…NYT employee, and Red Eye regular S.E. Cupp pens a good piece on the Catholic vote in the wake of the Notre Dame contretemps. It’s a good piece, even it it uses “liturgy” where “litany” or simply “politics” might be more appropriate. But she fails to make the leap to the hidden truth about the Catholic vote:

There is no Catholic vote.

I may exaggerate slightly, but self-identified Catholics haven’t been a distinctive voting bloc in a while. Thirty years of terrible catechesis, liturgical frippery, and widespread confusion have destroyed whatever distinctive Catholic culture once existed in the United States to form such a bloc. There are a bunch of identifiable sub-groups, but overall, there’s no cohesive pattern. And nominally Catholic politicians holding views against Catholic moral law—and sometimes the bishops themselves—have actively obscured as to the relevance of Catholic moral teaching to voting.

First, there are active, church-going, practicing Catholics. For many of them, life issues are probably the paramount issue in their vote. Consequently, they’ve progressively gone Republican since Roe.

Next, however, are the “religious Left” Catholics who are a smaller, but also actively practicing group who subscribe to the “social Gospel” and the basic idea that the Gospels enjoin us to create a just world on earth, and this desire for “social justice,” makes them essentially socialists in practice, even if they wouldn’t identify with atheistic Communism. They may decry abortion, but they’re frequently more exercised about capital punishment.

Next, there are Hispanics who, with some exceptions like Cubans, tend to vote Democratic for the same reasons that the Irish and Italians did a hundred years ago: they feel like outsiders and the Democrats offer to use state power for their benefit.

Last, there’s what might be the largest group of “cradle Catholics,” the non-practicing. They identify with the label of Catholic, but like many non-practicing Jews, it’s a matter of heritage, not of disposition. These Catholics are likely not differentiable from any other group of randomly selected Americans in their identification.

Looking at the map above, if anything, the Catholic population correlates roughly with the general Democratic vote in the last election. Given that Bush captured 52% of the Catholic vote (up 5% from 2000) against John Kerry, the first Catholic nominee since JFK, and that Obama then turned around and won the Catholic vote, it’s easy to say that the Catholic vote is a bellweather, but it’s hard to say how it’s distinctively Catholic, other than a high turnout rate which could be attributed to moral seriousness about the nature of democracy or a hangover from the long libel of Catholics as somehow un-American and possessed of dual loyalties.

Michael Barone, America’s greatest psephologist, calls the Catholic vote powerful:

With McCain plotting a path to the White House by attracting independent voters as well as white, ethnic, and largely Catholic Democrats whom Ronald Reagan successfully wooed, it is imperative that he establish his bona fides with Catholics, Hudson says. Catholic voters, though not a monolith, are powerful — and not a group to be trifled with. Surveys have shown that historically they turn out on Election Day in numbers that are higher than those for the overall electorate and almost without fail vote for the winner, with the exception of 2000, when a majority of Catholics voted for Democrat Al Gore. [But remember, a slight majority of Americans voted for Gore, too. —ŒV] In 2004, Catholics were key to President Bush’s re-election — 52 percent of them voted for him. (Turnout among Catholics that year was estimated at 63 percent, while overall turnout was 53 percent of the voting-age population.)

But again, I think it’s in terms of its swing-vote power, which doesn’t strike me as having anything particularly Catholic about it, but is a product of the heterogeneity I sketched above.

Anyway, the best discussion of this is in Jody Bottum’s essay, “The Myth of the Catholic Voter,” and his follow-up in which he claims that he may have been very wrong and that Catholics may relapse into old ethnic-bloc patterns when other voters start bloc-ing up. (For the comment by Friend of the Gormogons Jonathan Last that he refers to, you’ll have to check out the Google cache, as FT has disappeared a lot of its old blog entries.)

So, are Catholics a leading indicator, who crown presidents based on their appeal to Catholics, or are they a trailing indicator who simply reflect the Zeitgeist better than most precisely because of their non-distinctive character. Your Volgi favors the latter analysis, but I suspect it may be a minority position, even among my fellow Gormogons.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.