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The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
There has become a tendency within modern American political discourse to portray the so-called “culture war” – a pejorative term connoting Republican efforts to push back against the degradation of the American cultural fabric – as a uniquely conservative phenomenon.
The media and the modern American left’s conception of these issues pits the blame squarely on Republicans and conservatives for bringing cultural issues into the current political discourse. Some have suggested that the Republican response to these issues hearkens to a bygone era of racial tensions – Republicans, in this worldview, utilize these issues as proxies for racially motivated and discriminatory rhetoric towards minority groups. Those who peddle these very theories, in turn, are seldom obligated to explain or defend their positions. In this sense, Republicans have remained on the defensive end of these conversations for the entirety of their existence, and many have embraced this notion: politicians and activists who subscribe to the dawning “post-liberal” orientation of conservatism often take great pride in labeling themselves as “culture warriors,” who, in the model of their distant fusionist kin, seek to stand athwart history, yelling “stop.”
As the current political climate has provided little resistance to this burgeoning conservative undertaking – national fatigue with the Democratic Party has placed Republicans on the upswing –, there is scant evidence to suggest that the adoption of this “culture war” valence has instrumentally aided Republican popularity. A virtual panel of “national conservatives” convened after Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race contended a rather heterodox proposition, even from a conservative standpoint: Republicans ought to lean into the culture war phenomenon rather than resisting it. But little evidence from the election suggests that Republicans won crucial blocs of suburban voters in Northern Virginia or the Richmond suburbs on account of their fiery rhetoric, nor is there any real indication that Youngkin’s tactics strayed from those of any traditional, business-friendly Republican running for statewide office in a blue state.
Instead, it was the Democratic Party’s tinkering with volatile cultural topics, often in the form of Terry McAuliffe’s constant invocation of former President Donald Trump, that lent Republicans the key to Virginia’s Executive Mansion. Democrats, not Republicans, leaned into culture as a magnetizing electoral phenomenon rather than pragmatic, bread-and-butter policy directives. As a result, their efforts did not resonate with numerous former Biden voters, and they lost what should have been an easily winnable race. The Republican position digressed from culture instead of being clear-eyed, results-oriented, and destined for victory.
The results of this consequential election, then, belie the narrative constructed by conservative proponents of the culture war; Republicans need not double down on culture to win electorally crucial areas of the country. Conservatives who choose to embrace the “culture wars” as a guiding principle are squaring up for a litany of criticisms that ought to be instead directed towards leftists proponents of racially and culturally divisive policies. Why would Republicans mire themselves in the very type of scandalous polemics that, when employed by Democrats, have done wonders for the Republican cause – causing once-popular leftists entities like Black Lives Matter to become increasingly unfavorable in the eyes of most Americans? The political entropy of the current Democratic Party will lead them astray during the 2022 midterm elections and beyond; why should Republicans jeopardize this by contriving their own cultural controversies?
Surely, there is value in examining modern faults within American institutions at a microscopic level and encouraging a semblance of cultural cohesion to come about by mending them. Nonetheless, many of the same tactics proposed by figures of the post-liberal right to combat American cultural decay, such as reexamining required readings within public school curricula for racist or salacious undertones, have been elements for years of the American conservative political orthodoxy. Efforts to revamp these undertakings with potentially toxic cultural valences could prove disastrous for conservatives to reassume the mantle or normalcy within our country.
Thus, with both great trepidation and unrequited optimism for the trajectory of American conservative politics, I say to Republicans: let the Democratic Party continue to self-destruct on account of its unconstrained cultural arc. Our movement is already equipped to answer the calls that the current state of our body politic demands — use our current stockpile to hold those who seek to rent our nation’s cultural fabric to account. Lest we once again assume a position of electoral inferiority to the American left, we must remain par the course, united as ever, and not delude ourselves into appropriating the left’s cultural misgivings as our primary motivation.
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