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Anthropologist E.E. Evans-Prichard studied the Nuer, a pastoral people living in the Upper Nile region of Africa, herders who moved with their animals to the tune of the region's rivers. In flood times, Nuer tribes retreated to higher ground, and when the waters receded, the Nuer clans moved to the grassy valleys.
Nuer tribes were constantly crossing paths, and so they could easily fall into conflict over lost animals and scarce forage. Professor Evans-Prichard wrote in the 1940s about the intricate ways the Nuer encouraged cooperation and resolved conflicts.
The Nuer put special faith in a group of arbiters known as "men of the earth." Men of the earth had no formal powers. They couldn't arrest people or make arbitrary decisions. But the Nuer granted these people a kind of local authority to settle disputes. If a fight broke out, a man of the earth could stop the conflict by running between the combatants and hoeing a line in the dirt. If a tribal member was killed in a fight, a man of the earth arbitrated compensation to be paid by the winner to the dead man's family.
The "man of the earth" was a deal-maker, a negotiator, a compromiser. He was the person given the job of representing all the conflicting interests of the tribes.
A man of the earth was a politician.
John McCain and Barack Obama began this campaign running as men of the earth—post partisans who promised to race between the red and the blue, hoeing a line in the turf that would bring the bickering to an end. That's not how these races ended, of course, not just because McCain or Obama changed but because the country didn't.
Over the last 30 years, most communities have grown either more Democratic or more Republican. Through an incremental process of migration and self-selection, people have clustered in like-minded neighborhoods, clubs, and churches.
Migration had consequences. Legislative districts grew more lopsided, and they elected more-partisan representatives. Politicians no longer mediated competing interests in their districts. They represented increasingly one-sided constituencies that grew more extreme in their ideological isolation.
The meaning of politics changed. Voters didn't want men of the earth. They wanted partisans.
Republicans, perhaps, first realized how the country was changing and catered to the division that Americans were creating. By 2008, however, it didn't matter who started it. This was the way we lived. A Guardian reporter in deep-blue Brooklyn found a checkout clerk who wondered, as a "social experiment," what would happen if he donned a McCain button. A nearby shopper admitted she was still concerned about what might transpire on Election Day. "I'm worried about all the ignorant people—I don't mean that pejoratively, I mean uninformed people—who are out there and who will swing it away from Obama," Tamara said.
At McCain rallies, Obama is a "socialist," and a member of the Texas State Board of Education wrote that the Democrat "truly sympathizes" with terrorists and intends to declare martial law if elected. At one East Coast public university, a dean of undergraduate studies sent an e-mail to faculty reporting that there had been "an increase in complaints by students who believe a chilly climate exists for conservative view points. ..." Americans appear ready to end a culture of racism with this election—symbolically, at least—but prejudices based on what others think and where they live run wild.
The earth was what the Nuer had in common. If locusts swarmed or a drought persisted, every tribe suffered. When the grass was thick, they all prospered. They were called "men of the earth," anthropologist Max Gluckman wrote, because "the earth, undivided as the basis of society, (symbolized) not individual prosperity, fertility, and good fortune, but the general prosperity, fertility, and good fortune on which individual life depends."
What do Americans have in common today? Not much. Oh, we share a lot with our neighbors, with the people at our church. Too much, in fact. But we don't know fellow citizens just a few counties over. It takes a "social experiment" in some parts to imagine how it would be to live as a member of a different political party.
The danger the next president faces comes from his single-minded friends as much as his political opponents. Politicians need room to do their jobs. They need the authority to make deals with the other side. This isn't a power that's won on Election Day. It can come only from a people who come to realize that their well-being depends as much on the "ignorant people ... out there" as their like-minded and righteous neighbors.
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Just a few minutes into Friday's debate and Jim Lehrer was already exasperated. The moderator wanted McCain and Obama to talk to each other. (Did he expect the candidates to banter away the next 90 minutes like two buddies in a fishing boat?) And Lehrer was convinced McCain and Obama hadn't stated their "fundamental differences" in how the two approached the financial crisis.
The differences were pretty clear to me—and fundamental was the word. In the first few minutes of Friday's debate, John McCain and Barack Obama placed themselves on either side of a divide that has defined the country for more than a century—two worldviews that are today expressed in church, party, and neighborhood.
When Obama talked about the financial crisis, he said there was a demand for new social controls. McCain spoke about the need for individual responsibility.
Obama's described the financial situation as a failure of "we." The Wall Street debacle was the result of a "theory that basically says that we can shred regulations and consumer protections and give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down." The collapse was caused by "an economic philosophy that says that regulation is always bad."
McCain lamented a society that had abandoned personal accountability. He said he would have fired the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. "We've got to start also holding people accountable, and we've got to reward people who succeed," said McCain. The Republican looked at the collapse of Wall Street and saw an "I" problem.
In the late 19th century, American Protestantism split. The division wasn't denominational. It was about how people viewed the world. On one side was what University of Chicago religious scholar Martin Marty called "Private Protestantism." Private Protestants promoted personal salvation and promised that individual morality would be rewarded in the next life.
On the other side was "Public Protestantism," a conviction that the way to God required the transformation of society.
Private Protestants thought drunkenness was an individual failing that could be cured by faith. Public Protestants saw alcoholism as a social ill that should be addressed by "blue laws." Public Protestants confronted the new industrial age with the eight-hour day, child labor laws, and the minimum wage. Private Protestant preacher Dwight Moody witnessed the Haymarket labor riot in 1886 and concluded that either "these people are to be evangelized or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break out in a reign of terror such as this country has never known."
There were "two types of Christianity" in the country, Congregationalist minister Josiah Strong wrote in 1913. The competing views were "not to be distinguished by any of the old lines of doctrinal or denominational cleavage," Strong continued. "Their difference is one of spirit, aim, point of view, comprehensiveness. The one is individualist; the other is social."
The one staged revivals to save souls. The other pushed social reforms to save the world.
Private Protestantism guided the fundamentalist/evangelical church and, eventually, the Republican Party. It's expressed in The Fundamentals, Goldwater, Ayn Rand, the nondenominational church, Reagan, Cato and Heritage, right-to-work, school vouchers, Social Security privatization, the Great Commission, conceal and carry, free trade and the market.
Public Protestantism drove the ecumenical movement of the mainline churches and, in time, the Democratic Party. It was The Jungle, the New Deal and Great Society, the Ford Foundation, Medicare, the National Council of Churches, OSHA and the labor union.
This election was supposed to be about post-partisanship, but it's not even post-19th century. It's a contest between two worldviews that have been struggling against each other in sanctuary and voting booth for more than a century.
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