How everything became the culture war
Americans have given up on policy and turned to bruising battles over identity, said journalist Michael Grunwald. Partisans would rather score points against the opposing tribe than solve the country’s problems.
T O UNDERSTAND HOW American politics got the way it is today, it helps to rewind the tape to the presidential campaign of John McCain—specifically to his effort to win back a listless crowd at an otherwise forgettable campaign event in south-central Pennsylvania in the summer of 2008. The Republican nominee had opened by promising a country-over-party approach to politics, recalling his compromises with Democrats like Ted Kennedy: “We’ll have our disagreements, but we’ve got to be respectful.” The Republican crowd sat in silence. McCain then denounced Vladimir Putin’s incursion into independent Georgia, warning that “history is often made in remote, obscure places.” No one seemed interested in that particular remote and obscure place. McCain just couldn’t connect with the crowd, until he unleashed a garbled riff about how Congress shouldn’t be on recess when gasoline prices were soaring. “My friends,” he said, “the message we want to send to Washington, D.C., is ‘Come back off your vacation, go back to Washington, fix our energy problems, and drill and drill now, drill offshore and drill now!’” It lacked the poetic brevity of the “Drill, baby, drill” line his future running mate, Sarah Palin, would use to fire up crowds, but the York Expo Center suddenly erupted with raucous cheers. It felt visceral, almost violent, as if McCain had given his supporters permission to drill someone they hated. McCain flashed an uneasy grin, like a kid who had just set off his first firecracker, delighted but also a bit frightened by its power. He wasn’t really a drill-babydrill politician, but he could sense his party drifting toward drill-baby-drill politics. A decade later, McCain is dead, bipartisanship is just about dead—his funeral felt like the rare exception that proved the rule— and the leader of the Republican Party is a world-class polarizer who mocked McCain’s service while cozying up to Putin on his way to the White House. President Donald Trump has pioneered a new politics of perpetual culture war, relentlessly rallying his supporters against kneeling black opposition to carbon regulations, renewable energy subsidies, and other forms of climate action. He wasn’t disputing that the planet is getting hotter, or questioning the scientific data on the dangers of fossil fuels. He was clarifying which team he’s on, and more specifically which team he isn’t on: the team of tree-hugging scolds who look down on ordinary Americans for eating bacon and using plastic straws. As long as America keeps sorting itself into two factions divided by geography, ethnicity, and ideology, pitting a multiracial team of progressives who live in citathletes, undocumented Latino immigrants, ies and inner-ring suburbs against a white and soft-on-crime, weak-on-the-border team of conservatives who live in exurbs Democrats. and rural areas, this is what debates about
public policy—or for that matter about Democrats and Republicans are increasthe FBI, the dictator of North Korea, and ingly self-segregated and mutually disdainthe credibility of various sexual assault ful, each camp deploying the furious lanallegations—will look like. We will twist guage of victimhood to justify its fear and the facts into our partisan narratives. The loathing of the gullible deplorables in the self-inflicted wounds will infect more and other. One side boycotts Chick-fil-A (over more of our lives. And if you want somegay rights), Walmart (over sweatshops), thing else to worry about, consider where it and companies that do business with the might be spreading next.
National Rifle Association, while the other
P boycotts Nike (over Colin Kaepernick), OLITICS HAS ALWAYS been adversarial. Starbucks (over refugees, gay marriage, and Traditionally, though, we’ve had non-Christmas-specific holiday cups), and a fairly robust national consensus companies that stop doing business with about a fairly broad set of goals—a strong the NRA. We live in an era of performative defense, a decent safety net, freedom from umbrage. Every day is Festivus, a ritual airexcessive government interference—even ing of our grievances about Kathy Griffin, though we’ve squabbled over how to Roseanne Barr, fake news, toxic masculinachieve them. What’s different about ity, and those fancy coffee machines that drill-baby-drill politics is the transformaSean Hannity’s viewers decided to destroy tion of even nonpartisan issues into madfor some reason. Every decision about as-hell battles of the bases, which makes where to shop or what to drive or what to it virtually impossible for politicians to watch is now an opportunity to express solve problems in a two-party system. our political identities. The 24-hour news Cooperation and compromise start to look cycle has become a never-ending national like capitulation, or even treasonous collureferendum on Trump. sion with the enemy.
Politically, it makes sense that debates over highly technical challenges like energy and climate change have been transformed into shirts-and-skins identity issues. Ron
DeSantis, Florida’s Trump-loving governorelect, recently proclaimed that he’s “not in the pews of the Church of Global Warming
Leftists,” a very 2018 way of expressing Take infrastructure spending, which was once reasonably uncontroversial, at least in principle. Today, many conservatives portray it as a liberal plot to siphon rural tax dollars into urban bike paths, subways, and high-speed rail boondoggles that unions will build and Democratic city slickers will use. The Trump admin-