The politics of values

The debate about the American elections has still not abated. How did President George W. Bush manage to get three million votes more than Senator John Kerry and, in addition, to have a Republican majority elected in both houses of Congress? There is not much agreement on the answers, but two themes recur in many explanations.

One is personality. At a time of uncertainty and threat, people had more confidence in the President they knew than in the candidate who seemed unproven. The second theme is values.

People voted for a set of values rather than for specific policies. Indeed, some (it is said) agreed with Mr Kerry's policies but nevertheless gave their vote to Mr Bush, because they felt at ease with his general attitudes.

Clearly, the United States is now deeply divided in electoral terms. An arch of blue (Democratic) states in the east, north, and west spans a huge red (Republican) area in the middle and the South. More than that, the divisions are reproduced at the local level. Gerrymandering, "the drawing of electoral boundaries to benefit a particular political party" is no longer necessary. People actually tend to move to areas in which a majority of others share their values, whether Republican or Democratic.

What exactly are these values? They have to do, or so we hear, with God, guns, and gays. Religion plays a part in them, including the literal truth of the Bible when it comes to the story of creation. The possession of a gun is the ultimate test of individualism, and using guns in wars is not abhorrent. Gays and other modern practices are rejected as self-indulgent. As the political scientist Andrew Hacker recently put it, the Bush candidacy was framed to make a majority by giving some 60 million people a chance to feel good about themselves.

Is all this an American phenomenon, or are there similar trends elsewhere? One answer is that as an American phenomenon, the politics of values may command a majority now, but it is by no means general. Europe and other parts of the world are equally divided. Personality undoubtedly matters, and beneath overt political differences there may also be issues of values that have not yet come to the fore. But traditional political differences based on disagreement over fundamental values play a diminishing part in elections.

For example, Prime Minister Tony Blair, the next major leader to face an election, plays the personality card and talks about policies, but he represents above all a set of middle-class values. When he speaks of modernisation, or of bringing things into the 21st century, he manages to suggest a strange but appealing mixture of change and stability. This has left the Conservative opposition without an effective response. Even questions like tax cuts and stricter asylum rules do not quite hit the value chords that the Republican Party in the US has managed to touch.

The picture is similar in Germany, where the overt influence of value politics is even smaller. The German debate is still largely a policy debate. When the opposition offers the government talks on health-care reform or, most recently, on combating unemployment, the underlying competition is about competence rather than values.

Yet, underneath the common battlegrounds of political debate in Britain and Germany and elsewhere in Europe, value clashes are lurking. Parties fight for those who can be made to feel good about themselves, but they may not fully realise that this is only partly a matter of policy.

Religion is not likely to become a major factor in European politics; opinion polls show that religious observance marks one of the few major differences between Americans and Europeans. Guns also have a different place in the European mind; it is their absence that most Europeans regard as important. A pacifist streak of values is also unmistakable in Europe. But the issue of political correctness (gays) plays a so-far underrated part in Europe as well. Most importantly, the Europe itself divides Europeans, as the national question arises in each European state. It is an issue of values, inspired by fear. People want to know where they belong, and in the process they turn against the US and toward Europe, or against Europe and toward their country. Either way, we leave the realms of policies, and even of politics, and enter the murky domain of symbols and myth.

This, at any rate, is the main risk that democratic countries face, for the politics of values is a dangerous development. It reintroduces fundamental divisions in societies whose greatest democratic achievement was precisely to banish fundamentalism from politics. Enlightened public debate must be a dispute about policies contained by a community of values. Insisting on this is therefore a primary objective of the politics of freedom.

Prof. Dahrendorf, author of numerous acclaimed books and a former European Commissioner from Germany, is a member of the British House of Lords, a former Rector of the London School of Economics and a former Warden of St Anthony's College, Oxford.

© Project Syndicate, 2005.

www.project-syndicate.org