They are losing the culture war.
In desperate times, any measure of resistance is OK. Even Trump.
"Evangelicals and other traditional Christians feel they are under assault from a progressive Democratic Party that seeks to curtail their religious liberty. They support Trump because they see him as perhaps the only person standing between them and ruin."
Henry Olson, Ethics and Policy Center
Democrats are winning the culture war? They begin 2020 feeling desperate themselves.
Democrats know full well Trump won't be removed by the Senate. The economy hasn't fallen into recession, and with Democrats divided between old school moderates and progressives that are as unhappy with moderates as with Trump, pundits predict Trump will win re-election.
Who should feel desperate?
Short term, Democrats. There are electoral flaws in each of the three leading Democrats, Sanders, Warren, and Biden. Socialists are perennial losers in American politics; they scare voters. Warren strikes many people--men especially--like an angry mother or scolding schoolteacher. Biden bumbles, plus there is Hunter.
Re-election would be a ratification of Trump. That sounds like a big win for Republicans.
However, long term, the traditional Republican base is in trouble, and they know it. The "Great Again" country in memory was drowned by the great tidal wave of economic progress, technology, education, and feminism.
In the public mind of Trump's white, conservative, boomer-generation voters, cultural values combined with economic prosperity to create that Golden Age. Families taught good values. There were family wage jobs. Everybody was middle class.
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| 1967 movie |
In the public mind of Trump's white, conservative, boomer-generation voters, cultural values combined with economic prosperity to create that Golden Age. Families taught good values. There were family wage jobs. Everybody was middle class.
In the post-war era the USA was the sole industrial power not ravaged by war. Of course our workers would be the most productive. That generation was an aberration that came to an end when the rest of the world rebuilt and oil rich countries got it together to embargo oil.
Meanwhile cultural change.
In the Cold War, with the US and Soviet Union contesting for credibility with the non-aligned world, America's treatment of its own black citizens was such an embarrassment that official policy could no longer hold back domestic agitation toward legal equality. Racial integration began and progressed, slowly but perceptibly.
With the introduction of effective birth control, and more and more women entering the workforce, second wave feminism emerged. It created legal equality for women in the professions. Women were bosses. Women demanded respect and equality.
Meanwhile cultural change.
In the Cold War, with the US and Soviet Union contesting for credibility with the non-aligned world, America's treatment of its own black citizens was such an embarrassment that official policy could no longer hold back domestic agitation toward legal equality. Racial integration began and progressed, slowly but perceptibly.
With the introduction of effective birth control, and more and more women entering the workforce, second wave feminism emerged. It created legal equality for women in the professions. Women were bosses. Women demanded respect and equality.
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| 1971 |
Meanwhile, churchgoing is in decline. More people identify as agnostic or atheist. Generally young people were losing interest in joining voluntary associations, including churches. The public face of Christianity became partisan.
Homosexuals carried out their own Gay Pride liberation. Homosexuals were "out" and everyone knew them, had them in the family or as co-workers, and saw them in the media.
All across the board, the culture changed, toward equality in a more ethnically and racially diverse population, more secular, and with women and homosexuals claiming equality. These are the cultural values of the "coastal elites." They won. Trump is the predictable backlash.
He--plus some legislatures and the courts--will succeed in rolling back and delaying some changes, especially if he wins re-election, but women are not going back to being sexual playthings of bosses, blacks are not going back to Jim Crow, and homosexual are not climbing back into the closet. Immigrants are here and most will stay.
Democrats associated themselves with the cultural values of those coastal elites. Diversity. Equality. Anti-racism. Secularism. The division in the Democratic Party comes over what to do with the economic policies that also benefited those coastal elites. The coastal elites are OK with the economic status quo. Democrats have not yet figured out if they are the party of people successfully negotiating the economic environment, or people crushed by it.
Trump made little actual progress on trade or offshoring, and the 2017 tax bill helped the wealthy and passed the bill to the young. Older, conservative boomer voters are OK with that, and that is the Trump base. The cultural issues are the shiny bright distraction
It may well get Trump through 2020.
1 comment:
A big issue with the Regressive mindset is its self-fulfilling nature. A pugnacious, self-centered, paranoid approach to the world can be successful, but it's fundamentally short sighted. The patriarchy, with its misogyny and homophobia, is dying, but it's not a peaceful demise. Led by women, and hopefully a woman president, the Progressive movement echoes the broader society's growing embrace of diversity, compassion, and tolerance.
The "culture war", as I've noted before, is a one-sided conflict. Regressives feel threatened, but their fear is irrational, making them easy targets for opportunistic, unscrupulous scoundrels who reap profits from manufactured outrage.
For example, it is in their interest to allow the mentally ill access to weapons, with the attendant carnage, so common sense gun restrictions are resisted as "right". (I doubt the founders envisioned schizophrenics with AR-15s.) No one it seems sees the irony of needing armed security in a church to guard against an attack from a deranged person, whose illness goes untreated through defunding of mental health services.
Anyway, while I maintain my optimism for humanity as a Progressive necessity, at the moment it doesn't seem like we are near the tipping point of a 2008 meltdown. The lesson of that recession has not been learned; many signs point to another, not if but when. In the meantime the "culture war" is simply a distraction that enables the ongoing dismantling of the Republic. Make no mistake, this "war" is like any other with its share of profiteers.
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