America's new political center

'60s liberalism and '80s conservatism yield to synthesis.

from the July 3, 2007 edition

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By the 1980s, the left had gained control of the nation's preeminent cultural institutions, but the reenergized conservative movement, fueled in part by newly politicized evangelicals, had the advantage in the struggle for political power. Even as the activists who dominate the two major political parties hunkered down in their polarized extremes, neither side was able to capture the pragmatic middle or remake the nation in its image.

The "Aquarian left," as Lindsey calls it, celebrates diversity and inclusiveness, "while lacking due appreciation for the moral framework that sustains and advances progressive values." The right, meanwhile, "defends that framework, but does so on the basis of dogmatic beliefs that remain unreconciled" to 21st-century cultural openness.

Tuning out the divisive political rhetoric on the airwaves, a growing number of Americans, Lindsey says, have cobbled together an ideologically impure compromise between left and right in their own lives. The synthesis he describes is one of continuing strong commitments to family, work, and country, "tempered by a broad-minded tolerance of the country's diversity and a deep humility about telling others how they should live."

On the one hand, Americans embrace many of the core values they always did about God, mom, and apple pie; on the other, their attitudes on issues such as race and sex are vastly more liberal than they were two generations ago.

Of course, the problem is that muddled and pragmatic compromises transcend left and right, and accommodation is not articulated by any major political party. The electoral process in large ways and small emphasizes each party's "base" – exacerbating the extremes. Just watch the absolutism in the presidential primary campaign unfolding (unendingly) before our eyes now, or think back to the Swift-Boating of the last go-round.

While many Americans have already found ways to mend the divisions wrought by the 1960s and 1970s – the era political economist Francis Fukuyama has called the Great Disruption – we won't really emerge from that transformative chrysalis until politics achieves the same kind of pragmatic synthesis.

• Gregory Rodriguez writes a column for the Los Angeles Times. ©2007 Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

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