PHOTO OF BETO O’ROURKE ACTIVATES NEVER-ENDING CULTURE WARS
Politicians come and politicians go, but the culture war is forever. That’s the best way to understand a diverting little controversy happening now in Texas, the site of one of the most interesting Senate races this year.
Sen. Ted Cruz is facing an unusually strong challenge from Rep. Beto O’Rourke, which is surprising in a state in which every statewide elected official is a Republican. O’Rourke seems to be surging thanks to charisma, relentless shoe-leather, good timing, and perhaps some viral videos of him straightforwardly defending progressive ideals and policies, like the one in which he explains why he supports NFL players protesting police brutality.
So now the Texas Republican Party is hitting back, including in a tweet featuring a shocking photo.
The state GOP identified a rock star in a faded monochrome from the 1990s. A floral-print getup (perhaps a dress or tunic), cut wide at the neck, hangs over his lean frame. His hair is parted down the middle, the rest disappearing behind his head in what looks like a loose ponytail. His square jaw accentuates his long, angular face.
The man gazing out from the black-and-white image is college-aged Beto O’Rourke. An electric bassist, he toured the United States and Canada in the early 1990s with his punk rock band, “Foss,” meaning “waterfall” in Icelandic and Norwegian.
Judging by social media, liberals find this utterly hilarious, since the GOP’s argument seems to be that people shouldn’t vote for O’Rourke because as a young man he had steamy good looks and played in a band. Unlike Ted Cruz, who by all accounts as a young man was an even more annoying version of Ted Cruz, difficult though that might be to believe.
What the Republicans are doing here isn’t completely crazy, though. This is just one more iteration of the American culture war, which in one form or another has been with us since the country’s founding. The version we live through, however, has its most direct roots in the 1960s, when liberals grew their hair long, danced to rock music, took drugs, and had all the fun, while conservatives looked on in horror, contempt — and more than a little envy.
Ever since, barely a campaign goes by when we don’t replay the conflict between the hippies and the squares in one form or another. And it has often worked to the benefit of Republicans, who get strong support from older voters, including baby boomers of the Jeff Sessions variety, who ground their teeth in rage as they watched their free-spirited peers pile into vans and head off to Woodstock, vowing that one day they’d be in a position to lock those pot-smoking degenerates behind bars.
That kind of sentiment often manifests itself as an accusation that a Democrat is an empty, unserious person more concerned with palling around with musicians and Hollywood celebrities than with the somber business of politics. This was a charge Republicans frequently made against Barack Obama. Four years later they were still at it.
Granted, these days it’s a little hard for Republicans to charge that a Democrat is acting like a celebrity. But they still believe that showing that a Democrat is cool, particularly in a way that would appeal to young people (another Texas GOP tweet hits O’Rourke for skateboarding), is a path to electoral success. If it is, it will only be because they can convince large numbers of voters to get to the polls to tell Beto O’Rourke to get off their lawn.
Meanwhile, actual young people — the ones who decide what’s cool and what isn’t — can’t stand the GOP. According to a recent NBC/GenForward poll, only 26 percent of millennials have a favorable impression of the Republican Party, while 60 percent have an unfavorable impression (the numbers for the Democratic Party were 44 percent favorable and 42 percent unfavorable).
The saving grace for Republicans, however, is that young people vote at significantly lower rates than the older voters the GOP relies on. Or at least they usually do; we’ll see if Democrats can finally change that this year. Either way, chances are we’re going to keep having this fight for as long as we all live.
Paul Waldman is an opinion writer for the Plum Line blog.