Of Course the Left Started the Culture War

I’m finishing this in the parking lot of the John Fenwick rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike (I’m picking up my daughter at Newark airport and then visiting Grandma—and Fafoon). That’s not really relevant to anything, but it does help convey the glamour and excitement of the life I’ve chosen. And one of the consequences of the life I’ve chosen is that I take questions like “What’s the sweatiest movie ever made?” or “Did Joachim of Fiore get a bad rap?” pretty seriously. 

So, too, the question: “Who started the culture war?”

(Fun fact: Some would say, “Joachim did!” But that’s for another day.) 

What brought this to mind was a debate ignited by Kevin Drum—a decent and sincere liberal—who says,”Yup. We started it.” Peggy Noonan wrote a column vociferously agreeing with him. 

Meanwhile Tim Miller over at The Bulwark disagrees. 

And I think they’re all talking past each other. 

Let’s set the stage. 

Drum started the conversation by pointing out that Democrats or liberals have moved farther to the left than Republicans or conservatives have moved to the right. You should read the whole thing. But here’s his summary:

From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.

Peggy Noonan basically takes Drum’s argument and restates it in her own style. 

As for Miller, he doesn’t dispute much of the analysis offered by Drum. He writes:

This is valid political analysis. There are political ramifications to swift leftward shifts on various cultural issues that the Democrats should reckon with as David Shor and others have argued. There are also real social and cultural ramifications. It can create social strife for culturally conservative Americans to feel uncomfortable expressing their views at home or in the workplace for fear of being chastised—or worse—over issues they have little familiarity with.

All of this is absolutely correct.

What seems to have set Miller off was Peggy Noonan’s question: “Why, then, is it still conventional wisdom on the left and in the mainstream media that it is conservatives who are culture warmongers?”

His answer shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s the current GOP, especially the Trumpy wannabes leaping into the Ohio primary like those madcap rascals jumping into the pool on Caddy Day at the Bushwood Country Club.

Okay, here’s where I agree with Drum: I think the left started it. Here’s one place where I agree with Miller: Looking at public opinion confuses things a bit. The culture war is not a total war. The armies are mostly two tribes of elites. Looking at public opinion is instructive and important, but it’s a better measurement of which of the two tribes is having more success. But it’s far from a perfect measurement because attitudes often change for reasons unconnected or just loosely connected to the culture war. As I often say, the automobile did more to change the culture than most ideas, but while it’s fun to argue with Nietzsche it’s hard to argue with a Buick. 

But my main disagreement is with Miller. He writes:

But when it comes to the actions of politicians, the aggressive, top down Culture War is being driven overwhelmingly from the right. And the shift rightward among Republican politicians on culture war issues is as dramatic—if not more so—than the leftward shift among Democratic voters on policy.

I think this observation doesn’t have any explanatory value on the central question of causation. Think of it this way. There are dozens of “this is how you got Trump” takes out there, both pro-Trump and anti-Trump. Some are good and persuasive, some aren’t. But I think most reasonable people can agree that Trump didn’t spring up, ex nihilo, or from the brow of Zeus. Things were happening in the culture and in politics that made Trump’s candidacy and election possible. Let’s say, solely for argument’s sake, that 20 years of liberal policies on immigration made Trump possible. Though, honestly you can pick any theory you like: Fox News did it, the breakdown in institutions, income inequality, lunar tides, Col. Sanders, whatever. My point here would be the same. Dunking on the dumb things Trump did as president or as ex-president doesn’t do much to illuminate why he became president in the first place. When Godzilla is demolishing Tokyo, yelling, “Oh my God he threw a tank at that shopping mall!” doesn’t explain why the giant lizard is there in the first place. 

The same thing applies to J.D. Vance and or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their antics now don’t tell us much about how we got here. 

The uneven playing field.

It’s called a culture war for a reason. Just as culture is about more than the aggregate opinions of voters, it’s also about more than the shenanigans of politicians. And I don’t think any reasonable observer of our culture can dispute that the majority of people and institutions that control the commanding heights of the culture are well to the left of the average American (and even the Democratic Party). I’m not going to spend a lot of time demonstrating this because I honestly don’t know how you can dispute it. Hollywood, the mainstream media, universities, elite publishing, most of philanthropy, the music and fashion industries, etc.: They’re all pretty left-wing, woke, or whatever term you’d prefer. 

Of the comparative few institutions that are not—some big corporations, some major sports leagues, some religious denominations etc.—most have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to be bullied in that direction. 

What’s left? Fox News and its imitators, a good slice of country music, the Catholic Church, and… well, I’m sure I’m missing a few more. But not many. Oh, wait. There’s also the Republican Party.

The first point to make is that, if you’re someone who wants to push back against the cultural tide, you might conclude that there are precious few institutions or mechanisms available for you to do so other than the Republican Party. In other words, this asymmetry between right and left in the culture forces people to express themselves through politics. I think this offers one of the better explanations for the irrational panic about censorship on social media. People feel that one of the last venues where they are not at an asymmetric disadvantage is being taken away from them. Some feel so strongly about this they find themselves taking the side of the neo-Nazi “right” to make social media even worse. 

 I think as a cultural strategy this is misguided. This country would be far better served by 100 more Robby Georges fighting honorably within elite cultural institutions (like Princeton) than a thousand more J.D. Vances doing their schtick in politics. Similarly, that Vance finds himself expending energy to defend the right of Holocaust deniers to use a privately owned platform is pathetic. But crappy strategic choices don’t erase the reality of the cultural landscape. 

 Second, pointing out that the GOP’s culture warriors are “worse” than the Democrats’ doesn’t do the work Miller suggests. One reason Democrats seem more reasonable in their cultural warfare is precisely because they have the wind at their back. The media, academia, and Hollywood all provide cover for Democrats in myriad ways. One need only look at how the media amplified the “defund the police” message to understand this. When Republicans say dumb things, the tittering and mockery is relentless. When Democrats refer to mothers as “birthing persons,” the media either ignore it or make it a “Republicans pounce” story. For years, we’ve heard about how polling shows some gun control measures are popular with Americans. How often did MSNBC hosts or the New York Times trumpet polls showing that racial quotas are unpopular and voter ID is popular? 

Miller has a second argument. He attributes the left-wing lurch of the culture and our politics not to the actions of left-wing culture warriors but to the inexorable tide of history. “Social change is constant,” he writes:

Civil rights, technology, advancements in science, new religions and philosophical concepts, demographic shifts—these specific changes are always new, but change itself is constant. Whether it’s people moving from farms to cities, computers remaking the workplace, or gay folks wanting the right to marry.

This country is a living organism, not a display in a museum.

I have no major quarrel with this, except for the “living organism” thing—a bad and inaccurate historicist metaphor that has done incredible damage over the centuries. Though I don’t think he intended it that way. 

But the larger idea—that society evolves and changes over time in ways that don’t mesh neatly with ideological categories—is of course right. Buick v. Nietzsche and all that. But this is a 30,000 foot view on its way to orbit. 

I like such views. And I like debating them. But if we move back down to earth, the truth is progressives—indeed, progressive politicians—actually did things. They were not merely floating on the tide of social change. They had agency. They made choices, collectively and individually. And it seems utterly indisputable to me that they were the aggressors in the culture war.

I honestly don’t understand how this is debatable. The whole point of progressivism—in all its forms—is to change society.  You can start with Joachim of Fiore, the French philosophes, the Founders, Auguste Comte, the Marxists, Herbert Croly and the American Progressives, or the radicals of the 1960s. The forces of social change are exactly that—the forces of social change. Conservatism isn’t against all change, but it is by temperament and philosophy skeptical of change and almost always opposed to radical change (“When change is unnecessary it is necessary not to change” and all that).

There are some exceptions. I think you can argue that in the modern context the Founders are conservatives. But in their context they were radicals and revolutionaries. That’s why Clinton Rossiter dubbed American conservatism “the worship of dead revolutions.” I think that was unfair, but I get the point. American conservatism is—or at least has been—about defending a once-radical revolution. 

And let me be clear about something. When I say liberals (or the left or whatever) are the aggressors in the culture war, this doesn’t mean they’re always wrong. Very broadly speaking, the civil rights movement of the 1960s was fundamentally right on the core question that drove it, and conservative reluctance to accept change was fundamentally wrong on that question. One can make similar arguments about feminism, gay rights, etc. We might disagree on some stuff around the edges, but the point remains the same. The left believes in a kind of domestic cultural imperialism. They wouldn’t like the word “imperialism” and even if they agreed to it, they would argue that it’s an enlightened and necessary form of imperialism. 

This is one of the great frustrations of being a conservative in America. Progressives push change—good or bad change, it doesn’t matter—and when they meet resistance they immediately claim to be victims of cultural imperialism from the right. Take Miller’s example of gay marriage. Marriage had a definition in our culture that went back thousands of years. Progressives launched a successful campaign to change the definition, and whenever they met resistance, they claimed that theocrats and bigots were trying to impose their values on them. Whatever you think of the merits of the issue (I’m basically on Miller’s side), I have always been at a loss as to how progressives could simultaneously make both arguments, boasting of their success at changing society and retreating to a victim’s crouch when they encountered pushback.

We live in a moment where much of the right is determined to live down to the expectations of the left. And the left sees this behavior as proof that they shouldn’t respect the objections of those they want to change. It’s an old story that has gotten more extreme, with plenty of blame to go around. But pointing out how some on the right have gone crazy doesn’t absolve the left for helping us get here. 

Authors’ note: First, I’m sorry for missing yesterday’s deadline. I ran into some logistical challenges that aren’t worth getting into here. Also, I think I should note that Tim Miller, a friendly acquaintance of mine, and Cliff Asness, a friend and patron of mine (he endowed my chair at AEI), got into a Twitter spat recently. The above has nothing to do with any of that. Cliff is a man I admire greatly, and one of the things I appreciate most is that he has never once tried to influence what I write one way or the other.