Talking about morals & faith.

War without End Cultural Conflict and the Struggle for America's Political Future Robert Shogan Westview, $41.50, 348 pp.

In practice, culture and politics are never really separable, and conflict over things cultural has been more or less the name of the game in American political history. When Robert Shogan writes that, since the 1960s, the United States has experienced "the longest sustained struggle over culture and politics in the nation's history," one wants to remind him of slavery and racism, or the multiformed Protestant battle to retain ascendancy evident in Prohibition and the Progressive movement. Even the New Deal wasn't an exception: Social Security, for example, wrote new terms for family life. Still, take away the hyperbole and Shogan is obviously right: since the 1960s, arguments about the family, morality, and religion have been reshaping our public life.

Shogan himself has impressive credentials as a political observer. He covered Washington for Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times, now works at the Center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins, and has written ten books on American politics with a special emphasis on the presidency. Shogan knows how to tell a story, and his history is half vignettes, politics up-close and personal, seen largely from the inside. His account of the selection of John Ashcroft as attorney general is striking, especially in highlighting the role of Congressman Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) in torpedoing the candidacies of Marc Racicot and Frank Keating. In this book, however, Shogan is trying to describe political developments that are large-scale and relatively impersonal, recalling four decades of headlines.

There is almost nothing new in Shogan's account, but given the American tendency for political amnesia, most of his readers will profit from a reminder. In fact, Shogan seems to proceed on that assumption. He begins with the Lewinsky scandal and Clinton's impeachment and only then goes back to the sixties, evidently hoping to show Americans the presence of the past in our contemporary discontents. His history is balanced, almost militantly fair; he has considerable respect for Kenneth Starr as a person, for example, and his accounts of politics are fully stocked with paradox and ambiguity. One of Shogan's best touches is his discussion of the role of Jimmy Carter's candidacy and presidency in politicizing evangelical Christians, disappointing their hopes and ultimately leaving them to the Republican right. And more broadly, Shogan makes it harder for left-of-center Americans to forget that, as agents demanding change, they have been de facto aggressors in the culture war.

Shogan's theme is that sociologist (and Commonweal contributor) Alan Wolfe is wrong: we are not "one nation after all"; there is no emerging cultural consensus; the culture war, as a crucial dividing line in American politics, has deep roots, is still with us, and will continue in the future, especially given our changing ethnic demographics. After Clinton survived impeachment, Shogan argues, liberals--and not a few conservatives, for that matter--misread the signs, underrating the extent to which most Americans, even those who supported the president, were put off by the moral carelessness of his administration and worried about the state and direction of American culture. Up to a point, Shogan is evidently right: Cultural battle cries are audible all along the frontlines of politics. But Shogan's case slides into overstatement. For example, he seems to miss what most voters understood from the beginning about the impeachment crisis: that the damage to our national institutions was due, not to Bill Clinton's misdeeds, but to the zealous effort to unmask them. Nor does he say much about the broadly held conviction that, in relation to sexual conduct, lies and guilty secrets are something close to the rule. In the bigger picture, in fact, Wolfe gives a better account of where we seem to be going. Across a broad spectrum, Americans hold relatively traditional values, but--partly because they recognize the diversity Shogan describes--they are reluctant to "impose" those standards on others. They are increasingly inclined to see moral beliefs as little more than personal preferences, and while that isn't good news for the American left--it suggests, as Todd Gitlin argues, the "twilight of common dreams"--it reflects the embattled state of the cultural right, something conservatives feel only too intensely.

Recent decades have only accentuated the long-term drift toward individualism in American culture--Harvard's Harvey Mansfield, that conservative nonpareil, speaks of "creeping libertarianism"--a slide accelerated by the cultural right's embrace of the free market, with its materialism, its relativism, and its celebration of "freedom of choice." In practical politics, cultural conservatives have won a good many battles and skirmishes, but it's hard not to see a broader pattern of retreat. Disappointed by Carter, the cultural right, as Shogan shows, got relatively little from Ronald Reagan or Bush Sr., or Newt Gingrich, and conservative indignation at Bill Clinton ended in the failure of impeachment, with Bill Bennett musing about the death of outrage and Paul Weyrich proclaiming--for the moment--defeat in the culture war.

Shogan is right to observe that the despair was excessive and that the right retains the ability to veto a Republican nominee, as it proved in the election of 2000. Yet it is also true that a full-throated expression of the creed of cultural conservatism spells political disaster, as in Pat Buchanan's notorious oratory in 1992 or Jerry Falwell's quickly qualified analysis of September 11, 2001. In 2000, as Shogan notes, most of the leading spirits on the religious right settled, very early, for George W. Bush, a candidate who was adroit at speaking in "theologically coded" terms, but whose campaign vigorously portrayed Bush as a "uniter, not a divider," a peacemaker rather than a cultural warrior.

At least Republicans know better than to ignore the cultural right. Democrats, especially given the ascendancy of money in politics, have grown increasingly committed to social liberals and inclined to mute or silence any concern for what seems to be the culture's growing indifference to inequality, its shattering of communities, or its cavalier attitude toward life. As Shogan observes, Al Gore's moment of "populism" in the campaign of 2000, like his effort to embrace religion and traditional values, was too selective and too compromised to be very credible, especially given Gore's conspicuous lack of natural rhetoric and political charm. Of course, in a contest as close as the last election, everything has a claim to have been decisive, but it certainly mattered that Catholic voters divided almost evenly between the parties. In any event, Shogan is right: if Democrats are to fight the culture wars effectively, they will need to discover a way of talking about morals and faith "consistent with their own heritage" as defenders of the common life.

Wilson Carey McWilliams, a frequent contributor, teaches political philosophy at Rutgers.