On that heady evening last August when Barack Obama claimed the Democratic presidential nomination before an adoring throng in Denver, it seemed possible he could change the very nature of American politics. Americans, Obama said, had "lost our sense of common purpose". He vowed to restore "the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort". It seemed entirely plausible, as Andrew Sullivan had argued in an influential December 2007 Atlantic magazine essay: "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man," Sullivan wrote. Obama, he argued, could usher in a new era of post-baby boomer politics, one that would transcend the culture wars that had dogged America since Vietnam and the rise of Richard Nixon.
One year later, politics in America has indeed changed, but largely in the sense that the fury that liberals once directed at George W Bush has largely been transferred to the conservatives now raging against Obama. That much has been clear in the spectacle at this month's congressional town hall forums around the country, where the debate over Obama's healthcare reform plan has become a focal point for familiar themes of conservative cultural resentment.
The town hall events attracted gun rights zealots carrying handguns. Anti-abortion fanatics screamed at congressmen about taxpayer-funded infanticide. Anti-government ideologues, including the newly unemployed Facebook provocateur Sarah Palin, warned of socialism, the loss of "freedom" and technocratic elites allegedly plotting to decide which infirm Americans shall live and which shall die before what Palin has despicably labelled "death panels". So much for common purpose and the grace to bridge divides.
To witness the mad, hysterical spectacle is to appreciate what has become increasingly obvious for months now: that despite the earnest hopes of the misty-eyed Obamamaniacs, things are not so different in Obama's America. Indeed, we are witnessing the latest iteration of the long-running American culture war that Sullivan and others promised Obama would transcend.
To be clear, this is not the religious culture war that raged from the Monica Lewinsky scandal and through the Bush era. During that period, evangelical Christians were on the march, promoting their agenda of banning gay rights, stifling stem cell research and discrediting Charles Darwin. But the Christianists have lost their punch after seeing their agenda fizzle even under a two-term Republican president (remember, Bush never came close to banning gay marriage), and crusaders like the Reverend James Dobson have largely withdrawn from the political front lines.
No, today's culture warriors are more reminiscent of another famous type in recent American politics: the Angry White Male. This was the archetype of the political force that rocked Bill Clinton's presidency during the 1994 congressional midterm elections, in which Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and Senate. The catchphrase was based on the huge shift by white men to the Republican column in that election; just 39% voted for Democratic House candidates that year, a 10-point dip from the 1992 election. The anger was something more intang-ible, but also quite real: storm clouds of bile filling the conservative talk radio airwaves. Most memorably, perhaps, in the autumn of 1994, the Watergate-conspirator-turned-talk-radio-host G Gordon Liddy advised a listener worried about intrusions by federal agents to "shoot for the head".
Today, white men again symbolise the conservative resistance to a Democratic president. And with a black man in the White House, the racial element is even more pronounced. Think of the recent cast of heroes trotted out by the conservative message machine. Last autumn there was Joe Wurzelbacher – better known as "Joe the Plumber", the Ohio voter who confronted Obama about his tax policies on the campaign trail. It was through this burly, working-class everyman that John McCain was finally able to crystallise a clear campaign theme, one which warned that hard-working, blue-collar Americans were about to be steamrolled by know-it-all elites with visions of a socialist utopia. Implicit in the celebration of Joe the Plumber, whether intentional or not, was also a racial contrast with the African-American Democratic candidate. In this sense, the message was cultural as much as economic, one that reached back to Richard Nixon's appeals to the Silent Majority.
The working-class white hero resurfaced this spring, with Obama's Supreme Court nomination of judge Sonia Sotomayor. Conservatives hammered at Sotomayor's foolish past statement that a "wise Latina" judge should be able to reach a better decision than a white man. And they lionised the white Irish and Italian firefighters who had been denied promotions by a 2008 ruling in which Sotomayor had concurred, arranging to have the firefighters testify in full, noble uniform before the Senate judiciary committee before the national television cameras.
But it was midsummer that brought us the apotheosis of contemporary angry white man politics. On 20 July, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was arrested on the porch of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after breaking through a door that had been jammed, leading a passerby to report a possible burglary. After haranguing the responding police officer, sergeant James Crowley, Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct. Asked about the incident at a televised press conference, Obama responded that, although he didn't "know all the facts", the Cambridge police had "acted stupidly".
Obama was probably right, but he, too, had acted stupidly. The off-the-cuff comment dominated national politics for days, as Americans debated the precise questions of class and race that Obama most dreads. Crowley, it turned out, was a hardy family man who spent his evenings on the softball field, while it emerged that Gates, a friend of Obama, enjoys riding his shiny red adult tricycle around Martha's Vineyard. To conservatives, here was an fine example of the president siding with his Ivy League intellectual pal, who also happens to be black, against the blue-collar white man trying to do his job.
It was precisely because Obama recognised this explosive culture-war dynamic that he quickly intervened in the controversy, admirably seeking to turn it into a "teachable moment" by inviting Gates and Crowley to sit down for beers at the White House. But it was also in this context that the inexplicably popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, perhaps the most cynical demagogue of the moment, articulated the venal id of this new moment last month. Obama, Beck explained, "has exposed himself… as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture".
Beck's idiotic commentary may have been self-defeatingly crazy. (Several advertisers have since boycotted his show.) But as a general proposition, it's hard to dismiss the notion that a carefully orchestrated white man's cri de coeur is at last partly to blame for dragging down Obama's agenda. The president's approval ratings have been sinking steadily and public opinion is now turning against his healthcare reform plan. Polls reveal rising voter trust in Republican ideas on other issues, like taxes and the economy (although Republican approval ratings overall remain dismal). With a new political narrative in motion, it may be that such cultural resentments may lead Republicans to a strong showing in the 2010 midterm elections.
In the face of such an onslaught, Obama's best hope for salvation lies not in teachable moments but in the prospect of economic recovery. Nothing makes white men angry, after all, like the humiliation of lost jobs and diminished earning power. And, while recent economic data has been mixed, there are hopeful indications that a recovery may be under way, one which Obama can attribute to his much-derided economic $787bn stimulus plan – just in time for those midterms.
There is also the possibility that the culture war can backfire on the right. The town halls may be good theatre, but they are also troubling. Passions are rising to irrational, even dangerous levels. Last week, a Maryland man was detained for holding a "Death to Obama" sign outside one congressional town hall meeting. Experts who track hate groups report a nationwide spike in violent rhetoric targeted at the president on the websites of white supremacists and militia groups. In this context, it's worth remembering that the last round of angry white man politics went well beyond a change in congressional power. On 19 April 1995, anti-government fanatics bombed the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. With that act, the culture war stopped being an abstract concept and became something more literal. (Although, ironically, that tragedy led the American public to rally to Clinton's side, a shift that may have rescued his presidency.)
We can only hope it doesn't come to that again. But that such a thought even needs uttering may show how sadly ephemeral was the belief that Obama might magically heal the deepest wounds in America's divided culture.
Michael Crowley is a senior editor of the New Republic Magazine