EXTRA! EXTRA! New York Times Reports Dramatic New Research Finding!

According to the lead article in today’s Week in Review, a book about to be published by a group of political scientists argues that the culture war is a myth.

The book presents evidence that voters in red and blue America are not far apart. Majorities in both places support stricter gun control as well as the death penalty; they strongly oppose giving blacks preference in hiring while also wanting the government to guarantee that blacks are treated fairly by employers. They’re against outlawing abortion completely or allowing it under any circumstances, and their opinions on abortion have been fairly stable for three decades. Virtually identical majorities of Blues and Reds don’t want a single party controlling the White House and Congress. [Emphasis added]

Imagine that! Who’d a thunk that a majority of voters (in both red and blue states, no less!) are able to hold such obviously contradictory ideas as opposition to racial preferences and a belief that blacks should be treated fairly by employers? Surely this dramatic finding — let me repeat it, since it is so counter-intuitive you might not have believed me the first time: people oppose racial preferences even though they believe in racial fairness, or conversely they believe in racial fairness even though they oppose racial preferences — surely this finding is so surprising and unexpected in academia and elite publishing circles as to earn the authors some sort of prize this year.

Next thing you know they’ll be arguing that “[i]f the two presidential candidates this year were John McCain and Joe Lieberman, you’d see a lot more crossover and less polarization” or even that “if Bush had not ignored the widely accepted Powell doctrine by launching the war in Iraq, never proposed drilling in the Arctic refuge and never supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage” there would have been much less polarized opposition to him.

Oh wait. They did argue that.

Maybe for their encore they can come up with a new revisionist argument that the alleged culture clash that led to the unpleasantness of the mid-19th century was also mythical. Surely the Civil War could have been avoided if the Republican party hadn’t emerged to oppose the expansion of slavery, if Lincoln hadn’t been elected, or if the South hadn’t seceded.

Too bad they didn’t have political scientists back then.