Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: For Republicans and Christian Nationalists, It's Culture Wars Today, Culture Wars Tomorrow, and Culture Wars Forever
March 22, 2021
Ronald Reagan began the modern era of GOP culture wars (i_forbes)
Bill Berkowitz
On January 14, 1963, in his inauguration speech as Governor, George Corley Wallace, a leading opponent to the then growing civil rights movement, unequivocally spelled out his position: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.” Nearly sixty years later, mounting relentless attempts to restrict voting rights and railing against mask wearing during the pandemic, “cancel culture” and “wokeness,” the Republican Party and its Christian nationalist allies -- perpetrators of Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election -- have their own meme: “culture wars today … culture wars tomorrow … culture wars forever.”
Many Americans are still grappling with losses of loved ones from COVID-19, unemployment, the stress of teaching their children at home, food insecurity, making rent or house payments, increased addiction to opioids, and mental health issues. In response to the toll of the pandemic, Democrats passed a $1.9 trillion economic relief package. Meanwhile, fiddling while Rome is burning, the Republican Party and its Christian nationalist cohorts are stirring up culture wars. Republican elected officials who have no pandemic relief platform of their own are reduced to reading from Dr. Seuss’ books in the Senate, lamenting the demise of Mr. Potato Head, and battling over who can use which bathroom.
Trump, the GOP and several Fox News Channel hosts have seized on public health advice to wear masks and turned it into an incursion into individual freedom. More recently conservatives have supported the premature opening up of such states as Florida and Texas, and labeled the question whether or not young people should travel to those states, the Spring Break Culture War. “The winter holiday season became, like spring break, a matter of cultural warfare, with then-President Trump and some of his political supporters arguing that public health advice” was unnecessarily restrictive, Alexander Nazaryan, recently wrote in Yahoo News. “Epidemiologists believe that widespread travel in November and December led to a winter wave that caused thousands of additional deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.”
“The ‘culture wars’ – incendiary debates over issues such as the role of religion in public life, reproductive freedom, LGBTQ rights, the meaning of religious freedom and others – have roiled America for decades and were especially prominent during the tenure of former president Donald Trump,” Rob Boston, Senior Adviser to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and editor of it publication, Church & State, recently wrote.
While to Trump – not a deeply religious man -- the culture wars were key to building upon, and placating, his Christian nationalist base, President Joe Biden appears to be more inclined to disregard their impact. As Thomas Edsall observed in The New York Times, Biden has refused to engage in culture wars ranting by Republicans.
Stanley Feldman, a political scientist at Stony Brook University, told Edsall in an email that “Biden understands that it’s to the Democrats’ advantage to lower the volume on the culture wars. The Covid rescue bill is a clear attempt to change political discourse back to economic issues and to provide broad-based, tangible assistance to a large part of the public. Biden signs executive orders on gender but there’s little discussion of this.”
“Taking their cues from a new president who steadfastly refuses to engage with or react to cultural provocations,” Democratic officeholders “have mostly kept their heads down and focused on passing legislation,” The Week’s Damon Linker wrote.
Linker noted that “The culture war has changed a lot since it began to play a role in national politics — first, haltingly, during the Nixon administration, and then in a much more sweeping way with the election of Ronald Reagan. Back then, the culture war was about the role of religion in American public life and the moral issues wrapped up with it: prayer in public schools, the counterculture, feminism, abortion, pornography, euthanasia, gay rights, and much more recently, transgender rights. From the early 1980s through the first term of the Obama administration, other issues of public policy were entirely separate from the moral and religious concerns that animated the culture war.”
GOP and Christian nationalist leaders are still very much locked into the culture wars but the playbook has evolved, hence the attacks on “woke culture.” . After all, what would a fundraising letter to their constituents look like without swiping at transgender people, and promoting prayer in public schools. . “Members of Congress – from Q-Anon queen Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and a host of U.S. senators including Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) and others – are eager to keep culture war issues front and center to fire up the same base of white evangelicals who so worshipped Trump,” Boston wrote. “Tuberville has been in the Senate less than two months, but he has already gone on a tear about school prayer and attempted to derail the coronavirus relief package with an offensive amendment attacking the rights of transgender Americans.”
Some critics – as they have done over the years -- hypothesize that the GOPs use of “culture war” rhetoric will not be as successful as it has in the past. However, the GOP and Christian nationalists should never be underestimated in their capacity to turn their endless aggrieved narrative into winning political issues.
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