Navigating our Cultural Landscape, Fighting the Culture Wars, and Negotiating a Compromise.
By Chris Dub
The rise of conservatism in the United States is emphatically linked to the advent of the culture wars. Conservatives and the Republican Party have used the issues of the culture wars to cement their control of the United States federal government and to defeat liberal and moderate Democrats in election after election. If progressive liberals and the Democrat party as a whole are ever to produce electoral gains and win back control over one, two or three branches of the federal government, we must understand the nature of these various cultural conflicts, address these cultural issues directly, forcefully and repeatedly, and attempt to broker a cultural compromise without abandoning the liberal principles that guide the party.
The culture wars have their roots in the upheavals up the 1960s. The cultural conflicts that resulted from the Civil Rights Movements, the anti-war protests over the Vietnam War, and the Women's Liberation Movement all contributed to the arrival of the culture wars. This conflict, however, has much deeper roots and causes than the mere discomfort or stress resulting from social upheavals. At its root, the culture war is a result of different views about how American society should be organized. The view associated with the Republican Party, the religious right and cultural conservatives states that our society should be constructed along traditional, bourgeois, Christian values. The opposing view held by the Democratic Party, secularists, and cultural radicals is that the values that govern our society are relative and naturally evolve and change over time. Another way of stating this conflict is that one side embraces modernism and its inherent change, while the other is essentially anti-modern. Of course there are also a large number of moderates who fall in the middle of these two points of view, as well as radicals on either side of the debate.
These arguments over how to structure society can be seen in arguments over countless hot-button issues such as abortion, gay marriage, flag burning, censorship and decency and a plethora of other issues. These issues, frequently referred to as wedge issues have been handing Republicans electoral victories and Democrats electoral losses for decades. Republican leaders enthusiastically search these issues out and use them to divide and polarize the electorate. This strategy results in two unequal halves, with the larger of the two voting for the Republican Party. Democrats, on the other hand, consistently run and hide from these issues, often completely ignoring them, or are forced to defend distasteful or controversial practices, such as obscene artwork, or abortion. By conceding these cultural issues to the conservatives, liberals have lost the culture wars and continue to retreat at every new conservative attack.
By not fighting the culture wars, Democrats have ceded dominance over these cultural issues to the Republican Party. As a result, Democrats have allowed themselves to be caricatured by the Republican Party as immoralists who delight at defending pornography, baby-killing, and drug-use. Other caricatures that have resulted from this ceded ground are Democrats as atheists who want to outlaw prayer in public places, or Democrats as tree-huggers who want to take away your guns.
In order for the Democratic Party to have a chance at consistent electoral victory, we must devise a way to at the very least fight these culture wars, and if possible, even win a few battles. By stating clearly, forcefully and repeatedly what our positions are on these cultural issues we can also work toward weakening these caricatures that Republicans have so successfully built.
Perhaps the reason the that Republicans have been so successful in waging these culture wars is not that most Americans agree with the positions these cultural conservatives advocate, but that the movement's think tanks and media outlets have been so successful at dictating the terms of the debate and at framing the issues in terms that most Americans understand. Democrats have been forced to debate these cultural issues on conservative's terms, and have not placed their arguments into narratives that Americans can instantly grasp. The framing of cultural issues in broad appealing terms has resulted in the conservative capture of the moderate center of American politics. The goals of the Democratic Party should be to fight these culture wars with the aim of regaining the cultural center. Democrats should be able to accomplish this by peeling off moderate and conservative support for cultural issues by crafting compromise positions that are consistent with the ideals of the Democratic Party, and by framing these issues in ways that Americans will instantly be able to understand.
Gay marriage, gun control, and abortion are all traditional wedge issues that conservatives have been able to insert into the culture war narrative. Democrats need to take on these cultural battles by crafting new positions on these issues that effectively communicate liberal values to Americans, counter conservative attacks, and appeal to moderates and less radical conservatives.
Although gay marriage was the issue du jour of this election, abortion is the issue key to the culture war. It is the most symbolically important of all major culture issues and serves to unify the cultural far right like no other issue unites any other faction of U.S. politics. It is an issue on which a surprisingly high number of single-issue voters vote on, and cuts across class, gender, age, education, and ethnic lines.
Conservatives have been able to dominate this issue, not because their position is the majority position, but because they have framed the issue in broad language and set the terms of the debate along the lines of legality and morality. Conservatives have been able focus the abortion debate on the issue of whether abortion should or should not be legal. They have also phrased the debate in moral terms arguing that abortion is morally equivalent to murdering babies. This approach ignores the underling causes of abortion, is insensitive to the values of others, is insulting and demeaning to pro-choice voters, and blatantly ignores the complexity of the issue. It also, however, uses language that most Americans will immediately understand, is sympathetic to the large number of hard-line cultural conservatives, and simplifies the debate over abortion into two opposing camps: those who think killing babies is bad, and those who think it is good. This language also effectively caricatures the left as immoral baby-killers. Far left pro-choice rallies featuring flamboyant protests and promises to protect a woman's right to choose at any cost, as well as the left's vigilant battles over issues like partial-birth abortion and the Laci Peterson law, contribute to these caricatures and work to marginalize moderates and other liberals' alternative ideas with regard to abortion rights.
The challenge for Democrats is not to compromise their defense of the Supreme Court's decision in Roe-v-Wade, but to rephrase their support of abortion rights in clear moral terms, and reframe the debate over abortion. In effect, Democrats must shift the debate over abortion from a debate over legality to a debate about how to best reduce the number of abortions. According to the best estimates of Dr. Glen Harold Stassen, the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at the Fuller Theological Seminary, abortions consistently declined under President Clinton. Under George W. Bush, however, abortions have been consistently increasing. In 2002 alone 52,000 more abortions were performed than would have been expected in any typical year during the decade of the 1990s.
One way to shift the abortion debate and to reclaim the left's moral ground would be for the Democratic Party to propose an initiative or series of programs aimed at reducing abortions in this country by a certain percentage over a certain number of years. This proposal would be directly at odds with the caricature of the left perpetuated by conservatives and would work to shift the debate from legality to issues about how to reduce abortions. It would also demonstrate that although the left defends abortion rights, we also do not want to kill babies. Debates over abortion centering on how to decrease abortion rates will inherently favor Democrats, who have presided over a period of abortion rate decreases, and will also lead the debate into more comfortable areas for Democrats such as social justice, economic prosperity, sexual education, and birth control and contraceptives. Reducing abortions will require a national discussion concerning the plight of mothers living in poverty, the issue of sexual education in public schools, the availability of birth control to women, and issues surround economic injustice. These are issues Democrats and liberals feel passionately about, and by tying them to abortion rates, and by expressing our desire to decrease abortions, we can find common ground among moderate cultural conservatives while extolling our values at the same time.
When politicians speak about issues, it is often said that what they say about the issue is not as important about as what the issue says about them. This is also true for political parties. Decreasing abortions will say a great deal about the Democratic Party, but perhaps the issue of the environment can say even more.
Environmentalists come in two basic packages. The first will call themselves environmentalists, are generally leftists, and have been effectively caricatured by the right as tree-hugging, non-showering, long hair-wearing wackos. The second group is generally culturally conservative, would never, ever identify with wacko environmentalists, and in fact don't even think of themselves as environmentalists. This second group is made up of hunters and fishers. These traditionally conservative, gun-toting voters and others like them in the National Rifle Association, are ripe-pickings for a crafty liberal candidate.
Although issues revolving around guns are traditionally dominated by conservatives, one Democrat, Brian Schweitzer, the now governor-elect of Montana, found a way to appeal to both left-leaning environmentalists, and right-leaning gun owners. In his campaign, described by some as "the Montana Miracle," Schweitzer proposed a nine-point plan to protect hunting and fishing rights in both public and private lands. The plan also included provisions to protect and expand state fishing and hunting grounds, to the delight of both environmentalists and hunters. Schweitzer also ran a pro-gun ad in Montana, but his proposals to increase hunting grounds did far more to cement his pro-gun credentials.
This approach to the so-called gun vote is an ideal compromise strategy that Democrats should emulate. Although Democrats in all regions of the country are not pro-gun, we should realize that not all parts of the country are the same. Gun control in New York City or Los Angeles is a much different issue than gun control in Montana or Vermont. But as Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont with the lifetime A-rating from NRA showed, a states rights position on the gun issue can appeal to the left wing of the Democratic party.
This approach not only can help prove that liberals are not going to take anyone's gun away, but also will highlight the differences in environmental policy between the two parties, and show how the environment is important to all Americans, even culturally conservative ones. This approach also can smash the caricature of liberals as pansy tree-huggers who want to abolish the second amendment.
Similar approaches that both highlight liberal values like social and economic justice and respect for the environment and directly appeal to cultural conservatives can also be crafted on other culture issues such as affirmative action, gay marriage, and public decency. Perhaps liberals can propose that affirmative action on the basis of race in university applications be replaced with affirmative action on the basis of family income. This position will not only diffuse conservative anger over reverse discrimination, but also will go a long way towards helping lower income students improve their financial situation.
With regards to gay marriage, the Democratic Party could decide it wants to take the federal government out of the marriage business altogether and focus exclusively on civil contracts. This proposal will give more authority to churches with regard to marriage and will even perhaps help preserve the sanctity and holiness of the institution while at the same time allowing for equal protection under the law.
Sex and nudity on television is also a hot-button issue, although not one right-wing politicians have chosen to attack liberals with yet. This is an issue we can get ahead of, perhaps by proposing stricter regulations with regard to not only sex, but also violence on network television, while at the same time relaxing regulations on cable television. Conservatives are correct that networks operate on the public airwaves, and anything the public deems offensive should not be aired. Cable television, however, is private, and anyone who does not want to watch it does not have to pay for it.
In effect, liberals and the Democratic Party need to be creative; not only with how they craft their positions on cultural issues, but also with regard to the language they use to describe those positions. We must remember that our country was built on compromises, but we must also not abandon our values. The right wing of this country has dominated the public debate over culture through their stranglehold on the terms of the debate and if Democrats ever hope to consistently win elections, they must fight these culture wars, and win some battles.
The stakes over these culture wars go far beyond just questions over culture. Republicans have been using cultural issues to distract Americans from economic and political issues, and as a smokescreen for their reactionary economic policies. In order for Democrats to address these economic and political issues, they must first address these cultural issues. It should also be noted that these economic and political issues sometimes become cultural issues themselves to some loyal voters of both parties. In order to have an honest, fruitful debate over these issues, they need to be separated from their cultural connotations and loyalties. Once Democrats are successful in going on the offensive in the culture wars, perhaps they can take a page from the Republicans by using our cultural positions as smokescreen to advance progressive economic reform and universal health care. Even better, will can learn even more from our political opponents and take these economic issues and convert them into our own attacks in the culture wars.