But sifting through the exit polls and election results . . . it's a funny thing. The voters least likely to be terror targets — those in rural areas, small towns and the less populated states — tended to be most frightened by the prospect of a terror attack. Conversely, voters in major metro areas that would be logical targets of terror, including New York and New Jersey, were least likely to be frightened by it.

That oddity mirrors something I first noticed back in the mid-'90s, at a time when crime, not terror, was the hot political issue. In interviews with candidates and voters, the fear of random, unpredictable crime seemed most intense in places you wouldn't logically expect, such as suburbs far from the city center where people lived in gated, guarded communities surrounded by people much like themselves and where rates of violent crime were absurdly low.

Those people were scared, but it was hard to believe that crime was the real reason. It seemed more likely that they were scared by the cultural and economic changes going on around them, by TV shows that were penetrating the walls of their gated neighborhoods depicting a world they did not recognize, by the sense that the country they had known growing up was being robbed from them, replaced by something foreign and threatening. But unable to put a name to their unease, they attributed it to crime.

I think the same may be true today with terror, a theory that's bolstered by something else in the exit polling and other post-election data. Apparently, many voters supported Bush despite misgivings about his policies because they were reassured by his character and faith and believed that he shared their traditional values. They saw him as an ally against the things they feared the most, while Kerry, with his foreign-born wife and Boston accent, in many ways epitomized those fears.

That fear — that sense of being under assault in your own country — is a powerful thing. And it no doubt grows every time people see a TV commercial talk of four-hour erections, every time they go to the ATM machine and are asked whether they want to conduct business in Spanish or English, every time a business announces mass layoffs and a tax-subsidized move overseas.

However, the root cause of those changes is not government or even the cultural elite. It's just business, chasing a dollar with little or no attention to what its impact will be. The social, cultural, legal and regulatory controls that once limited what was acceptable in selling a product or running a company are largely gone now, and the result is a consumer society that worships nothing so much as the bottom line.

The biggest threat to traditional values today is greed.

So even though conservative politicians may depict themselves as culture warriors, they will do nothing to stop that pharmaceutical company from running erection commercials, because you don't interfere when there's money to be made. And while illegal immigration stirs fears among millions, no effective action will be taken because businesses find those immigrants a cheap and docile source of labor.

And of course, the sleaziest of the major TV networks, the outlet whose shows are most likely to disparage institutions such as marriage and traditional moral values, is Fox Broadcasting. The latest movie drawing the ire of religious and cultural conservatives is "Kinsey," a lurid biography of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, likewise distributed by Fox Searchlight.

And where will those deeply offended people turn for comfort, for reassurance that they are not alone in their dismay at all this cultural decadence?

They'll punch the clicker to Fox News, so Rupert Murdoch's employees can tell them that it's all the liberals' fault.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column appears Mondays and Thursdays.

© 2004 Atlanta-Journal Constitution

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