Of Red States, Blue States, and Illiterate Americans – The Challenges Facing Obama

Over the past couple of weeks we have seen two extremely provocative articles regarding the social and intellectual divide that has gripped America in recent years. Both come as we await the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama, the man who began his campaign back in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention with the momentous line, we are “one state, the United States of America.”

Taken together, the two pieces demonstrate the enormous challenges Obama faces. From them, we can clearly see that the process of uniting America will be a far greater challenge for the next president than fixing the economy.

Red Sex, Blue Sex
Over at the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot wrote a fascinating piece called Red Sex, Blue Sex – Why do so many evangelical teen-agers become pregnant? The article began with a look at how liberals and conservatives reacted to Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old unmarried, pregnant daughter.

The overall viewpoint regarding Bristol Palin varied significantly depending on which side of the political aisle you were on. Talbot notes, “Many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin.”

Instead, members of the Republican party “seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news.” According to Talbot, one Republican delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, “Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it’s great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion.”

Talbot goes on to note the fundamental differences between the two parties when it comes to such matters. “Social liberals in the country’s ‘blue states’ tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teenagers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news.”

As for conservatives, the view is quite different. “Social conservatives in ‘red states’ generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teenager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.”

Talbot notes the work of others on this enormous chasm and offers a startling revelation. “Religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teenagers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage.”

Yet, according to data, “evangelical teenagers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews.” At the same time, she reports “that evangelical Protestant teenagers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception.”

Talbot discusses the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements and critical data that compares children who live with both biological parents with those who do not. She also details “The Education of Shelby Knox,” the story of a teenager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas who had taken an abstinence pledge and the work of two family-law scholars who are writing a book on ‘red families’ and ‘blue families’.

Red Intellect, Blue Intellect
The second article, from Chris Hedges, is entitled America the Illiterate. Interestingly, when his article appeared on the site Alternet, Hedges piece was entitled Forget Red vs. Blue — It’s the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda.

“We live in two Americas,’ stated Hedges. “One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth.

“The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.”

Of the latter, Hedges is extremely pointed. The other America “cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches.

“It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.”

Hedges cites the troubling literacy statistics that summarize our country: over 42 million American adults cannot read and another 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level.

Hedges summarizes, “Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate.”

The impact Hedges on our current political landscape is substantial. “The illiterate rarely vote,’ states Hedges, “and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information.”

Accordingly, our illiteracy means that “we prefer happy illusions.” The writer adds, “It works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates.

“We confuse how we feel with knowledge,” writes Hedges. And therefore, our “political leaders in our post-literate society no longer need to be competent, sincere or honest.”

Hedges adds some very revealing data from the Princeton Review. The agency has “analyzed the transcripts of the Gore-Bush debates, the Clinton-Bush-Perot debates of 1992, the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858.”

Not too surprisingly, the standard vocabulary of Gore-Bush and Clinton-Bush-Perot debates falls a couple of shelves short of the Kennedy-Nixon battles (early middle school versus early high school) and as many as five or six levels below that of Lincoln-Douglas (late high school, early college).

As part of the illiterate trend, Hedges points to another gradual change that is taking place across the country, “The change from a print-based to an image-based society.” He is not too kind to those who learn visually insisting they are being easily manipulated in today’s world.

Challenges for Obama
Though the president-elect has made it his pledge to bring our divided nation together, these two articles demonstrate the enormous prevailing divide that Obama will need to address.

Hedges is not kind to the president-elect. He first stipulates that Obama will be unable to halt the current devastating economic crisis facing America. That assertion pales next to his other, that the president-elect “used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign funds to appeal to and manipulate” the nation’s “illiteracy and irrationalism to his advantage.”

This of course soundly contrasts with the viewpoint that Obama was the candidate of and for the intellectuals. Yet Hedges is correct in his assessment of a deeper rift, one that transcends the simplistic red state/blue state divide that tends to be the focus of political pundits.

During his campaign, Obama insisted he was the one candidate capable of uniting a disparate America. Our next president has set forth some other lofty goals, jump-starting the troubled economy, introducing universal health care, improving education and bringing tax relief to the middle class. As a means to those ends, the president-elect will likely need to bridge the significant social and intellectual divides that pervade our country today.

By virtue of being the first ever African-American to be elected to the highest office, Obama has placed himself firmly in the history books for ever. If he can somehow actually get us to function as ‘one state, the United States of America,’ Obama will leave a legacy that will rival that of the greatest to ever sit in the Oval Office.

Flickr photos courtesy of oceandesetoiles, H. Michael Karshis, atennies94, and js wright.