Cooling The Culture Wars--It CAN Be Done, Just Don't Ask Versailles How

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Jun 07, 2009 at 11:00

In response to the weekend's murder of George Tiller, MSNBC's lead thought this morning was that the "culture wars" have returned.

Not to always be the irritating know it all sitting in the first row of class or anything, but I have news for MSNBC. The culture wars never left American politics. In fact, they will always be with us. We are never going to enter a period as a nation where our cultural differences fail to have an impact on our political choices.

While I do agree that (1) MSNBC was being foolish, (2) the "culture wars" never went away, and (3) cultural differences will always have a substantial impact on our politics, I think history shows quite clearly that there are ways to mitigate the intensity of such conflicts, which have varied considerably in their intensity over the course of our history. Thing is, though, the Versailles CW is (wait for it...) wrong once again on both where this comes from, and how it might be overcome.

What's more, it's not always a good thing to calm the culture wars. Gaining equality for despised and disempowered groups has regularly required that the culture wars heat up, not cool down: freeing the slaves, winning women's rights, ending racial discrimination, gaining social acceptance for every major wave of immigrants, winning equal rights for gays and lesbians--all these struggles have been held back by the insistence on social peace, and only advanced when people were willing to risk intensified social strife, which now goes under the rubric of "culture wars".

This gives rise to a simple observation: as a first approximation, there are three favored ways to end the culture wars:

(1) Conservatives believe that subordinate groups should stop "causing trouble" by pushing for equality. (The problem is those people.)

(2) Progressives believe that subordinate groups should be granted full equality, so there's nothing to fight over any more. (The problem is lack of "liberty and justice for all.")

(3) "Responsible" centrists believe in Santa Claus, and tell us we all need to be good little boys and girls, and everything will work out just fine. (The problem is individuals with bad attitudes on both sides.)

Refinements start on the flip.

Before doing anything else, it seems appropriate to establish the fact that social strife and cultural polarization ebb and flow over time, thus indicating that the "culture wars" can be mitigate to a greater or lesser extent.  There is no time in our history when there hasn't been some social and cultural dimension to political differences, so expecting the culture wars to end is clearly a pipe dream.  However, shifts in Congressional polarization have been well documented, as I pointed out in my December 2007 diary, "Obama-Yearning For Dixiecrats?"  In it, I looked at DW-Nominate data compiled by in the 2006 book, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches, by political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, some highlights of which are available online.  One facet of their findings, alluded to in the diary title, is that like it or not, the relatively lack of polarization in the 1950s in Congress was due to the presence of Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party.  Northern Democrats have not changed all that much, but as Dixiecrats and their descendants switched to the GOP, the Republican party moved farther away from the Democrats.  Here are a couple of illustrative charts:

This was not the only factor, or even, necessarily, the driving one as can be seen by these two charts:

Polarization in Congress is not the only indicator of cultural polarization, of course.  The power of incumbency and other institutional factors serve to mask more short-term phenomena, even when they do have a significant electoral impact--as did McCarthyism in the 1950s, for example.  But the last two charts paint a picture of increased polarization over a period of decades in an environment of increased income polarization, and a rising share of immigrants, who naturally tend to have lower rates of voting and thus less political representation--in short, a less robust democracy.

At the same time, in another diary, "Sorting By Party--Polarization By Party Without Polarization of People" I wrote about the evidence that individuals were not necessarily becoming more polarized in their views so much as they were becoming more uniformly sorted between the parties:

As Diana Epstein and John D. Graham observed in their Pardee RAND Graduate School paper, "Polarized Politics and Policy Consequences" [PDF]:

Now more than ever, the two parties represent clear differences in ideologies and policy priorities. Voters tend to associate more strongly with one political party or the other according to their own ideological inclinations, a phenomenon that experts refer to as "sorting." Whereas liberals and conservatives used to have a place in either party, now one usually finds conservatives aligned with the Republicans and liberals aligned with the Democrats.

A couple of charts from that diary which came from an earlier analysis use General Social Survey data to show how the ideological makeup of the two parties changed over time:

While liberals have grown in influence within the Democratic Party, they are still far less dominant than conservatives were 25-37 years ago in the GOP.  When it comes to ideological rigidity, there is simply no comparison between the two parties.  (When it comes to ideological rigidity, there is simply no comparison between liberals and conservatives, either.  But that's a whole other argument in itself.)

The main points of this section have been to show that the intensity of cultural polarization does indeed vary over time, that it is at a relative high point now, that it is due more ideological sorting of people into parties than it is due to individual polarization, and that conservatives joining the GOP has been the driving force, more than liberals joining the Democrats.

The fact that sorting into parties contributes more to party polarization than individual polarization does suggests that the "responsible" moderates are mistaken in blaming individual attitudes. The fact that conservatives dominate the GOP much more than liberals dominate the Democrats suggests that the moderates' tendency to "evenhandedly" blame both sides is itself biased against reality.  This does not mean that no plausible centrist approach toward mitigating the culture wars can be devised.  Only that the initial formulation has some severe problems with it.

These are, of course, long-period trends that smooth over much more volatile shorter-term events, including the particular issues that flare around one campaign cycle.  This is not to say such short-term phenomena do not matter.  They clearly do.  It's merely to note the limitations of what this kind of overview can tell us.

These trends have a more murky relationships with long-term struggles for social inclusion, since the two parties tend to be institutionally rather conservative in the sense that their top echelons are relatively insulated, and their mutually agreed-upon field of battle generally doesn't prioritize the concern of excluded groups, whose voter participation rates tend to be significantly lower, if not almost non-existent in some cases.  So it's best to think of the argument in the next section as addressing dynamics that are only loosely related to the broader shifts indicated in the charts above.  However, it's impossible to ignore the fact that polarization of income and political parties has increased remarkably since the 1970s, at the same time that once-despised groups have increasingly made progress in gaining inclusion.  The question, of course, is: at what price?

Second-Approximation Theories

In the beginning of this diary, I wrote:

This gives rise to a simple observation: as a first approximation, there are three favored ways to end the culture wars:

(1) Conservatives believe that subordinate groups should stop "causing trouble" by pushing for equality. (The problem is those people.)

(2) Progressives believe that subordinate groups should be granted full equality, so there's nothing to fight over any more. (The problem is lack of "liberty and justice for all.")

(3) "Responsible" centrists believe in Santa Claus, and tell us we all need to be good little boys and girls, and everything will work out just fine. (The problem is individuals with bad attitudes on both sides.)

Those theories made sense in terms of my previous observation that culture war-style social strife attended any sort of struggle for social inclusion and equality for previously outcast or subordinated groups.  

We can do better than that, however, simply by noting that the struggles for equality and social inclusion are not simple one-way streets.  There is not just forwards movement, but backwards movement as well--as seen with the rise of segregation following the brief period of Reconstruction after the Civil War.  And there are more subtle moves to assimilate former outgroups while defanging the political threats they pose.  What's more, groups may move forward together toward greater inclusion and equality for a while, only to fall out of step, or even grown somewhat antagonistic. All these considerations and more point toward the usefulness of considering second-approximation theories as refinements of those above.  

The problem is, only conservatives have managed to shape a commonly-shared second-approximation theory, and they have done so as part of their decades-long engagement in hegemonic warfare, greatly facilitated by the fact that they are naturally inclined to view ideas as weapons, and to take their orders from above.  

As a result, we can summarize where the three approaches stand today with respect to the culture wars follows:

(1) Conservatives believe that subordinate groups should stop "causing trouble" by accepting conservative definitions of equality and its limits (For example, "equal opportunity not equal outcomes", but without the actual material foundations to actually have equal opportunity.) Any deviation from this whatsoever is grounds for calling minorities "racist", women "sexist" and assailing GLBTs for taking away First Amendment rights. Thus, conservatives have positioned themselves both to engage in the culture wars almost without restraint, while simultaneously demonizing others for engage in the culture wars themselves. Newt calling Sotomayor "racist" is prototypical of this development, not abberational.

(2) Progressives still believe that subordinate groups should be granted full equality, so there's nothing to fight over any more. But they've yet to really adjust to the conservative's second-approximation theory, and this lack of coherent strategic response results in a substantial gap between mass sentimental support and effective political victories, as well as substantial internal disagreement.

(3) "Responsible" centrists still believe in Santa Claus, and tell us we all need to be good little boys and girls, and everything will work out just fine. (The problem is individuals with bad attitudes on both sides.) Barack Obama is the embodiment of this attitude, and his willingness to accept some conservative attacks on Sotomayor at face value is indicative of lack of intellectual rigor that's always characterized the center.

Obama's advancement of the centrist theory is undercut most sharply by the lack of any payoff.  His rationale, articulated most sharply during the primary campaign, was that the culture wars have been used to divide us, but we need to come together to solve pressing problems that have grown increasingly  serious because the culture wars have distracted us.  However, once in office we've witnessed an ever-widening gulf between the broad sweep of his rhetoric and the pinched nature of his actual proposals.

Although not immediately apparent to the vast majority of the public, the failure of his policy prescriptions to actually solve any of the major problems we face will eventually undermine the centrist project.  It's impossible to say what exact shape this will take, but it's safe to assume that a re-intensified outbreak of the culture wars is certainly quite possible, as minorities are routinely scapegoated whenever wars or economies fail.

Indeed, the success of the centrist approach to cooling the culture wars depends on progressive approaches to health care, the economic crisis, global warming, and foreign policy--because only progressive approaches (pragmatically reality-based) can actually solve these problems.  There is a precedent for this:  FDR's New Deal succeeded in cooling the long-standing culture war between nativist WASPS and continental European immigrant descendants.  He even managed to win significant black support away from the GOP, although he dared not directly confront the core of Southern racism.

Of course, I would argue that even a centrist approach to the culture wars linked to progressive policies on other fronts would not be enough for what morality demands.  But at least it has historical precedent to indicate that it could work politically.  And the fact that it is progressive in its broad sweep beyond the range of the culture wars clearly indicates that it isn't a Versailles-style form of centrism.

Still, we ought to be very concerned about developing a robust progressive approach to ending the culture wars.  Doing that would involve integrating many of the elements I've written about here over time--viewing all forms of group discrimination via the lens of social dominance theory, in which individual attitudes are but one element in a complex system where institutional forces predominate, seeing social dominance orientation and rightwing authoritarianism as pervasive attitudinal barriers that require confronting across the board, independent of who they result in targeting, developing a sophisticated analysis of
anti-egalitarian narratives, and promoting a common anti-rankist vision.

As I said earlier, it would be foolish to ever expect political groupings to have no relationship to any demographic foundation.  But an aggressive commitment to a progressive vision integrating all the elements described above could significantly lessen the intensity and the salience of such divisions.  And that is best that we can ever hope to reasonably achieve.