 | In addition to giving a public lecture, New York Times columnist David Brooks met with members of the Yale Daily News staff during his campus visit as a Poynter Fellow. |
It is a conundrum in U.S. politics that "the more educated the electorate gets, the more polarized it gets," says New York Times columnist David Brooks, who spoke on campus March 29 as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.
"[Y]ou would think the more educated voters get, the more they would think for themselves, and look at the issues, and read and investigate," Brooks told the overflow crowd in Linsly-Chittenden Hall. "But in the real world, that's the opposite of the truth.
"College-educated voters -- much more than high school-educated voters -- vote for the same party again and again and again," he said, noting that the former are much more likely "to give themselves an ideological label, to say 'I'm liberal or conservative.'"
Looking over the political landscape in the United States, said Brooks, "it's funny how the Information Age was supposed to make distance dead, but, in fact, it made geography more important. The number of counties in this country where one party or another has a landslide majority has doubled in a generation. And that's because people move in with people like themselves."
Major cities and the inner-ring suburbs are "increasingly Democratic," while the fast-growing outer-ring suburbs are "incredibly Republican," explained Brooks. He characterized the former as a land of markets selling organic treats like Veggie Booty with kale "for kids who come home and say, 'Mom! Mom! I want a snack that will help prevent colorectal cancer!'" and the latter as the land of golf. "If you want to understand the Republican party, you have to understand, not so much the game of golf, but the state of spiritual grace suggested by the game, which I call 'living at par,'" the columnist quipped.
"The question is: How deep is the divide?" said Brooks. "And you can slice it many different ways."
The "single best predictor" of an individual's political leanings, he said, is church attendance: "If you go to church every week, the odds are about 60% to 70% you'll vote Republican. If you never go to church, the odds are about 60% to 70% you're going to vote Democratic."
Marital status is another good indicator, he noted. "Married people make up 63% of the voters, and married people are much more likely to vote Republican."
One of the "most interesting ways to slice the data" between Democrats and Republicans is their fertility, Brooks told the audience. "George Bush carried 25 of the 26 states with the highest fertility rates in the country. John Kerry carried the 16 or 17 states with the lowest fertility rates."
"So if you're looking at long-term demographics," he added, "the Republicans have some advantage because people tend to inherit their party affiliation from their parents."
Despite these differences, the journalist asserted, "the data is clear" that the United States is not in the midst of a culture war. The results of polls on such hotly charged issues as abortion, gay rights or the Terri Schiavo case show "we do not have two humps of a camel, we have a bell curve," said Brooks. "There's always a center."
While there's increasing polarization in Washington, he added, "it's not getting any worse in the country. ... We are still one united country. We have differences between Utah and New Haven, but we do not have a vast divide, and I think that's good news for the country."
Brooks is also optimistic about the health of U.S. culture. "If you look at all the social indicators about how people actually live, and especially if you look at young people age 15 to 25, there's just an immense amount of social repair. They're taking patterns that were destructive and fixing them," he said, citing dramatic decreases in such areas as teenage crime, binge drinking, drug use, pregnancy and suicide.
The future of the U.S. economy also looks positive, thanks to the nation's "obsessively strong work ethic" and "young dynamic workforce," contended Brooks. "In 2050, the average age of the average American will be 38, in Europe it will be 52, in China, about 50. ... You have other societies that are aging, but we are not."
Turning to the foreign policy front, Brooks pointed to the elections that have occurred or are coming up in such countries as Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq as signs that democracy has begun to take hold there. "There are certainly moments in world history where you get a sort of thought contagion ... In 2005 in the Arab world, I think we could be seeing such a movement," he said.
Brooks told the audience that he was "much more pessimistic" over the crisis in the U.S. over the funding of Social Security and Medicare.
"We have promised much more than we can deliver," he said, noting that the share of government spending on people over age 65 will rise from 29% in 1990 to over 50% in 2030, leaving the United States with "unfunded liabilities of $44 trillion -- that's more than has been collected in taxes in the history of this country." Some experts have suggested that the only way to pay for these programs is to cut benefits by 50% or raise taxes by 60% -- "all horrible options," said Brooks.
"Empires fall either because someone defeats them militarily or they sink in their own debt. And to me this is the big problem that is sitting out there," he contended.
"The only salvation," he told his audience, "is that in the country that gave us Veggy Booty with kale, there's ingenuity enough to solve even a problem like this."
-- By LuAnn Bishop
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