2005 Seminar Topic Overview
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KEYNOTE
 David Brooks
Author and New York Times columnist
Mr. Brooks writes a bi-weekly op-ed column for the New York Times and is a regular analyst on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Before becoming a Times columnist, Mr. Brooks was a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek, a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, and a commentator on NPR. He is also the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004).
SPEAKERS
 Thomas Frank
Cultural commentator and author of What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (2004); Founding Editor of The Baffler.
 Morris P. Fiorina
Wendt Family Professor of Political Science, Stanford University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University; author of Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (with Samuel J. Abrams and Jeremy C. Pope) (2005).
 Arianna Huffington
Politcal commentator, nationally-syndicated columnist and satirist; author of ten books, including Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America (2004).
FACILITATORS
Rebecca Love Kourlis
Colorado Supreme Court Justice.
Richard D. Lamm
Professor and Director of the Center for Public Policy and Contemporary Issues, University of Denver; former Governor of Colorado.
Brooks Thomas
Chairman, the Vail Valley Institute; former Chairman & CEO, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
OVERVIEW
AMERICA DIVIDED
ARE THE CULTURE WARS FOR REAL?
Red states vs. blue states; “metro” America vs. “retro” America. What has happened in the last two national elections? Has the Nation suddenly become polarized? Have the once true-blue Southern states turned red for good? Is the Nation now divided between the red heartland and the blue coastal states? Has the electorate become polarized, or is it the parties?
If it is indeed the voters, what is driving them apart? For years the country has elected men from the center: “moderate” Republicans and “centrist” Democrats. This President’s own father is an example of the former, and his immediate predecessor, an example of the latter. Conventional wisdom has told us that most voters are middle-of-the-road, and poll after poll has confirmed that for years. Has that suddenly changed? If so, why?
According to much press and many pundits, the red/blue divide is real and is caused by a sharp disagreement over “moral values.” What are these values? Abortion. Religion. Gay marriage. Guns. The environment. (They have been called the “G” issues, after God, Gays, Guns and Grizzlies.) All of these issues have been around for years. What has happened to make them so pivotal now?
And why have they trumped traditional concerns such as jobs and taxes with the very same voters? Indeed, it has been argued that many voters are voting against their own self-interest. Why? Does 9/11 have anything to do with it? Do Americans feel threatened and insecure for the first time, and is this driving them to take refuge in “fundamental” values? Is it a surge of religiosity? If not, what is it?
There is another possibility. Perhaps it is the parties and not the voters that have become polarized. Confronted with a choice between a candidate on the left and one on the right, what is the centrist or independent voter to do? Even though they represent a majority of the electorate, they may be forced to choose between two candidates neither of whom they can believe in. How can this be? Do the parties care more about their own futures than they do about the country’s? And even if they did, how could they get away with it?
Is the primary system part of the answer? Only a handful of states have open primaries. In all the others, the candidates are chosen by party members and not be the voters who must pick one of them in the fall. Does this put party ahead of country? Does it disenfranchise the independent voter? Or does it encourage a strong two party system that saves us from the pitfalls of so many other systems?
What about the Electoral College? The calculus for it broke the impasse between the small and the large states in the Continental Congress, and without it there might not have been a Constitution at all. To change it would require a Constitutional Amendment, a mathematical improbability. Yet, it has been calculated that a resident of Montana has six times more voting power than a resident of California. Is this fair? Is it wise? If not, can anything be done about it?
Finally, there is the winner-take-all system. Part of our accepted political culture, it reinforces the two-party system. Yet, it also amplifies the distortions of the Electoral system: a victory by one vote wins all of a state’s votes in the Electoral College. This explains the near-drought of campaign attention to “safe” states like California, Texas and New York and the concentration on a small number of “swing” states. The winner-take-all system is not mandated by the Constitution and is a matter of state law: two states have modified it although a third (Colorado) rejected an attempt to do so in the recent election.
Is the polarization of America real? Does it represent a sea change in the electorate, or is it only the result of a political tactic that takes advantage of inherent weaknesses in the electoral system? If it’s real, what’s driving it that hasn’t been here all along? If it’s a tactic, will it last? Will a majority of voters continue to put up with choosing between candidates neither or whom they like? Where should we go from here? Does anything need to be changed? What? How?
We hope you will be able to join us in Vail from Thursday, June 23 through Sunday, June 26, 2005 to discuss these issues that speak to where America is headed.
KEYNOTE ADDDRESS
AMERICA DIVIDED
ARE THE CULTURE WARS FOR REAL?
BY NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST
DAVID BROOKS
Friday, June 24, 2005
It's a pleasure to be here. When you leave Washington you want to get in touch with the real America, and Vail is certainly the place to go. For me this is sort of a demographic step up. I'm glad Arianna's not here because for her it's kind of slumming. I'm happy to be here. I notice Dick Cheney's here. Newt Gingrich is here. I didn't know you guys were having a primary… a Republican primary.
But I'm here to talk about what you guys have already spent the day talking about and we'll spend tomorrow talking about, “Red” and “Blue” America. And I'm sort of intimidated because I hope you guys didn't do the reading list, because I think those of us who are visiting to speak know less than you guys do if you actually did the reading list.
But I thought I would start by taking us on a little stereotypical tour through Red and Blue America, just to get the cultural sense of it, and then I'll give you my take on whether we're a divided nation or not. And before I take this tour, Tom Wolfe was once asked, “What's the most important thing that happened in your lifetime?” And he said, “Oh, that's easy. Co-ed dorms, because nobody planned co-ed dorms. There was no big debate about them, but suddenly they just happened and life has never been the same since.”
It's always these sorts of unplanned changes that end up shaping society, and the unplanned change that I think is behind a lot of the segmentation — or there are many unplanned changes behind a lot of the segmentation in the country, but one of them is the dispersal of the population, that 43 million Americans move every year and, in my view, they move and are really good at finding people like themselves. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a block, a residential block, with an African-American minister, a Hispanic store owner, a liberal college professor, and a conservative professional hunter all living right next to each other. But I've actually never gone to that block, and I doubt it exists.
As you drive through the country, even through a very narrow slice of the country, you find these different cultural zones. You find places with slightly different cultures, different stores, different aesthetics. Where I live outside of Washington and in most metro areas you find these different cultural zones.
If you went outside of Washington, right out into the nearest suburb, you could go into a suburb called Takoma Park, Maryland, which is a bit like Berkeley or Burlington, Vermont. It's a progressive place. It's for urban hipsters who want to move out to the suburbs because they need more space but they want to be near panhandlers and check cashing places so they can feel urban and gritty. Takoma Park was actually a nuclear freeze zone in the 1980s, in line with its politics, though I'm not sure the Pentagon was greatly inconvenienced by the fact that they couldn't base ICBMs in Takoma Park, Maryland.
But it's got a distinct culture. It's got pottery galleries, dance collectives, and sandal stores. Progressives have a thing for toe exhibitionism I don't really understand. And then it's got — you know, it's reasonably affluent. It's got Volvos and Saabs and Audis. It's sort of socially acceptable to have a luxury car so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy. And that's a certain demographic.
And then if you keep driving, you get to the town I live in which is called Bethesda. Bethesda is a bit like Silicon Valley. It's a bit like Winnetka, Illinois or Greenwich, Connecticut. It's an upper middle class suburb. I like these places because there are so many blue New York Times delivery bags in the driveways… so many that they must be visible from outer space. And it's got people who are affluent but who have become socially progressive, but not necessarily economically progressive, and they try to reconcile their income with their progressive ideals.
They shop at Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, the ice cream company with its own foreign policy. I always say Ben & Jerry's should sell a pacifist toothpaste. It doesn't kill germs, it just asks them to leave. It would be a big seller. We've got organic grocery stores like Whole Foods markets. We've got places where you can get your vegetarian dog biscuits and your Basmati rice, and your all-natural hair coloring. Because, if you're going to artificially color your hair, you want it to be all-natural.
We've got, where I live, a Seattle-based grocery chain called Trader Joe's, where all of the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International. My favorite section of Trader Joe's is the snack section because they couldn't just have potato chips and pretzels. Instead, all of the snacks are made out of seaweed. Or what we get in my house is called Veggie Booty with kale, which is for kids who come home and say, “Mom… Mom… I want a snack that will help prevent colon rectal cancer.”
And then you go into the homes in these places and it's like, I confess, my home. The people have recently renovated their kitchen, so it's about twice the size of this [already very large] room. They've got their refrigeration quadrant over here with the Sub-Zero refrigerator because zero just wouldn't be cold enough. When you pull open the door, here there's a freezer, and then over here there's sort of an in-law suite tucked into the refrigerator. And then over there there’s the nickel-plated nuclear reactor, which looks like it's the Viking range, you know, six-burner dual fuel technology. It sends up heat like a space shuttle rocket turned upside-down.
In my last book [On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) In the Future Tense, 2004], I describe a certain character that I've begun studying who lives in these sorts of kitchens. She’s called the uber-Mom and she’s a highly successful career woman who's taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard. You can usually tell the uber-Moms because they weigh less than their children, sort of -- even at the moment of conception they're doing little exercises, calculating what year they can become School Auction Co-Chair, taking so many soy-based nutritional formulas during pregnancy that the babies just come out huge, like toothless defensive linemen. The uber-Mom is in the delivery cutting the umbilical cord herself, adjusting the video lighting, asking the uber-Mom question: “Is my baby’s Apgar score above average?”
And then the kids grow up. They're the ones you see going into elementary school with the 80-pound backpacks, so when the wind blows them over they're like beetles stuck there on their back. They grow up, they apply to Harvard, or maybe Yale in this case. They've already cured six formerly fatal diseases, started three companies, done community service in Tibet and are working toward greater environmental awareness. Actually, the present of George Washington University has a line, which I admire, about his incoming students' community service: “I don't know where these kids find lepers, but they find them and they read to them.” It's a great, great line.
That's a certain sort of highly pressured childhood. I'm telling my own kids to go into “play date” law because I think parents are going to be suing each other for feeding other kids insufficiently nutritious snacks.
Then there’s a certain sort of culture in Bethesda. Bethesda has become an increasingly Democratic culture. It’s like lots of places around the country that used to be home to “rock rib” Republicans. Places like suburban Maryland, like Weston, Connecticut; like Winnetka, Illinois where Ferris Bueller's Day Off was set; like the Main Line outside of Philadelphia where Katherine Hepburn's Philadelphia Story was set, Bethesda used to be populated by “rock rib” Republicans.
But John Kerry carried all of these areas. Actually, Al Gore was the first Democrat to carry these areas. The National Journal did a study of the 261 richest towns in the country, and it found that the Democratic vote has been going up in these areas for the last six elections. So these inter-ring suburbs tend to be more Democratic than they used to be, in part because of the new, more highly educated people who are moving in and displacing some of the old bankers. You can actually measure this change from the dangliness of the earrings you see. No more pearl studs in these places. More dangly earrings, more Democrats.
Then, as you drive out, you get into the outer-ring suburbs, the newer suburbs. George Bush carried 98 out of the 100 fastest growing counties in the country in this last election. And you get out to places like here, Douglas County, Colorado between Denver and Colorado Springs which is among the one or two fastest growing counties in the country. Or like Loudon County, if you've been to Dulles Airport. Or like Mesa, Arizona, outside of Phoenix. There are now more people living in Mesa than live in Saint Louis, Cincinnati, or Minneapolis, and Mesa will soon pass Atlanta in population. You get these enormous, quickly growing places, where the food courts come first and then 500,000 people just follow them.
What you get here are much more Republican areas and, because they're more Republican, they're much more heavily influenced by the game of golf. Not so much by the game itself, but by the culture of golf. The state of spiritual grace suggested by golf, which is a state of elevated spirituality I call “Living at Par.” That doesn't — that wasn't worth a groan. And when you're “Living at Par,” your DVD collection is well-organized, and everything you own is made out of titanium. Your fingernail polish matches the interior of your Lexus, and you've got your life so calm and cool and together that, next to you, Dick Cheney looks bipolar.
If you want to understand the essence of this more Republican culture, this fast growing outer-ring culture, you've got to watch a manly American man buy a barbecue grill at a Home Depot because this is when he's most emotionally exposed. He sort of goes into the Home Depot, doing the manly waddling walk that men do in the presence of large amounts of lumber. With this manly walk, he goes up to the yard machinery section and sees all of the grills in front of him – the Broil Master, the Thermador, the Weber Genesis Grill. In America, it makes sense to name a barbecue grill after a book in the Bible. That seems normal. They've got the 328,000 BTU heat generating capacity and a 942-inch grill surface, just in case you get the urge to roast a bison. It's all right there for you.
Then a large man in an orange vest comes up to him and asks, “How you doing?” He’s sort of an SUV in human form, and they exchange sort of pseudoscientific grill talk, none of which they understand because, in the end, it's all going to be about whichever grill has the best cup holders. All major durable purchases are based on cup holders. And he buys his grill.
Then our man goes out to the parking lot of this big box mall. You've seen these big box malls all around the country, with their PetSmart, Petco, Linens & Things, Bed, Bath & Beyond, and these massive parking lots in the middle. If you look across them, just over the curvature of the Earth, you can see an Old Navy big enough to qualify for membership in the United Nations. And along the highway you've got the suburban chain restaurants which, if they merge, will be called the “Chilli’s-Olive Garden-Hard Rock,-Outback Cantina.”
And, of course, there are the big anchor stores, with the Wal-Mart over here and, my favorite ones, the Sam's Club or the Price Club, which are like Wal-Mart on acid. At Sam’s Club you can get your 41-pound tubs of detergent, your 30-pound bags of Tater Tots, your packages with 1,500 Q-tips, which is really 3,000 swabs since there's one on either end. I always come to Price Club thinking of the people who come here shopping for condoms. The quantities are so massive, they're optimists.
The final thing about the Price Club is how everyone's having the same conversation, which is how much money they're saving by buying in bulk. You'll hear somebody say “We should get 10,000 popsicles because we're thinking of having kids anyway. It makes sense.”
So these are the two stereotypes of people who exist just within the middle class world or the upper-middle class world. Red and Blue. Inter-ring more socially liberal, outer-ring — actually, if you go to these outer-ring suburbs, go to Mesa, Arizona. One of the interesting things about the outer-ring suburbs are how, demographically, they are like Leave It To Beaver land. The divorce rate is very low. There’s very little inequality – very few rich people, very few poor people. They're like the Mayberries with Blackberries. They're just people who have moved out to the suburbs because they wanted an orderly place for their kids.
What's impressive to me is not so much how well Bush did in these areas, but how they reach these people. Because when you go to Mesa, Arizona, or when you go to Douglas County, you see that they're very new communities. There are very few civic organizations there. The politicians who represent these areas often talk about how hard it is to get people actually to show up at a town meeting because these towns and their residents are so new, they haven't developed community roots.
This is how you know Rove is actually — I don't think Karl Rove is as smart as a lot of people think he is, including himself, but one of the things I thought he did intelligently was how he reached out to people in these new suburbs. What Rove did was understand that there are two institutions that form immediately in these suburbs: (1) churches, and (2) health clubs. So, what Republicans did was they bought air time on the little TVs on the Stairmaster machines. When I heard that I thought, “Wow! That is smart!”
But anyway, that's the stereotypical divide. Red and Blue. And that's the stereotypical bitterness between a sharp divide, two different cultures, two different sorts of stores. And, if you go to Washington, D.C., where I live and do my business, you do sometimes get the impression that we live in this bitterly divided country. If anybody saw the Op-Ed page of the New York Times today, Norman Ornstein and Barry McMillion had this chart about the legislative voting patterns of the two parties. And, sure enough, if you look at the legislative voting patterns of the two parties, it's not a bell curve. It's two humps of a camel.
Actually, if you go back to the Congress of '70 to '72, you’ll see that we had a very Centrist Congress. We don't think of the late '60s and the early '70s as a peaceful time in American politics, but, in fact, I think in the legislative voting there were a lot of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans back then. Now there's almost nobody in those categories.
So we’ve got a Congress divided like the two humps of a camel and this is what has led to all the political bitterness. We've all seen it in Washington. Several months ago, I was at the house of a democratic Congresswoman. She has a salon, where she hosts 40 House Democrats every month, and I was there to be a discussion leader. Not that 40 politicians need a discussion leader, but I was the closest thing to a Republican that they had had to vent to in many months.
Later than night, I told my wife that if I had more hair, it would be sticking straight back because they just yelled at me for about three hours. A couple of them even pulled out their Blackberries and read me evil things that Tom DeLay had said to them. I don't even like Tom DeLay, but they really let me have it. During the course of this, a gentleman from the South, actually a Centrist, said, “I don't hate George Bush, but I regard him the way I would regard someone who molested my granddaughter.” I'm not riling you up, if that's not hatred, but that's the mood you sometimes get on both sides of the debate.
A couple years ago, the Annenberg Foundation tried to heal some of the bitterness that you find in Washington. They created something called “The Civility Retreat.” They took members of both parties of Congress out to the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia in the hope that, if they actually got together and met each other and invited their families, they'd socialize, and they’d be nicer to each other when they got back to Washington.
The highlight of “The Civility Retreat” was obviously karaoke night with 170 drunk members of Congress. But the real symptomatic moment was when I saw a woman weeping in the hallway because she'd been so viscously attacked at one of the breakout sessions that she had left the room in tears. And this was at “The Civility Retreat”…
This week, we've had Karl Rove calling the liberals, I don't know exactly the phrase he used, but wimps — you know, cheese-eating surrender monkeys, whatever that whole phrase was. You've had Dick Durbin accusing the Bush administration of being like the Nazis. You've had this concatenation of vicious attacks. You've had this hatred, and you do get the sense in Washington that we are a bitterly divided country.
This is attributable not only to the national divide. Part of it is partisanship. One of the things that's been the biggest surprise to me is the level of team spirit in Washington, D.C. The level of Yankees vs. Red Socks rivalry, and how the team spirit just perpetuates itself like that old joke about Serbian Alzheimer's… that you forget everything but your resentments. And this team spirit just sort of feeds on itself.
There's a great book by political scientists called Partisan Hearts and Minds, which argues that, in theory, we would think people would form their political philosophy and then embrace the party that best represents their philosophy. But, in fact, what often happens is people inherent a political philosophy or they form it early in life based on which party seems to be filled with people like themselves. Once they form their party ID, then they get the philosophy. So partisanship comes first for many people and philosophy comes second.
Partisanship shapes your view of reality. People choose the reality that flatters their partisanship. So, for example, after Ronald Regan was President, people were asked whether inflation rose or declined under Reagan. In reality, it dropped from 13 percent to 4 percent. But only 8 percent of Democrats said that it had dropped because they chose the reality that was most flattering to their personal partisanship. After the Clinton years, similar questions were asked, and this time it was the Republicans' turn to be wrong and negative.
So people choose the reality that flatters their partisanship, and partisanship itself, aside from any philosophy, is this tremendously powerful reinforcing force which is so alive in Washington. It’s the team spirit aspect of Washington. And it does give you a sense that there really is this bitterly divided country.
But, if you go around the country outside of Washington, there are only wisps of differences between so-called Red and Blue America. The most prevalent thing, the thing I don't understand most about this last election, is the fact that George Bush carried 22 out of the 23 states with the highest white fertility rates, and John Kerry carried the 17 states with the lowest white fertility rates. I don't think Republican whites, we are breeding at that high level, but apparently there's some slight difference in lifestyle.
There's a difference in media segmentation that we all see. There's a story that was told to me about how we choose the media outlet that tells us how right we are all the time and how this is contributing to sort of a segmentation of society. There's a story told to me about Fox News, which is what we in the journalism business say is just too good to check out. According to this story, some people get up and turn on Fox when they wake up at 6:00 in the morning, and then they don't turn it off until midnight until they go to bed. This is fine, except for the fact that Fox has a translucent logo on the bottom of the screen, and if you keep your TV on Fox for too long, the logo burns into your TV set. When Fox found out that they were ruining people's TV sets, they had to move the logo across the screen. So that's another wisp of the sense that we live in a divided country.
There are also the best sellers, which are divided. I don't know if Arianna [Huffington] may know more about this, but it's asserted by some that there is an increasing geographic divide, that the number of counties in this country where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled in a generation, and that's actually under dispute. But again it's a whiff that the country, not just in Washington but actually throughout the country, is bitterly divided between Red and Blue.
I was struck by another whiff by looking at who donates to each party. We now know a lot about who gives to what party. One of the things we've learned is that if you're good at numbers, you tend to give to the Republican party. If you are not good at numbers, you tend to give to the Democratic party. So if you look at the professions that donated to Kerry and Bush this last time, bankers and accountants gave in large proportion to the Republicans. Lawyers gave 2 to 1 to Democrats. Academics gave 11 to 1 to Democrats. Actors 18 to 1 to Democrats. Journalists 93 to 1 to Democrats, and librarians 223 to 1 to Democrats. There is no professional loyalty to Laura Bush, who was a librarian.
John Kerry's biggest group of donors were employees of the University of California system. His second biggest group was at Harvard University, more so than Goldman Sachs and all of the other big money Wall Street and legal firms. And so you get a sense of, again, whiffs of a divided country.
And, yet, I am of the school that, in reality, we're not a divided country, that in our heart of hearts we are divided at an elite level. We are divided in Washington. But the divide is limited both by who feels divided – mostly elites, mostly people who are politically active – and what they're divided about. I don't believe, again – Mo Fiorina [a Stanford Political Science Professor who was one of David Brooks’ fellow speakers] is a bigger expert than me and he'll talk about this tomorrow, I'm sure, but I don't believe we're divided on policy terms. I think the divide, such as it is, is between two rival sets of elites who have different leadership values.
There are certain people who take a look at George Bush and say “That's exactly the guy who possesses the leadership values we should have in this country. He's a simple straight-talking man of faith. That's what leaders should be like.”
There's another sort of person who takes a look at a John Kerry or a Bill Clinton or an Al Gore or a Michael Dukakis and says “That's the sort of person who has leadership values. He's more subtle. He can see nuances. He can do conversation. He's more open-minded. He's more sophisticated. And those are the leadership values we should have.”
I don't think we're having a culture war. I think among certain elites we're having a leadership war about which virtues are right for running this country. Some people take a look at Bush and think “moron.” Some people take a look at Kerry and think “cheese-eating surrender monkey.” In reality, we now know that they had the same grades at Yale.
I'm actually most impressed about John Kerry, as an aside. That John Kerry who probably knew he wanted to be President some day at Yale at this point didn't feel grades were necessary to become President, and that was a better America by the way. But anyway, that's an aside.
I think we're having a debate over what sort of leadership values we want. But I do not think we're having a debate, we're having a culture war. I do not think we're bitterly divided if you go down the breadth and depth of this country and go down the breadth and depth of people's souls.
As I mentioned, and we'll talk about this more tomorrow, if you take issue after issue and do the surveys, there's just a big middle in this country on abortion and gay marriage, and on everything else. If you go beneath the politics, even in Washington to the policy, you find that there's rarely a divide. If I go to a panel discussion with politicians talking about politics, I'm guaranteed to get some fireworks. If I go to policy wonks, think-tank johnnies and people who have worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and they ignore the politics and actually just talk about policies, I guarantee you, you can barely tell who the Republicans and Democrats are. You can often tell, but the divide between the parties is much less sharp because, in policy terms, whether it's health care or tax policy or environmental policy even, you still get this massive overlap between the two parties.
Just one small example. I was just in Africa touring AIDS hospitals in Southern Africa. If you read about American AIDS policy, you would think there's this massive war between the social conservatives who want to talk about abstinence and the liberals who want to talk about condoms. You go to Africa where the Americans are actually running the policy, some from the Bush administration and some from NGOs who are pretty liberal, and there's no debate about it. Both sides think, well, if you're talking to a 13-year-old, you talk about abstinence. If you’re talking to a 25-year-old, you're talking about condoms. The idea that there was a culture war about this issue on the ground in Africa was totally irrelevant. And that's an example of how, in policy terms, once you actually get down to the actual policy, you find much less polarization than you do in the realm of campaign politics.
Second, I don't think there's been a massive shift in the electorate. I don't think there's been a rise of evangelical conservatives. I think the number of evangelical conservatives in the last presidential election was the same as it was four years ago, same as it was eight years ago. They're a steady, significant part of the country, but I do not think there's an upsurge that there's a polarization caused by a rise of the social conservatives.
In fact, I would say what's happening among the evangelical community is a movement away from the Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson types who really were politically dogmatic, really were resentful; and a move toward Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose Driven Life who was anti-political and who is not resentful and who rejects the Jerry Falwells of the world.
One of the things you hear a lot in the evangelical community is that Jerry Falwell has a very big constituency. It's ABC, CBS, and NBC. That he is the person who gets put on TV to misrepresent the evangelical community, and I think in the age of mega-churches and Purpose Driven Life that's quite true.
The fourth reason I don't think we have a culture war is that the culture's in repair. It's hard to have a culture war when things are going well. When people are in a panic they worry about the values of the country, but the culture is actually doing quite well. If you look at all the indicators of social breakdown in this country, you find they're all headed in the right direction.
Pregnancy rates are down a third. Divorce rates are down significantly. The divorce rates for 30-year-olds are 30 percent less than the divorce rates for 40-year-olds. Domestic violence has been cut in half since 1993. Teen suicide is down. Crime is down by half. Drug overdoses are down. Teenagers are having sex later and having it with fewer partners. So there's just less of a sense in the country of cultural breakdown, less anxiety, less of a culture war.
Finally, five, and this might be the most important reason why I don't think we're having a culture war, is that we don't behave differently from each other. Some people may shop at Ben & Jerry's and some people may shop at the Outdoor Store, but if you look at the things that really matter all of that stuff is aesthetics. That's how we shop and how we dress, that's aesthetics.
If you look at how we work, Americans are the hardest working people on Earth. We work an average of 350 hours a year longer than the average European. This is the same in Red and Blue states. If you look at how we raise our children, it's the same. If you look at how we move, if you look at actual life, it's the same. If you look at sex life, it's the same. According to the University of Chicago, the one group with the highest rate of female orgasms is evangelical Christian women. That's not me saying that, that's the University of Chicago. The divorce rate, it's not different. The divorce rate is slightly higher in Red America because they tend to marry earlier, but the divorce rate is the same.
So, again, another reason why I don't believe there's a culture war in this country is because people live basically the same kind of lives. And they may vote differently for one reason or another, but that doesn't make a culture war.
The final thing I'll say is that if there is a culture war, and I don't think there is, but I do think there is a political war and I do think there's a leadership battle. I'd say finally that it's unsustainable because we have this — to me the biggest domestic problem we face is the debt that's coming our way, the debt caused by the entitlement problem; the Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but especially the health care problem. Those entitlements now consume 8 percent of GDP. They'll consume 21 percent before too long.
Two economists from the Treasury Department did an analysis of what we would have to do to pay for the unfunded liabilities caused by this wave of debt coming at us. Their study was suppressed by the Treasury Department, but they left and they published it. And what we would have to do is either double the payroll tax, raise income taxes 80 percent, or cut benefits in half. All of these are horrible options. So you've got this big wall of debt, and the one thing you see about the political war in Washington is that neither party, and especially with both parties fighting each other, is capable of dealing with this problem.
Countries decline either because they lose a war or they get buried under by their own debt. I just don't think Americans are going to sit around for decade after decade and allow their country to be destroyed by this wave of debt. And if the two parties can't handle it, which they can't do in their loggerheads manner, then some slightly saner Ross Perot is going to come out of the West and he will solve it and then we’ll have a third option. We could have a third option in two years, between John McCain and Hilary Clinton. And believe me, the country would look very different if those two ran against each other. I'm already resigned to the fact that through my entire lifetime the presidency will be Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton.
So basically when I look around the country I see, yes, in Washington there's a sharp red and blue divide. Yes, if you go to an organic grocery store and then go to the Piggly-Wiggly, there's an aesthetic fruit divide. But if you look at the things that really matter — policy, life, core beliefs — we are all Americans. We are formed by our country much more than whether we live in a Red state or a Blue state. If you take Republicans and Democrats and send them to France, and this has happened to me dozens of times, you find the Americans always agreeing and disagreeing with the French. There is a commonality here, and the divide between Red and Blue is superficial and overblown. Thanks.
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