The Right Lost the Culture War

But what will the center do with their victory?

The right has lost the culture war. They initiated it, kept it alive, and now, by many metrics, it would appear that their defeat is nearly decisive. After decades of the right promoting the culture war, there is growing evidence that this strategy has finally come back around to bite them in the ass. Railing against critical race theory, trans people, and single women is costing Republicans elections, as evidenced by school board candidates backed by far-right Moms for Liberty losing elections in Florida and multiple swing states.

At the same time, Republicans who ran on culture war issues have recently faced recalls in red parts of California. Abortion, touted for decades as a GOP touchstone in the culture war despite its very material impacts, has also become politically toxic for the right. Every time voters get the chance to defend abortion rights they do so, voting for abortion access in states from Kansas to Ohio to Montana in recent years. As one NBC headline from last year reads:

These electoral fights still only capture part of an even larger trend. What’s happened since 2016 is that the Trump era of the GOP has ushered in far-right control of the party to such a degree that Republicans now only represent one fringe of the country. We all know that in this country the fascist movement is far larger than it should be, and that people who don’t explicitly identify with far-right politics still vote Republican, but we’re increasingly seeing the ramifications of the GOP being taken over by, as people say these days, a bunch of weirdos.

It’s not just the increasingly frequent local losses on referendums, or even the repeated strange statements coming from their Presidential candidate, Vice Presidential candidate, state officials and more. It’s the very noticeable out-of-touchness. It’s the loss of the national zeitgeist. These two recent conventions summed it up nicely. At one you had people wearing ear patches to commemorate a bullet skimming their dear leader’s ear, while at the other people held USA signs. One had washed-up actors as guest stars, and the other had Oprah Winfrey. Online, young people fawn over Kamala’s social media team, while Trump supporters spout increasingly odd conspiracy theories. The right is losing the culture war, and they’re losing it so badly that the Democrats are rapidly monopolizing the center.

Here’s where things get tricky. I think Trump will lose, unless the Democrats fumble massively, and I think the growing cultural hegemony of the Democratic Party will play a massive role in that win. As many others have noted, the Harris-Walz campaign website still doesn’t have a policy page. It’s a vibes-based campaign, primarily, and that’s a very viable path to victory. People have half-joked for as long as I can remember about the ‘median voter’ who chooses politicians largely based on whether or not they’d like to sit down and have a beer with them. And in truth that’s how a lot of this works. So as Democrats successfully paint the right as weird and convince voters that Kamala and Tim are normal and decent people it seems harder and harder for Trump to find a path to victory. The latest national polling has Harris up 7%, higher than she or Biden have ever polled in this election.

By this point I think you know how much I dislike the right. Relegating the fascist elements in this country to their weird corner, hopefully paired with losing elections and making it less and less socially acceptable to hold those views, is a good thing, of that I have no doubt. But we then must turn to the question of what Democrats will do with their relative cultural hegemony, and the power it will very likely yield them both in this election and in the years to come, because the far-right’s hold on the GOP and their growing irrelevance is not likely to end any time soon.

Photo by Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

At the DNC, and in Kamala’s speech in particular, we got a pretty clear picture of what comes next. The first third of her speech was about family, community, and her normality, which is good politics and helped cement the national trend discussed thus far. Then she shifted into what you might call the ‘progressive prosecutor’ segment, focusing on how she’s fought bad companies, and how as president she’ll use her power to fight fascists. She emphasized how she’ll fight for the middle class, for abortion access, and against the authoritarianism of Trump. But the last chunk of the speech painted a different picture. Near the end Harris emphasized “the strongest border bill in decades” which has been endorsed by the border patrol. She spoke about ensuring that “America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world” which is a call to expand our military and surpass the trillion dollars we already spend on war every year. Kamala endorsed Israel’s right to defend itself, as it commits genocide with U.S. funding, reinforced unproven lies about Hamas sexual violence, and acted like these statements are compatible with mourning the loss of life in Gaza and supporting Palestinian dignity and self-determination.

Plenty of people lauded this speech, and were energized by the DNC. I wish sometimes that I could be squarely in that boat and keep it moving. But it’s just not that simple. What the Democrats appear set to do with their control of the center, coming off a comvention where VP Harris was endorsed by people ranging from Bernie Sanders to a former Trump official, is pursue a brand of politics that slightly confounds our classic understanding of the left-right paradigm. I would call this politics a neoliberal-populism. There is probably a more conventional term for this, but what we’re about to see, and already seeing, is an approach that embraces certain right-wing ideas when it comes to international policy, immigration, police and prisons, while embracing moderately progressive ideas when it comes to domestic economics and social issues. 

It’s hard to know how this will play out, and in particular it’s tough to know if ideas that Kamala has discussed, like price controls for food, an unequivocally good idea, will actually become policy. We do know it’s good politics, we know that unfortunately many Americans want us to ‘secure the border’ which in practice means being unbelievably harsh to migrants trying to seek a better life after decades of U.S. imperialism harming their home countries, and we know that this neoliberal-populism does appear to cover a remarkably large tent with its embrace of everything from unions to the military to trans folks. It’s a formula that works with the cultural hegemony brewing in the Democratic Party.

But building an even more lethal fighting force in the U.S. is undoubtedly bad news for the Global South, because the reality is that our military causes pain and death in countless countries around the world. At the same time, spending a trillion dollars a year on the war machine hurts people here at home, denying funding to health and housing and education and more. And other groups in our country are clearly omitted from this ‘big tent’ politics – namely the people already cast out of society. Prisoners, over-policed communities, precarious migrants and more are likely to see things grow more difficult if this approach is implemented. Palestinians, Arab-Americans, and freedom fighters of all sorts are also cast out, literally not allowed on the DNC stage, shouted at outside, and not allowed into the convention room as a bloc of Uncommitted Delegates. None of this should be particularly surprising. Since at least the Bill Clinton years the Democrats have moved right on incarceration and the border. But now they’re pairing that with turning a bit to the left on basic economic questions, after being skewered on inflation for four years. This approach seems likely to capture a good chunk of the electorate, and when paired with the right getting weirder and losing the culture war the new Democratic synthesis appears like it could be remarkably effective.

Effective at winning – effective politics, that is, which doesn’t necessarily have much connection to effective governance or effective planning for the future of this world. Again, it likely doesn't matter for the election, which will probably be determined based on vibes, both the terrible ones emanating from the Trump-Vance ticket and the relative normalcy coming from Harris-Walz. But it does matter for our future. A world where the U.S. continues to invest heavily in a military that maintains imperialism, where we fund genocide, where we scapegoat migrants and only make minor progressive economic tweaks isn’t a sustainable world. The American middle and working classes desperately want cheaper groceries and cheaper housing, and if the Democrats can deliver that they’ll understandably be lauded and rewarded. That’s still a big if, but more importantly it wouldn’t be enough. We can’t just tell ourselve it’s enough and then cross our fingers. We’re at a pivotal moment in history, and radical change is coming one way or another. Our ecosystem can only handle so much, and it will impose its own radical future if we don’t adjust and bring radical change ourselves. Writing in The New Republic, Kate Aronoff spoke to this moment so well:

“There is no route to addressing the climate crisis—or even meeting the White House’s own climate goals—without directly challenging the core business model of the fossil fuel industry. There is no way to end the suffering in Gaza without provoking the anger of the Israeli government and lobbying groups like AIPAC. Avoiding those conflicts carries some obvious short-term benefits for Democrats, like keeping wealthy donors and some swing-state voters happy. Continuing to avoid them promises not just to prolong suffering, but invite calamities that there’ll be no turning back from.”

We are on the precipice of calamities that there’ll be no turning back from. And while the Democrats seem more determined and able to win than we’ve seen them in a decade, they do not appear particularly interested in addressing the crises rapidly coming down the pike. There’s nothing new here, but there is a strong and widespread sense of excitement accompanied by a willingness to set aside the major flaws of the party. It’s understandable, we all want Trump to lose. And, of course, we want to have hope. 

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

I think there are reasons to hope. I think the right losing the culture war is good. I hope their power declines and declines. I think the leftward shift in the economic consciousness of Americans, the support for unions, and the support for price controls are good. But good doesn’t mean good enough, it doesn’t mean sufficient for the future we face. The difficult question when people are riding high is, what does false hope do to us? What does a hope out of proportion to what we’re really being presented do to us? How does it deradicalize and demobilize people who otherwise might fight for real liberation and the radical change we need?

In Between the World and Me, a book that Ta-Nehisi Coates addressed to his son, he writes, “I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” And god do I feel that these days. There is such immense pain in the world right now, a pain which does not negate the beauty but can make it harder to see it. At the same time we can’t let the hopeful moments shining through blind us to the suffering, the injustice that our country plays a significant role in. We have to have the capacity to hold both and to see the truth in all its horror, glory, and in its bare reality. My hope is that in being honest with one another we are better able to work for a future that is livable and beautiful for all of us, not just for some few who are content to sacrifice the rest.

The other night I was at a neighborhood event, a documentary screening in a community garden. We watched “Attica” and discussed the struggle against mass incarceration. The events in the film took place over 50 years ago, and yet the issues are so similar to what we’re up against today. But many more people are locked up. Many, many more. How could that be? In a society that celebrates progress, how could that be? In no just world does progress look like chaining up our neighbors instead of addressing the poverty, the politics, and the systemic problems that they face. But we don’t live in a just society, as I think you know. We live in a world where profit is placed above human life. And yet we sometimes tell ourselves differently, because we want to believe differently. We want to live, at times, in the dream that Coates told his son about, a dreamland where we delude ourselves because it’s so much easier than wrestling daily with the difficult task of building a better world. 

The very last line of the Attica documentary is “Wake up, because nothing comes to a sleeper dreaming.” And that’s what I hope for us. I hope we wake up to be conscious citizens of this terrible and beautiful world, instead of sleepwalking in half-steps of progress that might personally get us somewhere, but which allow the world to sink and sink into unlivablity. I hope we wake, organize, and act on a global scale in ways that will be decried as radical, but which will save countless lives. Let’s not just climb atop the deck chairs of the Titanic, let’s build a life raft together. Hell, let’s build a better boat.