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I was chatting last night with a friend who suggested that for the 21st century United States, the dominant issues in its political life are those of Third Republic France: God, the Church, and their relationship to national life in all of its manifestations.
Consider: The results of the US Presidential election indicate a very sharp divide between the red and the blue states. This divide, it can be demonstrated, stems from widely divergent attitudes on issues ranging from sexuality and the family to the presence of religious symbols in state institutions to foreign and military policies. Most of these issues, though, have emerged from deeper divisions between relatively urbanized, secularized, and left-leaning city-dwellers--particularly those living on the Pacific coast, in the upper Midwest, and in the northeastern United States--and everyone else. It is generally agreed, by themselves as well as by their detractors, that these urbanites empathize strongly with the postmodern, secular, and cooperative worldview that Kagan mistakenly identifies with Europeans, and that they aren't attached to relatively monolithic and conservative definitions of American national identity: they would be called métèques in the French conservative lexicon of the Third Republic, much like the heavily immigrant and politically radical urbanites of belle époque France.
Thoughts?
Consider: The results of the US Presidential election indicate a very sharp divide between the red and the blue states. This divide, it can be demonstrated, stems from widely divergent attitudes on issues ranging from sexuality and the family to the presence of religious symbols in state institutions to foreign and military policies. Most of these issues, though, have emerged from deeper divisions between relatively urbanized, secularized, and left-leaning city-dwellers--particularly those living on the Pacific coast, in the upper Midwest, and in the northeastern United States--and everyone else. It is generally agreed, by themselves as well as by their detractors, that these urbanites empathize strongly with the postmodern, secular, and cooperative worldview that Kagan mistakenly identifies with Europeans, and that they aren't attached to relatively monolithic and conservative definitions of American national identity: they would be called métèques in the French conservative lexicon of the Third Republic, much like the heavily immigrant and politically radical urbanites of belle époque France.
Thoughts?
