Trump's War On Culture Is Not A Distraction - He Really Wants To Win It!

The following post is by Symone D. Sanders Townsend at MS NOW: 

President Donald Trump got two reminders this week about the limits of his influence.

Despite serving two terms in the White House, remaking the Republican Party in his image and wielding powers that many of his predecessors never enjoyed, Trump encountered setbacks in his efforts to extend that dominance into the cultural sphere.

The most visible moment came at Madison Square Garden, where the president was met with loud boos while attending Game 3 of the NBA Finals. Less dramatic but perhaps equally symbolic was a federal judge’s decision to reverse an effort to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, forcing the institution to remove it from its branding.

The two episodes represented Trump’s attempts to influence both ends of the cultural spectrum — from the sporting event watched across the country to one of the nation’s premier cultural institutions in Washington.

A lot of people see these as distractions, an attempt to get voters riled up about a side issue while the real fights happen out of sight.

I don’t. I’ve said for years that the culture wars aren’t a distraction; they are the playbook.

Culture shapes identity. It shapes belonging. It shapes what people view as normal, acceptable and true. Long before elections are won or lost, culture helps shape the lens through which people understand politics itself.

Long before he got into politics, Trump sought that cultural legitimacy, making cameos in TV and movies, starring in pizza ads and whining when he didn’t win an Emmy. 

When he first became president, it sometimes seemed like he was more excited about the trappings of the office than the tremendous powers at his command. But even as he’s learned to flex those powers in his second term, he still seems to crave cultural legitimacy. 

That helps explain the fight over the Kennedy Center.

The battle was never really about a building. It was about what the institution represents. The Kennedy Center occupies a unique place in American civic life, and association with it carries a kind of prestige and legitimacy that politics alone cannot provide.

The same dynamic is visible in America’s upcoming 250th anniversary celebration.

This should be a moment for the country. A chance for Americans to reflect on our history, our triumphs, our failures and the unfinished work of our democracy.

Instead, the line between celebrating the nation and celebrating the president is becoming increasingly blurred.

That is not accidental.

If you can shape the symbols, institutions and narratives that define national identity, you gain influence that extends beyond any election cycle.

And the pursuit of that influence does not stop with sports, celebrities or national celebrations — it extends to the institutions that help Americans make sense of public life.

It’s no coincidence that Trump’s attempts to inject himself into the nation’s cultural discourse are happening as so many of its institutions are under attack, from CBS News to the Smithsonian to our most prestigious colleges. 

Trump may have his own personal reasons for craving this legitimacy, but the movement behind him understands its power.

If a political movement can control which facts are reported as news, whose history is highlighted in our museums and what perspectives we’re taught at our colleges, it will have control over our culture itself. 

That control is ultimately about determining whose story gets told. Who gets to define what is considered true and what is treated as normal. Who gets heard, and who does not.

Tuberville Thinks The "Culture War" Trumps Our Military

Republicans like to claim they are strong supporters of the military. The same can't be said for Alabama's GOP senator. Tommy Tuberville is holding up all military promotions because of his idiotic culture war beliefs. Steve Been, at MSNBC.com, explains: 

Tuberville has spent months blocking 184 military promotions — not because he has concerns about officers’ qualifications, but as part of a broader tantrum over a policy dispute.

The GOP senator — whose most meaningful association with the military was coaching the losing team in the 2014 Military Bowl — objects to a Pentagon policy that provides troops and their family members paid leave and stipends to travel for abortions or for fertility treatments. Tuberville is apparently of the opinion that the policy is at odds with existing federal law. He has no background in such matters, and lawyers who know what they’re talking about completely disagree, but that hasn’t swayed the senator, who hasn’t budged.

The Alabaman’s blockade has been condemned by the Pentagon, which has said the Republican senator’s tactic poses a “clear risk” to the nation’s military readiness and directly affects the lives of service members’ families. What’s more, literally every living former Defense secretary from the past quarter-century — including two former Republican members of the Senate — recently signed on to a joint statement to Senate leaders with a simple message: Tuberville is hurting the military with his blockade.

Even other GOP senators have expressed discomfort with the Alabaman's antics.

Tuberville’s blockade, however, continues, and it will apparently apply to Air Force Gen. C.Q. Brown Jr., who is supposed to become the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

There’s growing talk in Democratic circles that Senate leaders can’t allow an abuse like this to continue indefinitely, and members can change what one House Democrat described as “stupid, arcane, [and] selfish rules.”

Senate leaders have not expressed a willingness to overhaul the chamber’s traditions on holds — though the longer Tuberville’s tantrum continues, the more likely it is Democratic members will rethink their comfort with the status quo.

The Culture Wars Are Destroying Constitutional Rights

The following is an op-ed by David French in The New York Times: 

The Constitution of the United States, properly interpreted, provides a marvelous method for handling social conflict. It empowers an elected government to enact even contentious new rules while protecting the most fundamental human rights of dissenting citizens. Political defeat is never total defeat. Losers of a given election still possess their basic civil liberties, and the combination of the right to speak and the right to vote provides them concrete hope for their preferred political outcomes.

But if a government both enacts contentious policies and diminishes the civil liberties of its current ideological opponents, then it sharply increases the stakes of political conflict. It breaks the social compact by rendering political losers, in effect, second-class citizens. A culture war waged against the civil liberties of your political opponents inflicts a double injury on dissenters: They don’t merely lose a vote; they also lose a share of their freedom.

That’s exactly what’s happening now. The culture war is coming for American liberty — in red states and blue alike. The examples are legion. Let’s start with America’s progressive strongholds. On Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the State of California would not renew a multimillion-dollar contract with Walgreens — not because Walgreens had failed to comply with its contractual obligations but rather because it had responded to Republican legal warnings and decided not to dispense an abortion pill in 21 red states. Newsom used his political power to punish a corporate position he opposed.

Weeks earlier, a federal judge blocked enforcement of a new California law intended to combat medical misinformation, because the state’s definition of the term was so vague that it couldn’t survive First Amendment scrutiny. This ruling came on the heels of multiple adverse rulings against California at the Supreme Court. In 2018 the court struck down a California rule that required pro-life pregnancy centers to publish information about free or low-cost abortions. During the pandemic, the court repeatedly rejectedCalifornia public health regulations that discriminated against religious worship. And in 2021 the court invalidated a mandatory donor disclosure law that violated court precedent that dates back to the civil rights era.

California is not alone in its efforts to suppress constitutionally protected rights. Late last month the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that New York’s so-called Boss Bill, which prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of their “reproductive health decision making,” may violate the expressive associational rights of pro-life organizations that require employees not to have abortions and to refrain from extramarital sex.

But no, I’m not letting red America off the hook. The educational culture wars are inspiring a host of educational gag orders across states that purport to block advocacy of disfavored ideas about race and gender. Many of those statutes are aimed at K-12 education, where the government has considerable control over teacher speech. But others are aimed at speech in public universities and private corporations, where states have much less control. Indeed, a federal court has already blocked enforcement of Florida’s so-called Stop WOKE Act to the extent that it limits free expression on public campuses and in private boardrooms.

Florida is one of the hot spots of right-wing censorship and punitive government. It passed an unconstitutional law to control social media moderation in the state, and Gov. Ron DeSantis took direct action against Disney after the company objected to Florida House Bill 1557, which tightly regulated “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation or gender identity.” If the right is going to condemn Newsom’s action against Walgreens, shouldn’t it also oppose DeSantis’s attack on Disney?

It’s a sign of the times that the list above — from the left and the right — is woefully incomplete. Careful observers will be able to point to any number of additional culture-war-motivated statutes, regulations and government actions that take aim at the Bill of Rights.

State attacks on civil liberties are even affecting our most valued relationships: the bonds between parent and child. In January, The Times reported on how public schools sometimes withhold from parents information about a child’s gender transition, even in the absence of any evidence of parental abuse. California has enacted a statute that grants the state broad authority to permit children to receive “gender-affirming health care” there, even potentially over the objection of a custodial parent.

For example, Section 7 of the law states that California courts won’t weigh as a factor against a petitioner seeking California court jurisdiction if the person took a child “from the person who has legal custody” in order to obtain “gender-affirming health care” and that care is limited by the law or policy of another state.

And because every culture war action against civil liberties has its mirror image on the other side, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas issued a directive to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate as “abuse” both surgical and pharmaceutical interventions for transgender children, regardless of the good faith and desires of the parents, children and caregivers involved.

To understand the gravity of the state interference with parental authority, it’s worth remembering the words of Chief Justice Warren Burger in the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder, in which he wrote that the “primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.” To simply presume that parents are abusive because they may dissent from state consensus on transgender care is to violate this principle of American law.

In a nation as diverse as the United States, conflicts over values are inevitable, but our most basic civil liberties must remain inviolate. To govern otherwise both inflicts a grave injury on dissenting citizens and violates the letter and spirit of the Constitution itself. Our right to speak, much less to parent, should not be contingent on our ability to gain political control.

The much better course for our democracy is to uphold a legal corollary to the golden rule: Defend the rights of others that you would like to exercise yourself. It doesn’t end the culture war. We’ll still clash over contentious issues. But maintaining a bedrock defense of civil liberties lowers the stakes. Protecting individual freedom tells all Americans and all American families that the social compact holds and — win or lose on any given issue, regardless of how controversial — this country is still their home.

The Morality War Between The Left & Right

The following is part of an op-ed by David Brooks in The New York Times. In it, he discusses the moral views of the left and right -- and offers suggestions on how Democrats can win this "morality" war. 

I’m going to try to offer a respectful version of the two rival moral traditions that undergird our morality wars. I’ll try to summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each. I’ll also try to point to the opportunities Democrats now have to create a governing majority on social and cultural matters.

***

The phrase “moral freedom” captures a prominent progressive moral tradition. It recognizes the individual conscience as the ultimate authority and holds that in a diverse society, each person should have the right to lead her own authentic life and make up her own mind about moral matters. If a woman decides to get an abortion, then we should respect her freedom of choice. If a teenager concludes they are nonbinary, or decides to transition to another gender, then we should celebrate their efforts to live a life that is authentic to who they really are.

In this ethos society would be rich with a great diversity of human types.

This ethos has a pretty clear sense of right and wrong. It is wrong to try to impose your morality or your religious faith on others. Society goes wrong when it prevents gay people from marrying who they want, when it restricts the choices women can make, when it demeans transgender people by restricting where they can go to the bathroom and what sports they can play after school.

This moral freedom ethos has made modern life better in a variety of ways. There are now fewer restrictions that repress and discriminate against people from marginalized groups. Women have more social freedom to craft their own lives and to be respected for the choices they make. People in the L.G.B.T.Q. communities have greater opportunities to lead open and flourishing lives. There’s less conformity. There’s more tolerance for different lifestyles. There’s less repression and more openness about sex. People have more freedom to discover and express their true selves.

However, there are weaknesses. The moral freedom ethos puts tremendous emphasis on individual conscience and freedom of choice. Can a society thrive if there is no shared moral order? The tremendous emphasis on self-fulfillment means that all relationships are voluntary. Marriage is transformed from a permanent covenant to an institution in which two people support each other on their respective journeys to self-fulfillment. What happens when people are free to leave their commitments based on some momentary vision of their own needs?

If people find their moral beliefs by turning inward, the philosopher Charles Taylor warned, they may lose contact with what he called the “horizons of significance,” the standards of truth, beauty and moral excellence that are handed down by tradition, history or God.

A lot of people will revert to what the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls “emotivism”: What is morally right is what feels right to me. Emotivism has a tendency to devolve into a bland mediocrity and self-indulgence. If we’re all creating our own moral criteria based on feelings, we’re probably going to grade ourselves on a forgiving curve.

Self-created identities are also fragile. We need to have our identities constantly affirmed by others if we are to feel secure. People who live within this moral ecology are going to be hypersensitive to sleights that they perceive as oppression. Politics devolves into identity wars, as different identities seek recognition over the others.

The critics of moral freedom say that while it opens up lifestyle choices, it also devolves into what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” When everybody defines his own values, the basic categories of life turn fluid. You wind up in a world in which a Supreme Court nominee like Ketanji Brown Jackson has to dodge the seemingly basic question of what a woman is. I don’t blame her. I don’t know how to answer that question anymore, either.

Under the sway of the moral freedom ethos, the left has generally won the identity wars but lost the cosmology wars. America has moved left on feminist and L.G.B.T.Q. issues and is much more tolerant of diverse lifestyles. But many Americans don’t quite trust Democrats to tend the moral fabric that binds us all together. They worry that the left threatens our national narratives as well as religious institutions and the family, which are the seedbeds of virtue.

***

The conservative moral tradition has a very different conception of human nature, the world and how the good society is formed. I’ll call it “you are not your own,” after the recent book by the English professor and Christian author Alan Noble.

People who subscribe to this worldview believe that individuals are embedded in a larger and pre-existing moral order in which there is objective moral truth, independent of the knower. As Charles Taylor summarizes the ethos, “independent of my will there is something noble, courageous and hence significant in giving shape to my own life.”

In this ethos, ultimate authority is outside the self. For many people who share this worldview, the ultimate source of authority is God’s truth, as revealed in Scripture. For others, the ultimate moral authority is the community and its traditions.

We’re in a different moral world here, with emphasis on obedience, dependence, deference and supplication. This moral tradition has a loftier vision of perfect good, but it takes a dimmer view of human nature: Left to their own devices, people will tend to be selfish and shortsighted. They will rebel against the established order and seek autonomy. If a person does not submit to the moral order of the universe — or the community — he may become self-destructive, a slave to his own passions.

The healthier life is one lived within limits — limits imposed by God’s commandments, by the customs and sacred truths of a culture and its institutions. These limits on choice root you so you have a secure identity and secure attachments. They enforce habits that slowly turn into virtues.

In the “moral freedom” world you have to be free to realize your highest moral potential.

In the “you are not your own” world you must be morally formed by institutions before you are capable of handling freedom. In this world there are certain fixed categories. Male and female are essential categories of personhood. In this ethos there are limits on freedom of choice. You don’t get to choose to abort your fetus, because that fetus is not just cells that belong to you. That fetus belongs to that which brings forth life.

Researchers Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt and Brian Nosek found that liberals are powerfully moved to heal pain and prevent cruelty. Conservatives, they discovered, are more attuned than liberals to the moral foundations that preserve a stable social order. They highly value loyalty and are sensitive to betrayal. They value authority and are sensitive to subversion.

The strengths of this moral tradition are pretty obvious. It gives people unconditional attachments and a series of rituals and practices that morally form individuals.

The weaknesses of this tradition are pretty obvious, too. It can lead to rigid moral codes that people with power use to justify systems of oppression. This ethos leads to a lot of othering — people not in our moral order are inferior and can be conquered and oppressed.

But the big problem today with the “you are not your own” ethos is that fewer and fewer people believe in it. Fewer and fewer people in the United States believe in God. And more Americans of all stripes have abandoned the submissive, surrendering, dependent concept of the self.

This is the ultimate crisis on the right. Many conservatives say there is an objective moral order that demands obedience, but they’ve been formed by America’s prevailing autonomy culture, just like everybody else. In practice, they don’t actually want to surrender obediently to a force outside themselves; they want to make up their own minds. The autonomous self has triumphed across the political spectrum, on the left where it makes sense, and also on the right, where it doesn’t.

***

Both of these moral traditions have deep intellectual and historical roots. Both have a place in any pluralistic society. Right now, the conservative world looks politically strong, but it is existentially in crisis. Republicans will probably do extremely well in the 2022 midterms. But conservatism, especially Christian conservatism, is coming apart.

Conservative Christians feel they are under massive assault from progressive cultural elites. Small-town traditionalists feel their entire way of life is being threatened by globalism and much else. They perceive that they are losing power as a cultural force. Many in the younger generations have little use for their god, their traditional rooted communities and their values.

This has produced a moral panic. Consumed by the passion of the culture wars, many traditionalists and conservative Christians have adopted a hypermasculine warrior ethos diametrically opposed to the Sermon on the Mount moral order they claim as their guide. Unable to get people to embrace their moral order through suasion, they now seek to impose their moral order through politics. A movement that claims to make God their god now makes politics god. What was once a faith is now mostly a tribe.

This moral panic has divided the traditionalist world, especially the Christian part of it, a division that has, for example, been described in different ways by me, by my Times colleague Ruth Graham and by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic. Millions of Americans who subscribe to the “you are not your own” ethos are appalled by what the Republican Party has become.

So is there room in the Democratic Party for people who don’t subscribe to the progressive moral tradition but are appalled by what conservatism has become?

First, will Democrats allow people to practice their faith even if some tenets of that faith conflict with progressive principles? For example, two bills in Congress demonstrate that clash. They both would amend federal civil rights law to require fair treatment of L.G.B.T.Q. people in housing, employment and other realms of life. One, the Fairness for All Act, would allow for substantial exceptions for religious institutions. A Catholic hospital, say, wouldn’t be compelled to offer gender transition surgeries. The other, the Equality Act, would override existing law that prevents the federal government from substantially burdening individuals’ exercise of religion without a compelling government interest.

Right now, Democrats generally support the latter bill and oppose the former. But supporting the Fairness for All Act, which seeks to fight discrimination while leaving space for religious freedom, would send a strong signal to millions of wavering believers, and it would be good for America.

Second, will Democrats stand up to the more radical cultural elements in their own coalition? Jonathan Rauch was an early champion of gay and lesbian rights. In an article in American Purpose, he notes that one wing of the movement saw gay rights as not a left-wing issue but a matter of human dignity. A more radical wing celebrated cultural transgression and disdained bourgeois morality. Ultimately, the gay rights movement triumphed in the court of public opinion when the nonradicals won and it became attached to the two essential bourgeois institutions — marriage and the military.

Rauch argues that, similarly, the transgender rights movement has become entangled with ideas that are extraneous to the cause of transgender rights. Ideas like: Both gender and sex are chosen identities and denying or disputing that belief amounts is violence.Democrats would make great strides if they could champion transgender rights while not insisting upon these extraneous moral assertions that many people reject.

The third question is, will Democrats realize that both moral traditions need each other? As usual, politics is a competition between partial truths. The moral freedom ethos, like liberalism generally, is wonderful in many respects, but liberal societies need nonliberal institutions if they are to thrive.

America needs institutions built on the “you are not your own” ethos to create social bonds that are more permanent than individual choice. It needs that ethos to counter the me-centric, narcissistic tendencies in our culture. It needs that ethos to preserve a sense of the sacred, the idea that there are some truths so transcendentally right that they are absolutely true in all circumstances. It needs that ethos in order to pass along the sort of moral sensibilities that one finds in, say, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — that people and nations have to pay for the wages of sin, that charity toward all is the right posture, that firmness in keeping with the right always has to be accompanied by humility about how much we can ever see of the right.

Finally, we need this ethos, because morality is not only an individual thing; it’s something between people that binds us together. Even individualistic progressives say it takes a village to raise a child, but the village needs to have a shared moral sense of how to raise it.

GOP's "Culture War" Is Just An Agenda Of Hate

 

Republican officials have no real agenda to campaign on in this election. Instead, they are engaging in a "culture war". They want American voters to think that liberals (Democrats) are trying to cancel this country's culture.

Of course, that is nonsense. Democrats don't want to cancel America's culture. They want to enhance it to include all citizens.

Republicans are trying to suppress the votes of nonwhites. But allowing all citizens to vote, and making it easier to do that, doesn't cancel culture. It just insures the survival of our democracy.

Reforming the police and stopping institutional racism doesn't cancel culture. It just protects lives and helps all citizens to benefits from the American Dream.

Protecting abortion rights doesn't cancel culture. It just insures that women have the right to control their own bodies -- a right that men have always had.

Allowing refugees and immigrants to enter the country doesn't cancel culture. It just gives desperate people a chance for a better life -- both economically and democratically.

Providing health insurance for everyone doesn't cancel culture. It just saves lives by insuring that everyone can access the preventive care they need.

Teaching real history in our schools (and real science) doesn't cancel culture. It just educates our children and prevents the nation from repeating past mistakes.

Providing full and equal rights to members of the LGBTQ community doesn't cancel culture. It just gives them the same rights that other Americans enjoy.

Protecting and enhancing the right of workers to unionize doesn't cancel culture. It just insures that workers have a livable wage and safe working conditions.

Making millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes doesn't cancel culture. It just creates a fairer economy for all citizens.

Democrats just want to make life better for all citizens. Republicans don't. They want a return to the culture of the 1950's -- when white supremacy and patriarchy were the prevailing powers. 

Why are Republicans doing this? Part of it is that they see the demographic change, and know that their policies (racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic) will hurt them as that change happens. They want to hold onto power, and rather than moderate their policies, they are choosing to do away with democracy to keep white emn in power.

Part of it is racism. And part of it is fear -- fear that those who they have discriminated against will do the same against them when they come to power. It's not true though. Those who are discriminated against don't want to discriminate -- they just want the same rights that white men enjoy.

The truth is the Republican culture war is nothing more than an agenda of hate. It must be defeated!

This Is How You Fight The GOP's Culture War Lies

The only real agenda the Republican officials have is to give more to the rich while taking from everyone else. That's not a winning formula, so the Republicans are trying to fool the voters by waging a false and hate-filled culture war. Democrats must stand firm and expose this culture war for what it is.

The following is an op-ed by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post:

Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Democrat, did not sit idly by after a Republican colleague sent out a fundraising email labeling her as someone who would “groom and sexualize kindergartners.” Instead, McMorrow blasted the lie in a powerful speech last week.

The attack on McMorrow echoed common rhetoric among MAGA cultists, including the despicable attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson from Republican senators that the soon-to-be justice is “soft” on child pornographers. But McMorrow refused to let it slide. “I sat on it for a while, wondering: Why me? And then I realized: Because I am the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme,” she said. "Because you can’t claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of ‘parental rights’ if another parent is standing up to say no.” 

She concluded with this message: “I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen. So I want to be very clear right now: Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am. I know what faith and service means and what it calls for in this moment. We will not let hate win.” The Republican senator who sent out the email, McMorrow later said, wouldn’t bother to look her in the eye.

McMorrow was not the only Democrat who recently stood up to bigots. Earlier this month, Missouri state Rep. Ian Mackey also went viral by denouncing the persecution of LGBTQ Americans. Addressing his Republican colleague Rep. Chuck Basye, who sponsored an amendment to a bill to prohibit transgender girls from participating in sports, Mackey noted that Basye’s gay brother had delayed coming out for fear of Basye’s reaction.

“If I were your brother, I would have been afraid to tell you, too,” Mackey told him. “Because this is what you’re focused on. This is the legislation you want to put forward. This is what consumes your time.” Mackey, who is gay, continued: “I was afraid of people like you growing up. ... I grew up in a school district that would vote tomorrow to put this in place. And for 18 years, I walked around with nice people like you who took me to ballgames, who told me how smart I was. And then [they] went to the ballot [box] and voted for crap like this. And I couldn’t wait to get out, to move to a part of our state that would reject this stuff. ... Thank God I made it out.” 

"Gentlemen, I’m not afraid of you anymore,” Mackey concluded. “Because you’re gonna lose. You may win this today, but you’re going to lose.” It was a passionate demand for decency, for fairness and for empathy.

These speeches went viral in large part because they are the sort of declarations of moral principle one hears too infrequently from Democrats. Cowed by the culture wars, they’ve tried to change the subject to economic issues, despite warnings and pleas that doing so would be morally and politically unsound. Most Americans stand with Democrats on these issues. Polling shows a majority of voters do not want censorship or book banning, do not like bullies and do not wantprohibitions on classroom discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity.

The MAGA crowd’s cultural grenades launched at schools are not a response to actual problems; they are an effort to stir up their own fearful and resentful base, which believes it has been victimized by far-left elites. When Republicans are called out for this hateful legislation masquerading as protection for children, their intentions are laid bare. Mackey is correct: If the hatemongers are confronted, they will lose power. Hopefully the rest of the party is listening and will stand up to the purveyors of bad-faith bills designed to inflame Americans and pit them against one another.

For showing Democrats how to stand up to cultural bullies, we can say well done, Reps. Mackey and McMorrow.

Why Are Republican Politicians Obsessing About Sex?

 

Republican officials can no longer justify their economic policies that favor the rich and harm other Americans. But instead of pursuing a better economic policy, they have just decided to focus on sex, and wage a culture war.

Here's part of how Robert Reich describes this:

The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has turned itself into a font of sexual innuendo and legal intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal life. Protecting children from predators is a worthy aim, to be sure, but the GOP is obsessing about all aspects of sex. Why?

First, it’s part of their culture war, and culture wars sell with voters (and the media) eager for conflict and titillation. A culture war over sex sells even better. It lets Republicans imply that Democrats are somehow on the side of sexual “deviants” who endanger the “natural order.” 

Also, by focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the rightwing extreme QAnon vote (with its the loony “Pizzagate” conspiracy claim that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile).

Most importantly, a culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to talk about the real sources of populist anger — corporate-induced inflation at a time of record corporate profits, profiteering and price gouging, monopolization, stagnant wages, union busting, soaring CEO pay, billionaires who have amassed $1.7 trillion during the pandemic but who pay a lower tax rate than the working class, and the flow of big money into the political campaigns of lawmakers who oblige by lowering taxes on the wealthy and big corporations and doling out corporate welfare. 

Oh, and by focusing on pedophilia, gender identity, gay people, and abortion, Republicans don’t have to talk about Trump and January 6. 

Democratic politicians, wake up! You have a critical opportunity between now and the midterm elections to reframe the national conversation as it should be framed -- around abuses of economic power by corporations and the super rich. Those abuses are worsening. They affect the everyday lives of all Americans. 

If you fail to do this, Americans will continue to be inundated with Republican “culture war” messages intended to deflect the public’s attention from how badly big corporations and the super wealthy are shafting them. Americans won’t understand how these economic abuses all relate to record amounts of income and wealth at the top, and what must be done to reverse this imbalance (break up monopolies, enact a windfall profits tax, raise taxes on large corporations and the super wealthy, strengthen labor unions, reform campaign finance, stop corporate welfare, and so on). And some of you will lose your jobs in the midterm elections — allowing Republicans to take over the House and Senate.

Right-Wing Likes Putin Because They Share Same Agenda

A few decades ago, Russia couldn't do anything right according to the U.S. right-wingers. That has changed. Now they like Putin more than our own leaders. Why? Part of it is their attack on democracy as they embrace authoritarianism, but that's not all -- they also share a culture war agenda with Putin.

Here is part of how Robert Reich describes it:

Remember, Putin was put into power by a Russian oligarchy made fabulously rich by siphoning off the wealth of the former Soviet Union. Likewise, Trump and the radical right in America have been bankrolled by an American oligarchy — Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer), Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, and other billionaires. 

What do these two sets of oligarchs get in return? Strongmen divert the public’s attention away from the oligarchs’ hijacking of their economies toward cultural fears of being overwhelmed by the “other.” Putin’s MO has been to fuel Russian ethnic pride and nationalism. The Trump-Carlson-radical right’s MO has been to fuel white American nationalism.

In both cases, strongmen and their allies have mythologized a “superior” culture (replete with creation stories of blood ties, motherlands, and religion) supposedly endangered by decadent forces intent on attacking and overwhelming it.

To Putin, the decadent force is the West. As he put it Friday, “domestic culture at all times protected the identity of Russia,” which “accepted all the best and creative, but rejected the deceitful and fleeting, that which destroyed continuity of our spiritual values, moral principles and historical memory.” Hence, a mythic justification for taking Ukraine back from a seductive but inferior Western culture that threatens to overwhelm it and Russia. 

The Trump-Carlson-white nationalist narrative is similar: America’s dominant white Christian culture is endangered by Black people, immigrants, and coastal elites who threaten to overwhelm it.  

The culture wars now being orchestrated by the Republican Party against transgender people, gay people, poor women seeking abortions, and schools that teach about sex and America’s history of racism, emerge from the same narrative as Putin’s culture war against a “decadent” West filled with “sociocultural disturbances.” As does the right’s claim that “secularists” have, in the words of former Trump Attorney General William Barr, mounted “an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”

These tropes have served to distract attention from the systemic economic looting that oligarchs have been undertaking, leaving most people poor and anxious. Which is why the grievances that Putin, Trump, Carlson, and the GOP use are unremittingly cultural; they are never economic, never about class, and most assuredly not about the predations of the super-rich. 

Reduced to basics, today’s oligarchs and strongmen (along with their mouthpieces and lackeys) are trying to justify their wealth and power by attacking liberal values that have shaped the West, beginning with the enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the values of tolerance, openness, democracy, self-government, equal rights, and the rule of law. These values are incompatible with a society of oligarchs and strongmen.

Ultimately, the oligarchs and strongmen will lose. Putin won’t succeed in subduing Ukraine, Trump won’t be reelected president, and Carlson and his ilk won’t persuade Americans to give up on American ideals. But the culture wars won’t end anytime soon because so much wealth and power have consolidated at the top of America, Russia, and elsewhere around the world that anti-liberal forces have risen to justify it.