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"Sept. 11 changed everything." How often have we heard or thought that since that awful morning? Yet for 14 months, Sept. 11, 2001, seemed to have changed very little in America's politics. The nation's electorate still seemed split evenly between the parties. Voters still seemed to be divided along cultural lines, with traditionally religious Americans heavily Republican, and less-religious and unreligious ones heavily Democratic.

The results of the November 2001 state elections were not far out of line with the results of the November 2000 elections. During most of the 2002 campaign, polls showed the two parties winning about the same percentages -- results that were not different, given the statistical limits of polling, from the 48-48 percent tie in the 2000 presidential race or from the narrow 49-48 percent advantage for Republicans in total votes cast in House races that year -- or from the similar percentages in House races in 1998 and 1996, and Bill Clinton's 49 percent of the vote in 1996. Until the polls closed on Nov. 5, 2002, we still seemed to be the "49 percent nation" described in this magazine's cover story of June 9, 2001.

But as the results of the 2002 elections came in, it was clear that something -- some things -- had changed. It is highly unusual in American politics for a president's party to gain House seats in its first midterm election; the last time it happened was in 1934, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was assembling what would become the New Deal Democratic majority. But in 2002, George W. Bush's Republicans -- and they are George W. Bush's Republicans -- gained seats in the House.

Likewise, it is highly unusual in American politics for a president's party facing an opposition majority in the Senate to gain a Senate majority in a midterm election; in fact, it had never happened since the 1913 ratification of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for popular election of senators. But George W. Bush's Republicans, facing a 51-49 Democratic Senate (counting the former Republican and self-proclaimed independent James M. Jeffords of Vermont as a Democrat), emerged from Election Night with 51 Republican senators.

The popular vote for the House of Representatives turned out to be 51 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic. The popular vote for senators and governors broke down almost exactly the same, though many states did not have contests for these offices. Contrary to expectations, Republicans ended up with 26 governorships -- just one less than they held before -- and they gained 105 seats in state Houses and 36 seats in state Senates. For the first time since 1952, voters elected a majority of Republican state legislators.

These down-the-line gains for Republicans are politically significant. In an opinion poll, a 51-46 percent result is not statistically significantly different from a 49-48 percent result. But the margin of error in an election result is much smaller than the margin of error in a poll. The Republicans' 51-46 percent advantage in the House vote in 2002 is significantly different from the 49-48 percent results of 2000 and 1998. It is closer to the 52-45 percent popular-vote ratio by which the Republicans won control of the House in 1994 and to the 53-46 percent vote by which the first President Bush was elected in 1988.

What changed? What changed to make the 49 percent nation into a Bush Republican nation, if only by a narrow margin? What were the effects of Sept. 11, or of other developments between November 2000 and November 2002, that produced this somewhat different result? The changes can be summed up under headings borrowed from Thomas Jefferson's original words for the Declaration of Independence: Life, Liberty and Property (he later substituted "pursuit of happiness" for "property"). Life, liberty and property have all been changed by Sept. 11 and by other recent developments, in ways that have reshaped our political alignment and produced the results of the election of 2002.

But before we examine how life, liberty and property have been changed, let us consider one objection that has been raised against using House race results as a proxy for swings in national opinion: the argument that House races are influenced by the candidates' personal appeal and by local factors, and thus cannot be taken as reliable indicators of the parties' national strength. That used to be true, but no longer.

In 1988 there was no close correspondence between House and presidential election percentages. In 1992 there was some correspondence between the margins by which Democrats led Republicans in both races. In 1996 there was close correspondence between the Clinton and House Democratic percentages. And in 2000 there was almost a perfect correspondence. Without quite thinking about it, we have become a straight-ticket country, something we hadn't been since the 1940s.

Moreover, the convergence of the presidential and House percentages in 2000 was not just a coincidence. It occurred in each of the major regions of the country, and the movement toward convergence can be charted in each region. For this purpose, let us define the regions as the Coast (the Northeastern states except Pennsylvania, the three West Coast states and Hawaii), the Heartland (Pennsylvania, the Midwest, the Rocky Mountain states and Alaska) and the South (the 11 Confederate states plus West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma). Each of these regions contains about one-third of the nation's population. The Coast, dominated by its large metropolitan areas, is economically the richest part of the country and culturally the most liberal. The Heartland, a mixture of industrial metropolises and small-town and rural America, is economically a little less well-off and culturally less liberal. The South, increasingly metropolitan but with strong rural traditions, is growing more prosperous and is culturally very conservative.

The pattern in each region reflects the national pattern: significant differences in presidential and congressional voting in 1992, convergence in the Democratic presidential and congressional percentages in 1996, and convergence in both parties' percentages in 2000. So it seems reasonable to view the shift toward Republicans in 2002 as significant -- as significant as the similar-sized shift toward Democrats in 1996 -- and to ask what changes in life, liberty and property helped produce the outcome of 2002.

Life
A nation that believes it is in peril is different from a nation that believes it is safe. On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States changed from a nation that believed it was safe to a nation that knew it was in peril. For most of its history, the United States believed it was safe. Then, during World War II and most of the Cold War, we knew we were in peril. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, we seemed to be safe once again. Then, just short of 12 years later, we learned we were once again in peril, and had been all along.

A nation in peril expects the leaders of its government to confront the danger and defeat its enemies. It does not expect instant deliverance, nor does it flinch at heavy casualties if it is clear that progress is being made against its enemies. Americans sustained the Cold War effort for 42 years, from 1947 to 1989, even though the end was never clearly in sight, and despite opposition to that effort from 1967 to 1989 by large and articulate segments of academia, the media and the Democratic Party.

Americans re-elected their presidents in 1864 and 1944, two of the four years of highest American military casualties, because they had confidence that their leaders had put the nation on the road to victory. But even amid these costly and long years of peril, Americans still talked of other things. Everyday life went on. Domestic issues continued to play a part in politics, and previous political alignments were not totally altered.

But when choosing their presidents, voters were careful about rewarding those who waged war. Harry Truman was re-elected in 1948, to almost everyone's surprise, after he rallied the nation to wage the Cold War and ordered the airlift to isolated West Berlin. Democrats lost in 1952 and 1968 after their presidents embarked on wars but failed to put us on the road to victory. Richard Nixon was re-elected in 1972 because he seemed to have brought about American withdrawal from Vietnam without defeat. Jimmy Carter was defeated for re-election in 1980 because he seemed unable to prevent advances by the Soviets and attacks by the Iranian mullahs. From 1968 to 1988, Democrats won only one presidential election -- and that by only a narrow margin -- in part because Republicans convinced voters that they were better able to protect and advance America in time of peril. Democrats won in 1992 and 1996 and nearly won in 2000, when the nation seemed to be safe.

Now, when it is clear once again that the nation is in peril, voters have responded positively to the leadership of George W. Bush. His job ratings in the 14 months after Sept. 11 remained very high, and they did so for a longer sustained period than for any other president since polling began in 1935. Bush is seen as a strong leader dedicated to prosecuting the war on terrorism. Even though he spent a record amount of time in 2002 raising money and campaigning for Republicans, most voters evidently did not doubt that his top priority was to protect the nation from peril. He is not as smooth-tongued as his predecessor. But in his high-visibility speeches -- his address to Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, his State of the Union address on Jan. 29, 2002, his West Point commencement address on June 1, 2002, his speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002 and his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003 -- he spoke out as strongly and as eloquently as Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan.

After Bush's speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, it was clear that Congress would have to debate a resolution supporting military action in Iraq. Then-Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., at first said that such a debate would have to be extensive, so extensive that it might not be possible to vote on a resolution until after the election. Then Daschle switched to saying that debate and a vote could take place quickly. Similarly, on the bill to create a Department of Homeland Security, Daschle persisted in backing provisions protecting unionized public-employees and so prevented passage of the bill before the election; this made it possible for Republicans to argue that Democrats were less interested in homeland security than in protecting a constituency that provides lots of money for Democratic campaigns. Such arguments helped defeat Democratic Sens. Max Cleland of Georgia and Jean Carnahan of Missouri -- and helped deprive Democrats of their Senate majority.

The votes on the resolution supporting military action against Iraq saw the Democrats split down the middle. In the Senate, 29 Democrats voted for the resolution, and 21 Democrats and Jeffords voted against; 48 out of 49 Republicans voted for. In the House, 81 Democrats voted for the resolution and 127 against; Republicans voted for it 215-6. Democrat Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri voted for the resolution but his whip, and successor as minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., voted against. The Iraq issue also split Democratic voters and Democratic fund-raisers -- a serious problem for the party. A party divided when the nation is in peril has difficulty winning its citizens' votes.

It was often said during the campaign that voters were more concerned about domestic or economic issues than they were about the war on terrorism. Reporters knocking on doors or roaming shopping center parking lots found relatively few voters bringing up the terrorism issue. Polls asking voters which issues they were more concerned about or -- a foolish question in a poll -- which issues they would prefer to hear candidates talk about, often showed more voters choosing domestic or economic issues. But polls often elicited such answers during the Cold War and might even have done so at some stages of World War II. People naturally don't like to contemplate another September 11 or a chemical or biological warfare attack. They prefer to dwell on familiar, quotidian, relatively unthreatening domestic issues. But that doesn't mean they ever entirely forget that the nation is in peril. And in fact, in 2002, some critical number of voters decided to switch to the party of a president who seemed to take that peril seriously. "This was an election about security -- or, more accurately, about insecurity," Democratic pollster Allan Rivlin wrote two days after the election. "When you think about it, these (domestic) issues seem minor when people want to harm us."

No one can say how long the nation will remain in peril. Life will still be threatened even if American troops are occupying Iraq, even if Osama bin Laden is tracked down and killed, even if the terror-sponsoring mullahs of Iran are overthrown, and even if the propagation of totalitarian Wahhabi Islam is ended -- and there can be no certainty, at this writing, that any of these "even-ifs" will happen. The sense that the nation is in peril seems likely to continue at least through November 2004. Voters will then have to judge whether George W. Bush and his administration are making progress in the war against terrorism, leading us on a road toward victory; or whether it would be better to entrust the executive branch of government to the Democratic nominee. In the wake of the 2002 election, it seemed likely that voters would choose Bush, and by a significantly wider electoral college margin than in 2000. But too many unknown events lay ahead to make prophecy at all sure.

Liberty
For more than 200 years (indeed for more than 300 years, since there are many continuities between colonial and constitutional America), this country has been dedicated to the proposition that people of great variety -- of different ethnic origins, different racial classifications, different religions, different opinions on government policy -- can live together in liberty.

Over that time, the happily elastic definitions of liberty set down by the Founding Fathers have been expanded to include people who were excluded in 1776 or 1787. During much of that time Americans, in the words of historian Robert Wiebe, could live together because they lived apart. People of different religions, different moral beliefs, different ethnic origins and different racial classifications could pursue their own happiness without bothering each other. But on occasion, government has had to address issues that split people along cultural lines, and much of American politics has centered on such cultural issues. The most serious was slavery, which caused the nation to split apart and fight a civil war. Other divisive cultural issues that government has addressed include the place of religion in education, prohibition of liquor and drugs, women's rights, racial segregation and racial quotas and preferences, immigration, abortion rights, gun control, whether America should go to war and whether it should have conscription. Some are a matter of history now, many are recurring and some are still matters of lively dispute.

Often these issues have been seen as battles over the way to balance liberty and moral principle. Do I have a right to consume alcohol, to have an abortion, to keep and bear arms? Or does moral principle require the government to ban liquor or abortions or handguns? Do I as a woman have a right to vote, or I as a young man to be free of an obligation to serve in the military? Or does the need to nurture and protect society require the government to bar women from voting and require men to serve in the military? Large numbers of Americans have had very different convictions on such issues and, when the question is raised whether a representative government should take action, such issues inevitably become the stuff -- often the central stuff -- of democratic politics.

In the America of 2000, such cultural issues -- issues that amount to conflicts between principles of liberty and morality -- were central to the division between the parties. In the achingly close election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, and in the elections between Republicans and Democrats for the House of Representatives, it was not income that divided the voters: If the only thing you knew about a person was his or her income and from that, you guessed how he or she would vote, you would have been wrong almost half the time. Party preference was much more closely related to cultural factors -- level of education, racial or ethnic identification and, most of all, religion. Strongly religious voters were very likely to vote Republican. Unreligious or not-very-religious voters were very likely to vote Democratic. If the only thing you knew about a person was his or her religious beliefs and from that guessed how he or she would vote, you would have been right a very high percentage of the time. And if you knew that person's views on abortion rights and gun control, you would have been right almost every time.

Practically everyone is familiar now with the 2000 election map showing the states Bush carried and the states Gore carried, the "red states" and the "blue states." The hostility between the red states and the blue states, between these two nations, grew more and more bitter during the 36-day controversy over the Florida vote count in November and December 2000. But on Sept. 11, the red states and the blue states became red, white and blue America. When terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and United Airlines Flight 93, we realized instantly that they attacked us all. We realized that the differences that had so bitterly divided us were less important than what we have in common. We realized that the conflicts between claims of liberty and claims of morality were just arguments at the margin, and that they were less important than our common commitment to liberty and morality.

American flags sprouted in neighborhoods where few flags had appeared on public holidays; they were pasted on cars alongside Bush bumper stickers and Gore bumper stickers. New Americans -- immigrants -- responded in every case in the same way as all other Americans. George W. Bush spoke for the entire country at Washington's National Cathedral on Sept. 14, 2001, and later that day, when he appeared at Ground Zero and spoke to the workers there. When some yelled that they couldn't hear him (the speech was unplanned, and he was speaking through a quickly-rounded-up bullhorn), he said, "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon." Immediately, the workers began chanting, "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" Look at the faces in the videotape of that scene: They are Americans of all descriptions and origins, some undoubtedly from families who have been here many generations, some of them recent immigrants, but all Americans, aware that what binds us together is much stronger than what sets us apart.

In this changed atmosphere, it seems likely that for many voters the hard edges of the cultural issues have become softer. When the nation is in peril, people are less eager to fight culture wars. An October 2002 Ipsos-Reid poll reported that 56 percent of Americans said they had become more likely over the past year -- that is, since Sept. 11 -- to respect cultures that do not share their values. Our cultural divisions still persist and still account, more than anything else, for our political divisions. But voters may be willing to cross cultural lines and support the party that does not reflect their own cultural views. Some significant number of voters who rejected George W. Bush in 2000 for his association with religious conservatives and his opposition to abortion rights and gun control voted Republican in the changed atmosphere of 2002.

And it is possible that public opinion has moved some little distance toward the Republican position on guns and abortion rights. The response of the heroes of United Flight 93 have shown that there are times when ordinary citizens must use violence to combat violence. Reliance on officers of the law is not enough. Today, 33 states have laws allowing law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons -- laws that gun control advocates predicted would lead to violence in the street but that in fact have seemed to reduce violent crime (criminals perhaps being less likely to mug or rape or burglarize if there's a significant chance the victim is armed). And abortion seems to carry a certain stigma. Fewer and fewer women are choosing abortion every year, and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League has taken "abortion" out of its name and now calls itself NARAL Pro-Choice America. It is an article of faith among many in the media that opposition to abortion rights is politically fatal. But the presidential candidate more opposed to abortion rights has won five of the seven presidential elections since the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade.

Whatever the movement on these issues, they are less important than they were before Sept. 11. Before, we were a nation split down the middle on cultural issues. Now we are a nation, by a very large margin, on the side of George W. Bush in his leadership of the war on terrorism.

Property
Politics, the political scientist Paul Lazarsfeld famously wrote, is about who gets how much when. In other words, politics is about economics. Lazarsfeld was writing in 1948, when American politics seemed to be a struggle between New Deal Democrats and laissez-faire Republicans, between those who wanted to use government to redistribute income and those who wanted government to leave well enough alone and between a party backed by rapidly growing labor unions and a party with almost unanimous backing from corporate and financial leaders.

We do not live in such a country today. Theories and formulas predicting electoral results based on economic statistics, concocted by political scientists studying the New Deal era, failed dismally to explain the results of 2000 and 2002. In 2000, the candidate of the president's party failed to win in a time of apparent prosperity. In 2002, the party of the incumbent president made historically unprecedented gains in a midterm election in a time of sluggish economic growth, officially proclaimed recession, and highly publicized corporate misdeeds.

Today, economic issues affect American politics differently than they did in the decades after the Depression and the New Deal. The important economic focus for most voters now is not on short-term income but on long-term wealth. The focus, in other words, is not on whether a slowdown in the economy threatens voters with unemployment or reduced income, but on whether voters can make progress in their lifelong pursuit of wealth. For the fact is, a large majority of Americans do accumulate significant wealth -- six-figure wealth -- over the course of their lifetimes. Most young Americans expect, reasonably, to accumulate such wealth in their lifetimes.

American voters who remember the 1930s were, for many years after, exquisitely sensitive to increases in the unemployment rate and any signs of an impending recession. They could remember how a one-year economic decline led to economic collapse and personal disaster. But in 2002, only 8 percent of voters were old enough to remember the 1930s. The memory of voters who were under 30 in 2002 does not go back before the years 1983 to 2001 -- 18 years in which the nation experienced low inflation and solid economic growth 97 percent of the time.

And today, unemployment is not necessarily the personal disaster it was in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s. Then, people who lost their jobs had little wealth and were forced to rely on modest government cash assistance; without that weekly paycheck or packet of cash and with little wealth to draw on, they had a far harder time buying groceries and paying rent or making mortgage payments. Today, losing a job is a setback but not always a disaster; the large majority of Americans have wealth and credit cards to get them through the tough times. So most voters don't respond to recession or economic sluggishness the way voters who remember the 1930s do.

The 2002 election results teach three lessons about the effect of economic issues on politics when voters focus not on income but on wealth. The first is how voters who are investors -- those who own stocks or bonds -- respond to a downturn in stock prices. This was the first election in which a majority of the voters were investors and in which stock prices had seriously declined. Would investors, angry at their loss of net worth, react against the party in power? No one knew for sure. Some predicted that when voters read their October 401(k) reports, support for Republicans would plummet. But no such thing happened. Investors had tended to vote more Republican than did non-investors in the 1990s, and that was the case in 2002 as well.

The increasing proportion of investors meant that the electorate as a whole was more Republican; pollster Scott Rasmussen estimated that if the proportions of investors and non-investors were the same as in 1992, and both groups cast the same percentages of their votes for the two parties, the overall vote would have been 50-46 percent for the Democrats. Investors evidently take the long view when they consider their economic interest, voting not on their short-term losses but on their expectations of long-term gain. Republican National Committee pollster Matthew Dowd argues, "The investing voters see the government playing a reduced role in the very large historic economic cycles." That tends to lead investor-voters to support tax cuts, free trade and measures to ensure corporate accountability -- policies that produce economic growth and increase the transparency and fairness of financial markets. Over the long run, the constituency with a vested interest in checking the growth of government (an interest that may trump the tendencies of some to vote for Democrats) is likely to grow much larger.

In the short run, the Democrats' vitriolic descriptions of the state of the economy, and their unwillingness to argue for the solution most of them privately favor -- repeal of the Bush tax cuts -- did not win them many votes. Nor did news about corporate misdeeds.

For one thing, Bush hastily accepted the bipartisan corporate-accountability bill sponsored by Democratic Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes of Maryland. But more important, voters no longer feel that big corporations' interests are antagonistic to their own, as many did in the post-New Deal era. Then, nearly 40 percent of private-sector employees outside the South belonged to labor unions and tended to see their interests as adverse to those of management. Much of American politics then revolved around labor-management conflicts. Today, only 9 percent of private-sector employees belong to unions, and relatively few employees see their interests as contrary to management's. Voters responded to the stories of corporate misdeeds not as union members and employees but as investors, and as investors they wanted to see corporate wrongdoers prosecuted and new laws passed to require better accounting standards.

The second lesson of the 2002 election dealt with Social Security. Across the country, Democrats attacked Republicans for supporting "privatization" of Social Security, by which they meant George W. Bush's proposals for voluntary individual investment accounts. In some states and districts, Republicans attacked Democrats for supporting "privatization" of Social Security, by which they meant Bill Clinton's proposal in January 1999 to have government invest part of the Social Security taxes of young workers. But the Democrats won few, if any, elections on this issue. Senate candidates Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and John Sununu of New Hampshire not only defended but promoted their policies for individual investment accounts. They argued that the accounts would give workers control over their savings and choices of how to invest them, while assuring future retirees of adequate retirement income at a time when promised benefits will vastly exceed payroll-tax revenues. Dole's opponent, Erskine Bowles, said there was nothing to worry about because the system would be sound until 2041. That sounds like a long time off to someone born in the 1940s. But for people born in 1973 -- and there are an increasing number of voters in that age group -- 2041 is the year they are scheduled to retire. At the same time, many elderly voters -- assured by advocates of individual investment accounts that their benefits would be untouched -- voted for Republicans.

Nothing will be done about Social Security in this Congress, but Bush seems determined to bring up the issue in 2004 and, with the presidential megaphone, he will be able to frame it his way. Polls show that in that case, private accounts have majority support. The GI generation -- the prime supporters of Social Security as-is for many years -- will never again cast as high a proportion of the total vote as they did in 2002. Casting higher proportions will be the young voters who believe they have more to gain by investing some of their Social Security taxes than by relying on the promised government return. It used to be said that Social Security was the third rail of American politics: Propose changes in the system, and you die. In an investor-majority nation in which voters want to accumulate wealth, it may be that the third rail has moved to the other side of the track: Oppose changes in the system, and you die.

The third lesson about the politics of wealth concerns taxes, the dog that didn't bark in the 2002 election. Democrats refused to argue for repeal of the 2001 Bush tax cuts, partly because the Democrats in some endangered seats had voted for them. But more important, they found it impossible to frame the argument in terms that would be attractive. The argument about taxes is really an argument about the size of government not just next year but in the longer run, and the reason most Democrats oppose the tax cuts is that they believe that a larger government would be good for most Americans. But the argument for bigger government in the abstract is unpopular with voters; that is why Democrats concentrate on specific, attractive programs, such as prescription drugs for seniors. The problem for Democrats is that their opposition to tax cuts is likely to be even more unattractive in 2004 than it was in 2002. If Bush's latest tax proposals are enacted, tax cuts promised for 2004, 2005 and later will be put in place for 2003.

That means that the parties' postures on the tax-cut issue will change from what they were in 1996 and 2000, back to what they were in 1984 and 1988. In 1996 and 2000, Republicans were arguing for tax cuts; Democrats, for keeping taxes where they were. The Republicans' promises were greeted skeptically, as promises of tax cuts usually are, while the Democrats' promises were credible, because everyone knew they had taken a shellacking in 1994 for having raised taxes and weren't likely to do that again. In 1984 and 1988, the postures were different. The Republicans, having cut taxes, argued for keeping them where they were, and the Democrats, explicitly in 1984 and implicitly in 1988, called for raising taxes. In those years, the affluent suburbanites who would later vote for Bill Clinton and Al Gore on cultural issues voted for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to keep their taxes from rising. They may vote for his son in 2004 for the same reason.

A Yet-Unfinished Era
Life, liberty, property: Not only are our lives different since Sept. 11, so are our politics.

Life: Republicans once again have an advantage over Democrats who are divided about national security at a time when the nation is in peril. But the burden is on George W. Bush to make progress in the war on terrorism.

Liberty: Sept. 11 has made us more aware of how much we have in common with those with whom we have differences. It's also made us less angry toward our opponents. This better positions both parties to win votes from those who found them unacceptable in 2000.

Property: The emergence of an investor-majority nation makes Big Government and economic redistribution less attractive, and makes policy changes offering options and choices more attractive. We have seen the effects of these changes in the results of the 2002 elections. We may see more in 2004.

History may record the years 1995 to 2001 -- the years of the "49 percent nation," when the two parties were at parity and when Bill Clinton won re-election and Al Gore came so close to being elected -- as the Clinton detour within a long period of Republican majority, something similar to the Eisenhower detour in majority-Democratic postwar America. That's certainly what it will look like if the Republican presidential majorities of 1980, 1984, and 1988, and the Republican congressional majorities of 1994 and 2002, are followed by Republican presidential and House majorities in 2004. We are still a long way from there, and those who remember the 1992 cycle -- when it was widely believed that Republicans had a lock on the presidency and that George H.W. Bush, with his 91 percent job-approval rating in March 1991, could not be defeated -- understand that many things can happen in American politics.

But there is some reason to believe that history will record our as-yet-unfinished era as a market-driven Information Age. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, this country was industrial America, a country that was moving toward standardization and centralization. This was an America of ever-bigger corporations, a bigger and more bureaucratized government and standardized professions and scientific communities. Such an America led to the assimilation of immigrants, to cultural conformity, and to common social experiences such as the comprehensive high school and the military draft. It was a society temperamentally inclined toward centralization, normalization, standardization. In that America, Theodore Roosevelt's Republicans and Woodrow Wilson's Democrats competed for the first third of the century over which was the better centralizing party. But after the Depression of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt's Democrats had a huge advantage as the party favoring vigorous and active government.

In the last third of the 20th century and now in the first third of the 21st, we are living in postindustrial, Information Age America. The economy is increasingly decentralized and market-driven rather than regulated by government or manipulated by oligopolies; American culture is increasingly variegated, as people feel free to choose different lifestyles and as new peoples come from other lands; affluence and surging economic growth produce many economic and cultural niches in which Americans can choose to live comfortably. It is a society temperamentally inclined toward decentralization, away from bureaucracies and toward markets, toward individual choice rather than standardization. This America has a natural tendency to vote Republican, although it is willing to vote for Democrats, such as Bill Clinton, who fashion their public policies and political tactics to suit its predispositions. George W. Bush seems to understand the character of this society: A theme running through his 2000 platform -- tax cuts, education, Medicare, Social Security -- is allowing more individual choice rather than requiring everyone to fit into the same bureaucratically defined template.

There is a similar contrast in how Americans fight their wars. Industrial America fought its wars by using its centralized industrial strength. Large military forces made up of draftees and armed with unsophisticated, mass-produced weapons and mat?riel -- these were what we brought to World War I and what enabled us to win World War II and to avoid defeat in Korea. But as industrial America became postindustrial America, industrial war fighting worked less well in Vietnam. Now postindustrial, Information Age America is winning its wars with a volunteer military, with tactics that put a premium on skill and personal initiative, and with highly sophisticated equipment far beyond the capacity of any other country. We saw this in the Persian Gulf War; we saw it even more in Afghanistan; we will likely see it soon in Iraq. This military is an institution that reflects the basic character of the nation led by George W. Bush, a leader who understands his nation far better than do those who ooze with contempt for him.

On the performance of this military, and of this president, much depends -- including the course of American politics for the next several years, perhaps the next several decades. But it is clear that this nation at peril, alike though it is in its basic character, is importantly different in its politics from the 49 percent nation that we thought we knew so well until the 2002 election returns started coming in.