure congressmen to vote against gun safety.
Nevertheless I see hope for the future because the pro-gun movement has been looking like a paranoid mix of Charlton Heston and John Wayne, a butt of jokes and a clear contrast to people like Gabrielle Gifford and others who work for gun safety.
It’s encouraging that the household gun-ownership rate has fallen from 50 percent in the 1970s to 35 percent in the 2000s, and that the drop is even steeper outside the South. Even in the gun-prone southern and mountain states, the rate has fallen from 65 percent in the 1970s to 40 percent. Gunsare still selling like hotcakes, because gun zealots fantasize jack-booted government troops are about to smash through their doorways.
But the culture is changing.
Most people realize, and scientific research confirms, guns in the home make people less safe. I’m hoping for a turnaround on gun safety (please don’t call it “gun control”) similar to America’s turnaround on gay marriage.
Another bright spot is the rise of women in politics.
Like gay marriage, this has been a fast-breaking story.
There have been only 44 female U.S. senators in history, yet 20 of them are serving today. Although female politicos include some macho types like Sarah Palin, women’s votes in Congress tend to lie on the side of humane liberal values. We’re going to see more women in Congress, and it’s going to improve America’s politics.
One dark spot is the rise of conservative Republicans in the South. It’s a necessary evil. The 2012 elections, for example, brought fresh air to the nation but a blight upon Arkansas.
After 150 years, the South has gotten sufficiently over its Civil War fury to vote members of that “Yankee” party into office in droves throughout the solid South, which is suddenly solidly Republican. The transformation began with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, and transfigured Arkansas during just the past two election cycles. It’s going to set the South back, as backwoods ignorance conquers Arkansas and other southern state governments, but it will ultimately usher in a better South and a more unified America as a more authentic politics teaches us the error of our ways.
Those ways have deep roots. Beginning perhaps with the pre-revolutionary Scots-Irish immigration to America, an antiintellectual, gun-loving, fundamentalist culture took root throughout the South, with strong branches today also in the Rocky Mountain west and midwestern plains. This history is recounted in former Senator Jim Webb’s sympathetic book “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.”
For America’s and the planet’s sake we have to move beyond the conservative, insular aspects of our culture. Now the demarcation lines are clear, each party occupies its own natural turf, and the liberal-conservative debate is out in the open. Others might regard this as a bad thing because it discourages compromise. I regard it as a good thing because now we can have an honest debate about the things that matter.
ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 04/14/2013