Start Making Sense

Excerpt #2

The Return of the Culture War
Lakshmi Chaudhry

November 3, 2004, marked not just John Kerry’s defeat but also the return of an almost-forgotten phrase to the political lexicon. The “culture wars” were back—and with a vengeance. Within hours of the outcome, pundits were putting forward what would rapidly become the conventional wisdom among the chatterati: uppity amoral liberals got their comeuppance for ignoring the traditional values of regular folk. Where the talk before the election had been dominated by terrorism and Iraq, the day after it was all about God—a punitive God, that is, who hates above all homosexuality and abortion.

The dominant theory about George W. Bush’s victory was influenced by exaggerated evaluations of the responses to a single question in the exit polls conducted by the National Election Pool—the same polls that predicted a Kerry victory. Asked to name the one issue that most influenced their choice of candidate, 22 percent of voters picked “moral values” out of a list of seven issues, while “economy/jobs” came in second at 20 percent. Oddly, “Iraq” (15 percent) and “terrorism” (19 percent) were listed separately.

While the exit polls were just a flimsy excuse for the media to indulge in its usual habit of inventing novelty where none exists, the elections did offer a harsh lesson in the power of the religious right. They got their parishioners out in droves to vote their moral opposition to abortion and homosexuality even if it meant supporting a party whose economic policies threatened their livelihood.

No wonder then that the Christian right now sees itself as the architect of Bush’s victory. Within days, television screens were plastered with the likes of Jerry Falwell and Gary Bauer, each declaring the triumph of cultural conservatism. In their mind, the evangelicals have now earned their right to sit at the head of the table. As far as they are concerned, it’s finally time for the Republican Party to deliver on its hard-right agenda: overthrow Roe v. Wade, legalize school prayer, crack down on gay rights, and censor sexual content, whether on the TV screen or in the classroom.

So the right wing thinks it has won the culture war. But has it?

The conventional wisdom on the morals divide is at best simplistic. Bush, for example, made significant gains among pro-choice married women. The same exit polls cited by the media reveal that only 16 percent of voters oppose abortion in all circumstances, and 22 percent of them voted for John Kerry. As for homosexuality, a healthy majority of Americans (63 percent) support either marriage or civil unions. If Bush voters are not all Bible-thumpers, Democrats are hardly secular atheists. They include vast numbers of devoutly religious Americans—Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and yes, even evangelicals, not to mention the nonreligious liberals who voted their moral opposition to the Bush administration’s policies, whether on Iraq or the environment.

The disagreement between social conservatives and liberals is not over religion but over the constitutional separation of church and state. A Catholic Democrat may be equally opposed to abortion and any attempt to legislate what is essentially a personal decision. The assumption that all religious Americans support the Christian right agenda is clearly false, as is the conflation of someone who may be uncomfortable with the sight of Janet Jackson’s breast on national television with a Jerry Falwell follower.

The 2004 election did not spell the triumph of Christian fundamentalism over godless liberals. It did, however, deliver a damning indictment of a political strategy crippled by the absence of a compelling moral vision. The failure is not just that of the Democratic Party leadership—though it bears a significant share of the blame—but also of the progressive movement as a whole. We have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the power of beliefs, assuming instead that the facts would set all Americans free. We have fallen victim to a culture of oppositional politics, content to vociferously challenge the Republicans without doing the hard work of crafting and communicating a persuasive worldview of our own—a values-based vision of America and the future.

The Not-Republican Party

The notion that white working-class men—better known during the 2004 campaign as the NASCAR dads—are increasingly voting against their interests is hardly news. Both Norman Mailer and Arlie Hochschild have written extensively on the post-9/11 dynamic that led blue-collar men to deeply identify with George Bush’s brand of swaggering machismo. Feeling increasingly emasculated by economic insecurity, which threatened not just their income but also their self-image as family providers, blue-collar men sought refuge in the false sense of empowerment offered by a president ever eager to assure them that as Americans, they were both right and mighty.

Their flight into GOP arms, however, was not a fallout of 9/11 but part of an ongoing transformation of the larger political landscape that began in the 1970s. As Thomas Frank argued persuasively in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas?, the Democratic Party has for decades refused to accept the reality of what he describes as “conservative backlash politics.” What began as a response to the counterculture movement of the 1960s has hardened into an ingrained distrust of liberals under the careful guidance of the Republican Party, the well-funded right-wing think tanks, and lately, Fox News and its ilk. Over the past thirty years, the conservative movement has focused its energy and resources on diverting increasing anger over economic hardship toward divisive social wedge issues, such as homosexuality and abortion.

In the post-Reagan era, increasing economic inequality would become an advantage for the GOP. Not only did economic hardship fuel social resentment—against the lazy poor, the job-stealing immigrants, the debauched Hollywood moguls—but it also created a window of opportunity for the Christian right. Writing in the Nation, Barbara Ehrenreich brilliantly dissected the insidious relationship between the GOP assault on welfare and the growing influence of right-wing churches, which now offer their parishioners the very same array of public services—free meals, jobs and drugs counseling, child care, et cetera—but with religious strings attached. In her words, these churches “have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on ‘faith’ but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients.” It’s the kind of loyalty that paid off at the voting booth on Election Day.

The Democratic Party’s strategy of moving to the right on the economy has clearly worked against its own interests. Yet it’s not surprising that many of the party leaders have responded to the latest electoral debacle with calls to do the same on social issues. Within weeks of the election, the Senate Democrats had selected a pro-life Harry Reid as their leader, even as California Senator Dianne Feinstein blamed San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s decision to legalize gay marriages for the party’s defeat. No policy or position is indispensable in a party that substitutes strategy for vision.

In his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff points out, “People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values.” Yet with the exception of Bill Clinton’s first campaign for the presidency in 1992 (which put forward—and then betrayed—the vision for a reenergized liberal politics), the Democratic Party plank has often resembled a grab bag of policies, each carefully tailored not to alienate so-called swing voters while appeasing the array of interest groups that represent core constituencies.

To win, the Democrats must articulate a coherent, persuasive worldview that voters can identify with. The party instead has been content to cede ideological ground to the Republicans with each defeat, and thereby sow the seeds of its own irrelevance. Soon its leaders will have nothing to offer voters except the promise to be better, more effective Republicans.

The Moral of the Story

Easy as it is to blame the Democratic leadership—and as much as it might deserve the blame—the errors of the party mirror deeper flaws in progressive thinking. After all, it is no accident that someone like Kerry gained the party nomination. In an email to Tikkun subscribers, Rabbi Michael Lerner laid bare the perverse logic of the predominantly antiwar Democrats nominating a pro-war candidate: “Privately, they told themselves and each other the following: Kerry is really not for this war. Once he is elected he will, we hope, feel less pressure to be opportunistic, and then the real John Kerry will re-emerge and save us from this war.”

So would nominating an antiwar candidate such as Howard Dean have won Democrats the election? Maybe not. The issue here is not one of any specific policy positions but of the absence of moral vision. But there was no consensus—or much thinking, for that matter—on the left as to what a moral Iraq policy might look like in the face of postwar realities. So it’s no wonder that we were content to allow Kerry to sell himself on Bush’s failings—the lies, the lack of postwar planning, the towering costs—rather than articulate a counter-morality of his own.

After enduring years of relentless political GOP assaults on the progressive ideals, we’ve all succumbed to the politics of opposition. It has become easier to define ourselves in the negative, by what we stand against rather than what we stand for. And this void constitutes the essence of the right’s ideological victory.

The progressives’ reluctance to talk moral values springs partly from a self-defeating hubris, which became painfully apparent in debates over religion in the wake of the 2004 elections. The mainstream media’s misguided analysis of the elections as the triumph of “traditional values” provoked the predictable range of lefty responses. Some rejected the thesis outright. Many others reaffirmed the media’s conflation of Christian fundamentalism with religion by rejecting both in one fell swoop.

Sojourners editor Jim Wallis has long argued against this type of “secular fundamentalism,” which cedes the terrain of religion entirely to the Republicans, leaving them free to define faith narrowly and expediently as an opposition to homosexuality and abortion.

Progressives rarely speak publicly about religion except when it’s a “problem”—as in areas such as school prayer, abortion, and contraception. The academics, writers, and organizational leaders who represent our positions in the media are usually well-educated white folks who tend to be uncomfortable—and often unfamiliar—with religion. Their response to Christian fundamentalism is to oppose all faith-based politics per se. The message: any discussion of religion in the political arena is illegitimate.

The kind of knee-jerk thinking that equates faith with delusion was evident in reactions to a New York Times article on the role of faith in the Bush administration titled “Without a Doubt.” When an aide was quoted as telling the writer, Ron Suskind, that Suskind belonged to the “reality-based community,” many progressive readers were only too eager to believe that the Bush administration’s deep denial of its problems was a natural corollary of the president’s religious beliefs. No one, including Suskind, bothered to clarify the fact that many people in faith-based communities have little or no problem facing reality.

Contrary to popular wisdom among lefty intellectual circles, many people of faith derive their belief in social justice and equality from their religious tradition and not in opposition to it. Take, for example, the passionate and engaged discussion on NBC’s Meet the Press, where Jim Wallis and Al Sharpton took on both Jerry Falwell and the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land over the definition of Christian values. By the end of the program, Wallis and Sharpton had made powerful religious arguments for public welfare, for a woman’s right to choose, and for the antiwar movement. They were far more effective in undermining the Christian conservative positions on these issues than, say, the president of NOW.

This antireligious position is at odds with not just Bible Belt Americans but also vast numbers of Democrats—especially of color—who are devout believers. Writing for Salon, Z. Z. Packer describes the arrogant indifference of party and movement elites toward the religious Democrats such as her black evangelical mother because of her views on abortion and gay marriage. Packer’s mother was “frustrated at every turn by the lack of support and infrastructure for religious lefties to engage in community outreach,” Packer wrote. “What we Democrats need is our own political brand of evangelism. The conservatives have a well-wrought message, but no works. We have the substantive works, but no message, and certainly no overarching vision.”

Progressives will never be able to counter Christian fundamentalism with antireligious secularism, more so because it violates our own values of tolerance and respect. Faith is an important force in the lives of most human beings, including Americans. When we treat the Church—or the temple, the synagogue, or the mosque—with disdain or indifference, we do the same to its parishioners. Over the next four years, the progressive movement will face the daunting challenge of opposing both the excesses of the power-drunk Christian right and the religious opportunism of the Democratic leadership. To win, we’ll need faith on our side.

Speaking Values

The truth is that there is no red state or blue state. The fiercely divisive and partisan politics of our time has served to obscure the fundamental consensus over basic values that have shaped this country. The greatest successes of the left—from the New Deal to the civil rights movement—appealed to American values of equality, justice, and compassion. The political failures of the progressive movement are not the result of a lack of moral values, as the Republicans are so fond of claiming. They reflect instead the gap between our values and the way we speak about them.

Progressives have ceded three of the most powerful words in the American vocabulary to the right: God, family, and country. The Republicans were free to use the word patriotism to their advantage after 9/11 because there was no competing definition of the word in people’s minds. In shunning its use, we had affirmed the definition of patriotism as flag-waving jingoism—a mistake that we would later begin to address in our protests against the Patriot Act with banners that read “Dissent Is Patriotic.”

Over and again, we have paid a heavy political price for simply ignoring or rejecting key cultural concepts rather than redefining their meaning to reflect our values. Take marriage, for example. Progressives had little to say about marriage—except for some feminist writing rejecting its value as a patriarchal institution—until gay rights groups rallied for the right to marry. Our credibility on gay marriage was undermined by our unwillingness to consistently defend the institution as valuable and meaningful for all people, gay or straight.

Progressives also need to pay greater attention to the language we use to express our values. Republican phrases, such as special treatment to knock affirmative action, are effective because they speak to the shared ideas of fairness and equal opportunity. Progressives instead tend to fall back on the language of rights—right to choose, right to economic security, right to clean air—which merely adds to popular misconceptions of liberal self-entitlement. While rights are important, so are the other words in the American vocabulary: opportunity, work, freedom, equality, justice, and personal responsibility.

As we work to build a new movement for change, let’s remind ourselves anew that our values are American values. Let’s remind ourselves that just as there are all kinds of Americans, there are all kinds of progressives.