CULTURE SHOCK: FROM A cultural perspective, the most interesting thing about the American elections is that they were not dominated by culture. The idea, pioneered by Lee Atwater and perfected by Karl Rove, that "culture wars" could replace economic interests, failed this time. This was not for want of trying, of course, writes Fintan O'Toole
The Republicans, with their attempts to paint Obama as "elitist" and "un-American" and their attempts to woo the white working-class with Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber, did their damndest to repeat the strategy that has been so successful in the past. But they couldn't make it work well enough to win.
At the most basic level, the reasons for this are obvious enough. The Faith and American Politics survey, which has long been one of the best guides to underlying attitudes among religiously-inclined Americans, found this time that Karl Rove's "wedge issues" of abortion and gay rights were simply not important enough.
Asked to rank ten key issues according to whether they were "very important" or not, respondents put abortion and same sex marriage at the bottom, with the economy and energy at the top.
Strikingly, this was almost true even of white evangelicals who ranked abortion seventh and same-sex marriage last. Basic realities like having a job and being able to drive to work knocked the key cultural identifiers out of the park.
But this in a sense begs the question. Economic hard times may exacerbate the degree to which people focus on questions of money and survival, but it has long been the case that even the poor and desperate have tended, as Obama himself said in a rare moment of complete candour, to cling to God and guns. Something else seems to be at work. To put it crudely, the culture wars have been banished by cultural change.
Three factors seem to be at work. One is the way a figure like Obama, while being in his own words, a political "freak" is actually more culturally mainstream than John McCain. This has to do in part with the way art and popular culture have long left behind the conservative view of the US as a white Christian culture. This is not to say that there is anything like an equality of cultural resources or that non-whites have the same power to generate mass media images of the country. But popular music, TV, fashion and fiction (Hollywood is a notably conservative exception) have drawn disproportionally on minority cultures for decades now, anticipating the demographic shift that has made states like California, New Mexico and Texas already "majority minority" and will do the same to the rest of the US by 2050.
The second factor is the ascent of the creative class. The Open Left blogger Chris Bowers has summed up this cultural shift, somewhat crudely, as "Out with Bubbas; Up with Creatives".
Put simply, this has to do with the shift in the nature of well-paid work from the old industrial base to the new knowledge economy. What this shift does is to create a sense in which "creative types" (or what sociologists call "symbolic analysts") are now representative, not necessarily in terms of numbers, but in the way they belong to the leading edge of society and the economy.
The shift from George Bush, a man of limited learning who did his best to play down whatever intelligence he possesses, to Barack Obama, who has never attempted to hide either his intellect or his erudition, symbolises a much larger change in cultural prestige from brawn to brain.
In cultural terms, this shift plays itself out in images of masculinity. McCain touches all the right nerves for fans of John Wayne, but most men don't want to be John Wayne anymore.
Thirdly, and closely related to this change, is the cultural impact of the internet. The fears expressed about the internet even a decade ago were that it would create a culturally atomised society, in which everyone could choose to connect only to people like themselves with the same narrow range of obsessions. Obama's campaign showed, more profoundly than ever before, the capacity of the technology for creating a sense of common purpose.
This is not just about the obvious ways in which the campaign used the internet for brilliant propaganda (winning the You Tube wars hands down) and to create a crucial advantage in fundraising.
It is much more profoundly that the very habit of using the technology seems to have created a new kind of engagement with public space. It is striking, for example, that the internet generation in the US, which was supposedly going to be atomised and individualistic, is far more inclined to want larger government doing more things than those who are older.
Even among white evangelicals, this split is obvious - those under 35 are twice as likely to want "big government" as those over 35. It would be wrong to see all of this as a mere result of the internet, but there is clearly a complex change under way in which the very idea of the net - personal connection to a larger whole - has been a key part.
These factors suggest that, while in political terms Obama may have been what Colin Powell called a "transformative" candidate, in cultural terms his victory has more to do with aligning politics to the way things really are. American-led globalisation was supposed to create a homogeneity in which everything came to look like America. In fact, it has created an endless series of hybrids, in which all identities are multiple.
Obama simply looks much more like that kind of hybrid humanity, and gives the sense of being gracefully at ease with its complexity. That ease allowed him to evade the culture wars with a kind of cultural peace.