Politics and the Sexual Revolution

Ross Douthat weighs in on two McCain ads that hit culture war hot buttons -- the "sex education for kindergartners" ad, and a new one -- not from the McCain campaign, but anti-Obama -- hitting Obama on his opposition, confirmed by the independent FactCheck.org, to legislation that would have protected the lives of babies born during a botched abortion (you can see that new ad below).

Why is Team McCain doing this? They know that the greatest core difference between liberals and conservatives in the US today is where each side comes down on the sexual revolution. As Thomas Edsall wrote in the Atlantic a few years back:

It is an axiom of American politics that people vote their pocketbooks, and for seventy years the key political divisions in the United States were indeed economic. The Democratic and Republican Parties were aligned, as a general rule, with different economic interests. Electoral fortunes rose and fell with economic cycles. But over the past several elections a new political configuration has begun to emerge--one that has transformed the composition of the parties and is beginning to alter their relative chances for ballot-box success. What is the force behind this transformation? In a word, sex.

Whereas elections once pitted the party of the working class against the party of Wall Street, they now pit voters who believe in a fixed and universal morality against those who see moral issues, especially sexual ones, as elastic and subject to personal choice.

It's possible that the current economic crisis will force, in time, a realignment along the old economic lines. But that hasn't happened yet.

One more point: last week, the editorial board met with an incumbent Democrat running for re-election to the Texas state Board of Education. She kept talking about how she stood in opposition to "social conservatives" on the board, who oppose scientific, fact-based educational standards in favor of ideologically driven moralizing, especially on the matter of sex education in public schools. For all I know, she may have a good point about this particular board, but the striking thing to me was how completely certain she was that her position was morally neutral and wholly rational. I find it fascinating, and maddening, that the Left is so often unaware of its own ideological biases on such matters. Mind you, I would certainly expect this candidate to fight for what she thinks is right, but what stood out was how she (quite sincerely) positioned her side as paladins of sweet Reason, and her opponents as entirely driven by dark, inexplicable motive into taking a stand that no reasonable person could possibly care about, or defend. It's the assumption that there is no moral agenda behind offering comprehensive sex education in schools that rankles. It's something like Americans who think that spreading liberal democracy at the point of a gun is not an ideological undertaking, but rather simply helping people in other countries obtain what's good for them, and what deep down they really want, if they rationally understood their best interests.