Stop ignoring the culture war. Democrats must fully engage
One bit from the great satirical newspaper-turned-website The Onion that has stayed with me more than any other is searingly funny, of course, but also the best-ever summary of the ugly turn that American politics has taken over the last 40 years. In its 1999 send-up of 100 years of mock front pages called “Our Dumb Century,” a 1980 election shtick involved an infographic comparing the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan campaigns. Carter’s large-type campaign slogan: “Let’s Talk Better Mileage.” Reagan’s: “Kill the Bastards.”
In 2021, Biden-era Democrats like Terry McAuliffe, the party’s tired retread for governor in Virginia, literally tried to talk better mileage with the voters as their climate change and fix-road-andbridges promises slowly ground through the sausage maker on Capitol Hill. Over the western mountains and at the edge of suburban sprawl in the Old Dominion State, angry voters searching for their pitchforks after imbibing days of propaganda about what their kids are taught about racism didn’t want to hear about fuel efficiency. They were out for blood.
Just like Reagan in 1980, Republican Glenn Youngkin’s “Kill the Bastards” message carried the day in a state that had seemed to be trending Democratic blue for much of the 2010s. Once again, the Democrats showed up to a culture war gunfight brandishing a 2,000-page piece of legislation.
But if the green tree of universal prekindergarten and extended child tax credits falls in a rural community like isolated Bath County, Virginia, will it even make a sound?
The Republicans’ culture war strategy is winning. That doesn’t mean Democrats shouldn’t pass bills like the transformational yet horribly named and marketed $175 billion-a-year “Build Back Better.” They should. Actual, mature governing is a key part of a strategic message for Democrats, and it excites some voting blocs — just not the one that the party has been unsuccessfully trying to woo back since that Reagan win in 1980, the white working class.
The Democrats will lose the culture war if they’re too aloof to even bother to fight it, and if they lose the culture war, they will lose the elections in 2022 and 2024, and it will take a long time to recover.
The Democrats need to fight a culture war — more than anything else — over voting rights, to make the argument that the red state wave of Republican voter suppression laws is a profoundly un-American activity, and that Democrats are the spiritual heirs to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and thus the protectors of an expansive vision for democracy that works for all citizens.
The Democrats need to fight a culture war over book banning — to stop playing rope-a-dope on the bogus “critical race theory” issue and fight for academic freedom and open expression.
The Democrats need to fight a culture war over science — to make their voters as passionate about defending the core values of inquiry and knowledge that led to the COVID-19 vaccine and our understanding of what will be needed to roll back climate change in the same way that the far right and its Facebook-fried (excuse me, Meta-fried) misinformation have fired up the right over pandemic denial and fossil fuel addiction.
The Democrats need to fight a culture war over education — to remind parents that the real fight for the future of our children is not whether we can keep denying critical parts of American history but whether we’re providing any civics education at all to our kids, and whether we can offer our young people access to the kinds of higher education that’s out of reach for far too many. There needs to be a new push to revive free community college, and Biden needs to remember his campaign promise to address student debt in a big way.
Democrats lost an incalculable number of votes Nov. 2 — and they’re on track to do so in 2022 — by failing to convince their core constituencies they’re fighting for their culture. What are Black and Brown voters supposed to think when they see a party fight harder over property taxes in Silicon Valley or the Upper West Side than against voter suppression?
Democrats can bring these voters back next year by reminding decent, democracy-loving Americans that their party is the thin blue line between them and book burning, a culture of ignorance, and the end of free and fair elections. That would mean an end to watching the culture war from the sidelines. It means actually fighting to win — and to kill all the bastardization of real American values.