Democrats need to win the cultural values war
For a long time, there has been a fairly wide range of policy issues that Democrats and Republicans (liberals and conservatives) have disagreed about, e.g., taxes, deficit spending, government’s role, gun control, immigration, abortion, environmental policy, and regulation. Increasingly the differences between the parties have become much more fundamental. They have become differences of underlying cultural values.
More and more, the disagreements about policies has morphed into disagreements on what had traditionally been widely accepted bedrock principles of our nation — freedom of speech, academic freedom, trust in science, and the rule of law.
In a recent column entitled “America has a Free Speech Problem,” The New York Times editorial board argued that both sides must share the blame for the loss “of a fundamental right of citizens of a free country; the right to speak their mind and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.”
How did his come about? According to the Times editorial, “In large part, it’s because the political left and the right are caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture. Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech. Many on the right, for all their braying about cancel culture, have embraced an even more extreme version of censoriousness as a bulwark against a rapidly changing society, with laws that would ban books, stifle teachers and discourage open discussion in classrooms.”
The result of ever-increasing vitriolic back and forth between liberals and conservatives is tearing away at the fabric of our nation and is destroying life-long friendships and even family ties. We are seeing disastrous consequences, on a host of fronts, from the growing lack of civility and consensus among leaders and our people on what previously had been widely accepted core values.
I attribute the inability of our political leaders from both sides of the aisle to coalesce early on around what the scientific community was widely recommended to combat the COVID-19 pandemic as the primary reason that vaccinations didn’t become more widespread. The result was hundreds of thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.
I attribute Trumpism and the rancor it produced to a total lack of respect for the rule of law that resulted in the antidemocratic insurrection that occurred in our nation’s Capitol on January 6th. The insurrection was a perversion of everything that America stands for and those who provoked it were acting in my mind in a clearly treasonous manner.
Day in and day out Republicans have exploited cultural differences, appealed to the fears and status resentments of white working-class voters and exploited issues such as defunding the police, critical race theory, immigration, affirmative action, and transgender rights to extenuate a cultural war. They project Democrats as being soft on crime and purveyors of identity politics in which they cow-tow and utilize double standards to secure the votes of our nation’s minorities.
Likewise, woke progressive Democrats on college campuses shout down conservative speakers because of their “unacceptable” ideas. The left needs to remember that long before the term was fashionable, they were in the crosshairs of the cancel culture during the McCarthy era. Cancel culture is wrong whether it is promulgated by the left or the right. Democrats should disavow any attempts on college campuses to thwart divergent viewpoints. It is unconstitutional and contrary to our bedrock principle of freedom of speech.
Democrats also need to also make it clear that they do not want to spend less money for law enforcement, but rather want to spend funds allocated for law enforcement for both public safety and mental health counselors who have the skills to deescalate confrontations.
When it comes to the debate about schools, Democrats need to reframe the conversation. They must avoid, at all costs, getting caught up in the morass of critical race theory (a construct taught in law school and almost never in public schools). Instead, they need to focus on what many Republicans want to do which is to ban books and block teachers from discussing even Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, which is not something most American want to see happen. They need to become the party that is committed to telling the truth about both the exemplary and sordid aspects of our nation’s racial history. They should make it clear that parents do have an important role to play in the education of their children, but it is not as censors but as collaborators with educators. When it comes to the debate over whether transgender athletes should be allowed to compete on female sports teams, Democrats need to stress that it is not the hill that they are prepared to die on. This doesn’t mean that Democrats are no longer concerned about transgender discrimination, but it does mean that we are also sympathetic to concerns that parents have about the possibility that their daughter(s) may be competing in an inherently unfair playing field.
Experts say the Republicans want to make the 2022 midterm election a referendum on cultural issues and the Democrats need to shift the conversation away from culture wars to avoid losses at the ballot box. I’m not sure about that given what is going on in Ukraine. Watching how hard Ukrainians fight to preserve and defend their democracy, perhaps American voters will be less easily distracted by the cultural politics of division and distraction.