"It's worth taking a step back from the emotions and technical details of all these events,"
writes Walter Russell Mead, "to ask about the broader trend they point to."
Superficially, they point to a schizophrenic public: leaning
pro-life; increasingly in favor of gay marriage; divided on gun control
but unwilling to pull the trigger, so to speak, on significantly
tightened gun laws. But on a deeper level, these all look like examples
of the biggest cultural-political trend in America: a response to the
growing complexity of 21st century life that revives individualism and states’ rights.
Individualism sometimes work for the Right and sometimes for the
Left. The right to marry who you choose is as individualistic as
insisting on your right to bear arms. With abortion, that same logic is
muddier, which is why the public is still divided. Pro-choicers lay
claim to the individualism mantle by stating that women should be free
to control their own reproductive health, while pro-lifers do the same
by arguing that abortion involves two individuals with rights, not one.
Given the nation's divisions, a future of a live-and-let-live individualism sounds appealing, but we've a long way to go to achieve it. The Left's passion for demonizing those with whom it disagrees reached new heights in Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy's
majority opinion in the Defense of Marriage case, when he disparaged the motives of half the nation as well as DOMA legislators. As Justice Antonin Scalia retorted in his dissent,
