Climate change used to be a bipartisan issue. So did abortion rights. Ditto immigration. In each case, the earlier bipartisan consensus was much more liberal than the current conservative credo. The Right gained ground, both achieving issue-specific policy outcomes and advancing electorally, by turning each issue into a culture war and then winning it.
The Left, by failing to understand the underlying grammar of culture wars, plays into the Right’s hands again and again. To stop being played, we need to study their playbook — and take stock of our own successes.
The greatest advance in reducing social inequality in the last three decades is the normalization and legalization of gay marriage, which profoundly shifted the material conditions of people’s lives and also changed deeply held understandings about the dignity of gay families and gay sex. The gay marriage template shows us how to fight for progressive social values without falling into the culture-war traps that the Right sets for us.
Culture wars are part of the deep structure of populism. To quote Democratic strategist David Kusnet, “There are two populist messages: #1 Left populism: They’re robbing you blind. #2. Right populism: They think they’re better than you. Progressives should stick with #1 and not fall into #2.”
In both recipes, the magic ingredient is resentment. There’s a lot of it to go around. The fragile and failing middle class is very angry, and they should be: If wage increases had continued to match productivity increases in recent decades, as they did after…
Auteur: Joan C. Williams
