There are, as we know, only two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don’t. This is especially true among the chin-pullers and pulse-takers of Washington’s chattering class, who for the past year have been dominated by (to reverse the president’s favorite phrase) dividers not uniters.

You saw it right there on the front page of The New York Times last December: America was “split down the middle, divided into two hostile groups.” And who would dare argue with The New York Times? Certainly not U.S. News and World Report, which scanned the landscape and saw “a nation divided in almost every conceivable way by geography, gender, marital status, race, ideology, party, culture.” A grim diagnosis indeed.

And one that almost everybody disagrees with today. On television, in the newspapers, on the street, it suddenly seems that every American the Legionnaire with a buzz cut in Iowa City, the rocker with a tongue stud in Tribeca sees the world, and the country, in the same way. America looks less like a country fractured beyond repair than a single nation bound together by anger and grief and pride.

So were the pundits wrong?

Once seemed obvious

Until Sept. 11, this idea of a split country was so widely shared because the evidence for it was so strong. Begin with the election last November. It was a tie.

Each of the two major-party presidential candidates received roughly 48 percent of the vote. The U.S. Senate was split in half, and a shift of a few thousand votes would have swung the House from the Republicans to the Democrats. The fissure continued down into the state legislatures, 17 of which were wholly controlled by Republicans, 16 by Democrats, with the rest evenly split.

The electoral map made the case even more plainly. An unbroken block of “Bush Red” stretched through the heartland, with “Gore Blue” wrapped along the coasts and spreading outward from the cities. It looked like an ethnographic map of the Balkans.

For the division went beyond where we live to who we are. Not long before the election, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb published a book called “One Nation, Two Cultures,” suggesting that Americans had divided up between a 1960s culture (secular in outlook, extremely tolerant in matters of morality, individualistic) and a 1950s culture (religious, traditionally moralistic, and family-oriented).

The exit polls underscored her thesis, creating new stereotypes for the pundits to ponder. Regular churchgoers, married parents, gun-owners went overwhelmingly for Bush. Unmarried professionals, holders of graduate degrees, members of public-employee unions went strongly for Gore.

And the differences of opinion were closely held. According to a poll by the Institute for America’s Future, four out of five Bush voters never even considered voting for Gore; the same goes, in reverse, for the Gore voters.

It’s no fun to agree with the soothsayers at The New York Times, but when they spoke of “two hostile groups,” they had a point, even discounting for hyperbole.

Then came Sept. 11, and the polls today show rather a different country a single country.

“It’s stunning,” said Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “We’ve never seen anything quite like this, the unanimity of people instantaneously rallying around the country and the president.”

Rising approval

A Gallup poll out last week showed Bush’s job approval rating closing in on 90 percent, up from 51 percent a week before. An ABC News/Washington Post poll showed that more than 90 percent favored a military response and the evidence suggests that a strong majority will continue to do so regardless of cost.

Two-thirds, for example, said they would support the U.S. taking military action “even if it would continue for a period of several years,” and even if “large numbers” of our troops are killed or injured.

It’s always dicey to predict future public reaction from hypothetical poll questions like these. What happens when the bombs start to fall and the troops hit the beachheads and, more to the point, when casualties begin to mount is anybody’s guess. In the past, though, the public’s enthusiasm has soured during military action.

Does this mean we can retire the “divided America” thesis, then? “We’re two cultures, but we’re still one nation,” says Himmelfarb. “Both sides think of themselves as extremely patriotic. And at a time like this, patriotism overrides other considerations. But I worry that once the urgencies of war are upon us, we may see the differences reassert themselves.”

Then again, it may be that those differences weren’t so deep or decisive as they’ve looked over the past year. Patriotism isn’t just one value among many, but a value that contains other values: It includes how we define justice, what we believe about war and peace, and the importance we place on community.

If we all rise to patriotism in response to the same horror, then perhaps we share more views than seemed possible last November. For the moment, at least, beneath that electoral map studded from place to place with Gore Blue and Bush Red, a single heart is beating red, white, and blue, indivisible.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.