Blame Liberals for the Culture War
– By Howard Sierer –
ST. GEORGE, Utah — “If you hate culture wars, blame liberals.” So says veteran leftwing journalist Kevin Drum who rose to national prominence writing for the Washington Monthly and Mother Jones, both influential leftwing media outlets.
In a recent article, Drum writes: “It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues, while Republicans have moved only slightly right.”
He cites data on issues from abortion and religion to guns, same-sex marriage, immigration and taxes that lead to “the obvious conclusion that over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right.”
I’ve been saying the same thing for the last four years, often getting pushback from liberals who along with the mainstream media claim that conservatives are the culture warmongers.
Drum explains that “for most people, losing something is far more painful than the pleasure of gaining something of equivalent value. And since conservatives are ‘losing’ the customs and hierarchies that they’ve long lived with, their reaction is far more intense than the liberal reaction toward winning the changes they desire.”
In other words, when conservatives like me complain loudly about liberals’ rapid leftward shifts, it’s not because our own positions have shifted right.
Drum’s article is not intended to defend conservatives but to warn the Democratic Party of the political dangers that result from its leftward march. He says the party “has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary…Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.”
Drum’s warning was based in part on New York magazine’s interview with David Shor, “a data geek who identifies as socialist but is rigorously honest about what the numbers tell us.”
Shor told the magazine that Democrats in 2020 gained about 7 points among white college-educated voters. Support among blacks declined by a point or two and Hispanic support dropped by 8 or 9 points. This followed last summer’s defund-the-police movement. The Democrats had, in Mr. Shor’s words, “raised the salience of an ideologically charged issue that millions of nonwhite voters disagreed with us on.”
Shor lays it on the line for Democrats interested in winning elections saying, “white liberals have become a larger and larger share of the Democratic Party,” and noting that whites are “sorting on ideology” more than nonwhite voters. “We’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of ‘racial resentment.’”
Here in Southern Utah, this was evidenced by the strident reactions of white liberals who disagreed with my recent column titled “Race Relations – Better Than You Think” and with last week’s column, “School Teachers as Political Indoctrinators.”
Shor goes on, “Black conservatives and Hispanic conservatives don’t actually buy into a lot of these intellectual theories of racism. They often have a very different conception of how to help the Black or Hispanic community than liberals do.”
His conclusion: “If we polarize the electorate on ideology—or if nationally prominent Democrats raise the salience of issues that polarize the electorate on ideology—we’re going to lose a lot of votes.”
Drum opines that “the whole woke movement in general” has turned off many moderate voters. “Ditto for liberal dismissal of crime and safety issues.” He notes that the white activist class has turned a deaf ear in moving so far, so fast to the left. While that has energized the white progressive base, it “risks outrunning the vast middle part of the country, which progressive activists seem completely uninterested in talking to.”
He concludes: “And for God’s sake, please don’t insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.”
As one of those moderate conservatives – regularly chastised as extreme rightwing by leftist readers – I am pleased to see at least two “woke” leftists “awakened” as to how far they and their fellow travelers have raced to the extreme.
I join with increasing numbers of blacks and Hispanics in echoing one-time Democrat Ronald Reagan when he said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.”
