As Charlie notes, the national political press has an irksome and dishonest tendency to describe as “culture war” any Republican policy or proposal that touches in any way on life, death, children, faith, safety, order, sex, race, citizenship, justice, fairness, or any other aspect of how people live their daily lives, while frequently declining to use the same terminology when Democrats take positions on exactly the same issues. As Charlie observes, this is because the national political press is composed largely of liberal Democrats, so “most members of the press proceed reflexively from the assumption that the Democrats are normal, and that those who disagree with them are weird, wrong, or dishonest.”
Of course, the idea that only one side engages in culture war is not only ridiculous, it is especially dishonest when one takes the position that it is only the conservative party that does this. As a simple matter of history and self-definition, self-identified progressives define themselves around “progress” — in other words, changing the culture as it exists. Self-identified conservatives define themselves around “conserving” — in other words, not trying to change things, or at any rate, not changing them swiftly and dramatically. While this is an oversimplified view of where the right and left sides of the political spectrum stand on any given issue, the general tendency of progressives to push for accelerated changes while conservatives just want to leave things alone means that progressives will be the aggressors in cultural battles far more often than are conservatives. No honest person would deny this, yet our political media starts from the presumption that conservatives are always the only aggressors.
The history of the term comes from the German kuturkampf, which referred to the effort by the Prussian leadership of the German Empire after 1871 under Otto von Bismarck to obtain hegemony for the secular state over the Catholic Church, which had previously held significant power in Bavaria and other German states that were consumed by the new German superstate in 1871. It was prosecuted as a government offensive against a population that suddenly found itself in a minority. “Cultural war” largely entered the American lexicon after the 1992 Republican convention speech by Pat Buchanan. That speech was treated at the time as a call to offensive arms — I confess that I received it poorly at the time, as a result of disliking Buchanan on grounds having nothing to do with cultural issues — but it was fundamentally defensive in character, invoking not the spirit of the secularizing, centralizing Bismarck but his beleaguered Catholic targets, for whom the Germans came first.
If we take seriously the idea that Greg Abbott’s Texas or Ron DeSantis’s Florida are engaged in “culture war,” what would that look like on the Democrats’ side? I submit that it would look like Minnesota in 2023. Alone in the country, Minnesota for the past few years has had a divided state legislature, with a Democrat-Farmer-Labor majority in the state house and a Republican majority in the state senate. Throughout the madness of the George Floyd riots and the pandemic, the Republican state senate limited Democratic (or, properly, DFL) ambitions. But Democrats took the majority in the 2022 midterms, and they have rolled out in January looking to make rapid changes across a broad front. The agenda they are proposing and already beginning to pass into law, nearly all of it with the enthusiastic support of DFL governor Tim Walz, includes:
- Enshrining a broadened right to abortion in state law, in a bill signed by Walz.
- Legalizing recreational marijuana in the state for the first time.
- Giving state driver’s licenses to illegal aliens.
- Expanding the vote for felons on probation or parole.
- A new law that “aims to establish Minnesota as a ‘Trans Refuge’ state by preventing out-of-state laws from interfering in the practice of gender-affirming health care.”
- Redesigning the state flag to remove “racist undertones.”
- Broadening the state’s gun-control laws with new background checks and red-flag laws.
- Promoting anti-Asian hate-crime laws.
- Expanding the “Teachers of Color Act” aimed at increasing the number of non-white teachers in the state.
- Passing a carbon-free energy mandate.
- Changes to policing capitalizing on the racially polarizing death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis, Tenn.
Not all of these are necessarily bad ideas or ones that lack bipartisan support, but all of them address cultural or social issues on the basis of liberal or progressive assumptions, and some of them are highly divisive and polarizing proposals. By any definition of “culture war” that is not just partisan propaganda, this is what a state’s governing party waging culture war looks like. The fact that the political media will not describe it as such in the same way as Florida or Texas tells you they have chosen a side, and whose side it is.