Speaker 1: Welcome, everybody. So I want to start today with what I see as the impossibility of the
current culture war being won by either the left or the right, but for very different reasons.
And on Friday, I'm going to talk a little bit more about the Republican strategy of doing
culture war issues instead of policy. But what I want to explain today is that the culture war
that's currently taking place, that's the one where in the Republican Party has completely
abandoned policy and instead they are fighting politically on issues like critical race theory,
socialism, communism, flags, sports team names, trans girls in sports, the vague notion of that,
of fighting against what they claim is the left wanting to defund the police, even though that's
not what the left wants to do. That type of thing is what I'm talking about. This is a war
that the left can't actually win in fighting it on an issue by issue basis. And I'll explain why.
But it's also a culture war that the right has no interest in winning. That's a really important
thing to understand, because the right benefits from it being an ongoing war as a strategy to
justify people donating money to them and voting for them in elections because you need them to
continue fighting the war. If they win the war, then it's over. The entire impetus for saying
these are the reasons you need to donate to us. And here's why we don't actually talk about policy
goes away if they win so they can never actually win for their own self-preservation.
There's a really interesting article from about two or three months ago in Politico magazine
called How the Culture War Could Break Democracy. Zack Stanton wrote it. And in the article, Zack
references James Davis and Hunter, sociologist from the University of Virginia, who years ago
described culture war as cultural flashpoints with political ramifications. And that's a really
good definition. These are flashpoints, meaning places, events or times when trouble, violence
or anger flare up flash points on the basis of cultural disagreements. But they're not just
irrelevant cultural disagreements. They have political significance in a very real way.
Think through some examples. The so-called debate over critical race theory is actually a really
good example of this. This is a flashpoint that is really a cultural issue. What is the
culture in schools that the left versus the right wants? What's the culture of workplaces
when it comes to race and an understanding of race that is generating disagreement and unrest? And
it's politically significant in that Republicans and the right are weaponized it to justify people
voting for them instead of voting for Democrats perfect culture war, for example. Now, why do I
say it's not apparent to me that the culture war is winnable? And I want to be really careful in
how I explain this. As far as the American right wing's right wing goes, Republicans don't have a
plan to win the culture war because the winning is to continue fighting the culture war forever.
As I mentioned earlier, all of these cultural issues, even when they subside in real life,
the right keeps talking about them as if they are real problems. The entire war on Christmas
is a very good example of this. That was always merely a cultural issue and it was being laid on
top of ideas of nationalism, freedom of religion, alleged hostility from the left against religion,
patriotism, and even after the subject of whether we say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays
essentially disappeared completely, like at some point it just went away. It wasn't even a thing.
Republicans continued to act as though the very same war on Christmas continued to take
place almost as an aside, like, of course. Yeah. We're also still fighting the war on Christmas,
even though it wasn't actually an issue in society. So the point is Republicans don't
plan to actually win the culture war because they benefit by fighting it, whether they win it or
they lose it or they have the majority public opinion on their side or against their side,
they will continue to claim that the culture wars going on and that it must be fought and they are
the people to fight it. So you'd better donate to them and vote for them so they can fight it
for you. That's what's happening right now with socialism and communism. I mean, look at these
last six months of Joe Biden, Joe Biden's first six months in office. It's become very clear Joe
Biden is not a communist. Joe Biden is not a socialist. Joe Biden is not a Marxist. Now,
if you'd been paying attention for the last four decades, you would know that about Joe Biden.
But now that Joe Biden is president and he's done no socialist stuff, he's done no communist stuff,
have the discussions about Biden's communism and socialism gone away from the right? No,
because for Republicans, especially in the absence of any policy. And in particular,
especially when the country is increasingly not with Republicans on policy, they need to have some
war to point to. So now they point to we've got to fight communism and socialism. Trump did it at his
speech, his rally in Phenix on Saturday, which we covered yesterday. So Republicans have no plan to
win the culture war. That's a feature, not a bug. All right, fine. But what about the left? What
about Democrats? What about progressives? However you define that movement? The unfortunate thing.
Is that these cultural issues aren't actually won by fighting them directly, and there's a
couple of reasons for that. And I think a perfect example to understand this is abortion rights.
Abortion rights is an issue that the right has fought in two ways. The right has fought against
abortion rights as a cultural issue in churches and through colloquial rhetoric. But the right
has also fought abortion rights as a legal issue ever since we saw Roe v. Wade legalized abortion
in most cases decades ago. We've seen Republicans fight abortion rights at the state level in a
legal sense, and then they've also fought it as a cultural issue on television and as an issue.
We must preserve life and humanity. Even the term pro-life is a propaganda term you use when you are
fighting this as a cultural issue, you're framing anybody who doesn't share your view is against
life. There is no coincidence about the right choosing the term pro-life for their position.
And the American right has essentially lost the abortion fight in in a legal sense. What I mean by
that and in a cultural sense, what I mean by that is while some states have successfully curtailed
abortion rights with state level restrictions, it's still a fight in that sense that still is
being legislated in the courts. But we have a situation today in twenty twenty one where
the country is more in favor of abortion being legal in most cases than at any time
in the last 40 years. Republicans have been fighting abortion for 40 years or even longer,
and the country is more in favor of abortion being legal in most cases today than at any previous
point. It's an abject failure by Republicans, by the right to fight against abortion rights.
But that's not because Democrats go around talking about how great abortion is, and that's one of the
complexities of fighting the culture war because of the way that the right frames these issues.
And they do a good job of it. I have to give them credit. The left is put in a position where if you
fight them directly head on on the issue, you get framed as, oh, well, so you want more
abortions. And then all of a sudden now you're fighting against that and it becomes a mess.
But then here's the other thing. Bigger picture. The culture in the US has shifted and as a result
of that, issues like income inequality and the environment have taken more center stage
and opposition to abortion has just faded. So a lot of the reason that the soft opposition to
abortion has gone away isn't because of Democrats going around and saying abortion is great.
It's because a lot of people realized, yeah, we actually don't even really need to be talking
about that. We need to be talking about income inequality and access to health care and the
damage we're doing to the environment, etc. It's not a fight that makes sense. And so with a lot of
these things, I don't know that there's anything to win by fighting issues head on. I'll think
now about critical race theory, which is a great example. Republicans make critical race theory out
to be this absolute evil thing that will corrupt your children. It will lead to self hating whites.
It will lead your kids down some kind of Marxist rabbit hole or whatever the case may be, and
progressives in order to fight it head on. Mostly have to talk about critical race theory is great,
even if they don't believe that it's great or maybe they're just not sure. As a progressive
myself, I don't have much of an interest in defending critical race theory in and of itself,
because I see it as I mean, listen, critical race theory is one of many critical theories.
It's important to understand them. It's important to study them. And like any postmodern
post-structuralist structuralist critical theory, it has significant limitations. It's just one
little aspect of how we might analyze the world around us. So what exactly would would be the
fight like? I'm not interested in going around demanding critical race theory specifically be
taught in schools, but it certainly shouldn't be banned. I'm not interested in going around
extolling the endless virtues of critical race theory, but it should be understood,
among many other ways of analyzing the world around us what I'm interested in.
Is moving society on from the thought that critical race theory is even an important issue,
that it should get the amount of oxygen that it's getting. And so when I say the left is
not going to win the culture war, what I mean is it's not going to win on these individual issues,
arguing about should the Cleveland Indians be called the Indians or the Guardians and why
and making that a forefront issue, or at what age should critical race theory start to be taught?
The complexity is and here's where I turn to you for ideas. The complexity is that if you
just ignore these issues, if you ignore the war on Christmas, you ignore the fact that the right
is waging against critical race theory, et cetera. You allow the right to secure some real victories
in controlling society, which we don't want them to do. But at the same time, if you fight these
issues one by one, you either end up spending a lot of time defending things that you're not even
really that much in favor of. At the end of the day, you just don't think they should be banned,
for example. So what is the balance between understanding that fighting these issues on their
merits is essentially a losing battle, while at the same time recognizing that if we ignore these
issues completely, that's not a good idea either, because we cede so much ground to the right. So
that's my question to you, given that the right doesn't plan to actually win the culture war and
given that fighting each of these cultural issues for the left is essentially a losing battle,
how is it that the left should face up against this? Because Republicans have made it very clear
they're done with policy. Sure. They'll say keep the keep the deficit down or they'll say build the
wall or whatever. But I mean, listen, the the wall was never going to happen. You can even saying
the wall was an example of policy. No, it wasn't. It was never going to get built. Mexico was never
going to pay for it. It was really it was a metaphorical wall all along. And so my question
to you is, what is the proper how should the left enter this and manage it, given that Republicans
seem extremely committed to no more policy and just fighting cultural issues? Quick reminder,
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