It's the culture, stupid!
The increasingly bitter combat between conservatives and progressives is really a life-or-death struggle to "define reality"
“It’s the economy, stupid” has become an iconic phrase in politics. It was originally uttered by Democratic strategist James Carville in Bill Clinton’s unanticipated victory over George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Presidential sweepstakes.
Flush with astronomical poll ratings from the previous year on account of America’s decisive military defeat of Saddam Hussein in the first Iraq war known as “Desert Storm”, the elder Bush had been predicted to eat the lunch of an upstart governor from Arkansas with little name recognition in the 1992 campaign. But an abrupt, albeit mild, recession on the eve of the voting in November along with the entry of third-party candidate Ross Perot into the race defied the conventional betting odds.
Carville’s insight that anxiety in the heartland about jobs and family finances would wash away all the good feeling about America’s triumphal reversal of what had come to be known as the “Vietnam syndrome” turned out to be prophetic. His choice words, moreoever, have served as a mantra ever since then that it is pocketbook issues that ultimately swing elections.
In the same year Clinton was elected President a University of Virginia religious studies professor by the name of James Davison Hunter published a book entitled Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America. The book moniker soon became an iconic political phrase of its own. But very few who use it have ever read Davison’s book or pondered its analysis and arguments.
Translating into English the German word Kulturkampf (“culture war”), a term concocted by historians to describe the acrimonious public conflicts between Catholics and Protestants over the relationship between state and religion in Bismarck’s Germany of the late 19th century, Hunter descried something similar, but more troubling at the time in America. He was prescient.
Hunter argued that media pundits and academics lacked the “conceptual tools” truly to divine what was going on. Political discourse was becoming increasingly polarized, but the common assumption was that the phenomenon derived from the sensation-seeking slant of media and the oppositional dynamic of America’s two-party system. Hunter proposed that the culture wars were epiphenomenal to “political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding.”
Several years later philosopher and cognitive linguist George Lakoff published his renowned Moral Politics: How Conservatives and Liberals Think, which laid out and explained in detail what exactly were these “different systems of moral understanding”. Hunter had opined that America’s ethnic and cultural pluralism had also carried with it a “moral pluralism” within which competing moral claims needed in public life to be reconciled with each other.
Yet, according to Hunter, not all systems of moral understanding are equal. What matters is the social milieu in which they intersect with each other. Moral politics is still politics, and with political hegemony comes “the power to define reality”, which is what the culture wars are all about.
The power to define reality belongs to the “ruling class”, according to sociological theory. As Marx and Engels famously wrote almost two centuries ago, “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling class”. Marx and Engels singled out what they termed “bourgeois ideology”, which outside the rhetorical apparatus of historical Marxism is better known as the tradition of “liberalism”.
Classical liberalism derives from the work of the seventeenth century political philosopher John Locke and focuses on the equality and “inalienable” rights of abstract individuals, as the American Declaration of Independence expresses it. Classical liberalism also exalts government guarantee of private property as the mainstay of these rights, prompting the Canadian philosopher C.B. Macpherson to call it the “political theory of possessive individualism.”
Marx, particularly in his early work, savagely criticized the political economy of classical liberalism, arguing that the abstract principle of property rights, espoused during Locke’s time to protect the landed gentry against the absolutist claims of the monarchy, had with the advent of the industrial revolution given capitalist overlords license to expropriate from workers the value of their labor.
Property rights must be counterbalanced by “social” rights, including the right to food, shelter, physical and mental health, and an environment of mutual support and caregiving. In short, the right to own or exploit necessarily entails the right not to be owned or exploited.
One of the familiar critiques of modern liberalism from its inception to the present is that it not only ignores the social dimension, but pollutes and denudes it just as strip mining disfigures the land and destroys its nutrients. The modern political conservative tradition from the writings of Edward Burke to Robert Nisbet’s Quest for Community has proferred various versions of this argument with different phraseologies.
Quite recently Catholic political theorist Patrick Deneen has garnered attention with his controversial blueprint for what he calls a “postmodern conservatism” based on “postliberal” principles that approximates these earlier positions. Deneen writes that “one of the main features, and even designs, of liberalism is to disassemble what might be described as public social utilities, and in their place, to privatize all such social and political ‘utilities’ for the benefit of the ruling class.”
Ironically, a very similar case been made by leftwing political theorist Nancy Fraser in her book Cannibal Capitalism. Fraser opines that “our social system”, the end product of the current neo-liberal political regime, “is sapping energies needed to tend to families, maintain households, sustain communities, nourish friendships, build political networks, and forge solidarities”. The same sentiment could easily be vocalized by a conservative midwestern Republican running for office on a “family values” platform. The conservative, however, would argue for limited government, which Fraser would opt for an even safer “safety net.”
The point is that both leftwing and rightwing critics of liberalism historically have emphasized corrosive effects of liberalism on what Fraser fashionably terms “solidarities”, and it is in this context where culture wars bear striking analogies with Marxian class wars.
If one reads Marx honestly in deciphering, for example, his youthful characterization of human beings as “species beings”, it becomes evident that the “class struggle” is ultimately over the dominant social values that determine to which class one is often assigned (something he makes very clear in The German Ideology) as part and parcel of what he terms “the relations of production”).
It is not incidental that the flashpoints of today’s culture wars are race and sexuality. The familiar jargon that these typifications must be understood as “social constructs” rather than as essential ways of being human underscores their symbolic or “cultural” function in defining collective reality. At the same time, it also points to their importance in articulating what is meant precisely by such “solidarities”.
Liberalism historically has reduced these solidarities to abstract rights, and even “entitlements”. That is true of both classical liberalism and what Fraser on the election of Trump in 2016 characterized as the “progressive liberalism” of the ruling urban elites and the Democratic Party.
That was also the gist of Christopher Lasch’s epoch-making book from the late 1970s entitled The Culture of Narcissism, in which he blasted both the New Left – the forerunner of today’s “woke” professional elites - and the hippie counterculture for its phony proclamations of social revolution, when in fact it was doing nothing more than ritually enacting the decadent denoument of Macpherson’s phenomenon of “possessive individualism”.
As British philosopher Kathleen Stock points out, the current obsession of our professional elites with transgenderism is the only remaining “emancipatory” project left on the table for them when the rhetoric of liberalism has already over time strip-mined away all meaningful social content when it comes to maintaining traditional solidarities. Academics and policy makers have succumbed to what she terms an “immersion psychology” where the specificity of transgender exclusion serves as a placeholder for the entirety of the liberal language game of stamping out oppression.
Sexuality, she reminds us, is about the mundane challenging of keeping the human race going, which is what the uneducated, or half-educated, demos rightfully cares more about. Hence, we are confronted with the anomaly of public opinion polling strongly supporting gay rights and the expression of LGBTQ+ sexuality, yet provoking a frenzy among the more conservative segment of the population when a trans person serves as the short-lived marketing marquee for American’s most “populist” beer Bud Light.
The more nuanced message from the demos turns out to be “that’s the one line in the sand you’re not going to cross”.
Although Stock does not address the conservative consumer backlash against corporate trans branding (since the book came out in 2021), she would not be at all surprised it is taking place. “Culture wars” are about exactly that – culture! And culture is about moral solidarities that hold societies together.
It’s the culture, stupid!
If societies – such as most of Western society nowadays – are split almost evenly down the middle over which moral universe should prevail, culture wars are inevitable. One side can win only at enormous cost, and even if that is the outcome, the resentments and bitterness will linger for generations.
Stepping back and trying to find a way to negotiate differences is at even more transcendent level obligatory upon all of us. Unfortunately, the willingness of either side to make a move in that direction may not be possible until there are real consequences for this collective moral dogfight, which may be coming sooner than we think and turn out to be a lot more than we can really handle.