LONDON, 31 October 2004 — The tour around the battlefield of Gettysburg finishes at a copse known as the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy.” Among these rolling Pennsylvanian hills the Union forces of the North staved off a final, heroic charge by 12,000 Southern troops in 1863. From that moment, the Confederate cause was doomed.
On Tuesday, the quintessential Yankee, John Kerry, hopes to deliver a similar knockout blow to the ambitions of born-again southerner George Bush. Pennsylvania is again a battleground. Across its cities and farmland an ideological struggle between North and South is being played out.
Neighborhood by neighborhood, the divisions are apparent in Kerry-Edwards and Bush-Cheney placards jostling for space on lawns. Since 2001 the president has visited this state more than three dozen times; Kerry over 20 times since March alone. Last week he brought Bill Clinton.
The ferocity of this election has reignited America’s simmering cultural divide. Pundits now split the country not between Confederates and Unionists, but between red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) states. Red-state inhabitants believe in God, guns and marriage, blue-state citizens in science, secular politics and social liberalism. It is no surprise that, outside of Iraq, the hot-button issues of this election focus on such controversies as stem-cell research, abortion, and gay marriage rather than deficits and health care.
Much of this can be traced to Bush. Elected as “a uniter, not a divider”, committed to compassionate conservatism, he pushed a ruthlessly partisan agenda. He has packed his Cabinet with zealots and spurned bipartisan initiatives, including the recommendations of the independent 9/11 Commission. The result is a nation at loggerheads.
Pennsylvania provides a microcosm of this ugly divide. It combines liberal Philadelphia with de-industrializing Pittsburgh and a conservative rural heartland. Al Gore won the state by a whisker in 2000, but many conservative Democrats are drawn to Bush’s faith-and- family rhetoric. Success will lie in Philadelphia’s sprawling suburbs, where Kerry has an edge. Bush, on the other hand, is courting the large Amish community.
At the national level, polls put neither candidate outside the margin of error. One of the favorite scenarios among Democrats is for Kerry to take the Electoral College, while Bush wins the popular vote. The probability of a dead heat in the college of 269-269 is minimal, but what is more likely is the election count descending into legal chaos. Some 20,000 lawyers stand ready as Democrats try to right Gore’s wrong with a barrage of lawsuits. Yet the Bush machine, headed by James Baker, has never been one to give up power lightly.
The real, lasting damage of such internecine strife is a collapse of faith in the institutional fabric. This election is likely to produce a record turnout, but if people feel their vote doesn’t count they quickly lose trust in the system of governance. If there are repeated allegations of fraud or the electoral process reverts to the appointed judges of the US Supreme Court, then the constitutional machinery will face allegations of illegitimacy.
The very process of effective administration could be in jeopardy. The party hostilities generated by this election mean that the man who wins will find it almost impossible to deliver a mandate, particularly in the case of Kerry who would probably face a Republican Congress and a revengeful right. Alternatively, Capitol Hill Democrats would not make the same mistake of cooperating with Bush as they did in the early days of his presidency.
It was precisely to banish such political division that Abraham Lincoln traveled to Gettysburg four months after the July 1863 battle. In the cemetery where tens of thousands soldiers lay, he delivered his famed address championing “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. But what Lincoln stressed was neither North nor South, Confederacy nor Union, but the wholeness of the nation. That national unity of purpose, which delivered so much of America’s greatness during the 20th century, will this week be tested as rarely before.
— Tristram Hunt is a visiting professor at Arizona State University.
