Culture War 1.0 in action (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of a right to abortion, marked the triumph of a decades-long conservative legal crusade. Close to a year later, however, and Dobbs has begun to look like the Republican Party snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
The GOP’s restrictionist abortion platform appears to have played a major role in its subpar results in the 2022 midterms, even as spiralling inflation seemed sure to boost the party’s fortunes. In the months since, its vulnerability on reproductive rights has continued to play out in a number of statewide contests — most recently, in the commanding victory of pro-choice liberal challenger Janet Protasiewicz in Wisconsin’s State Supreme Court election.
All of this has proven frustrating to those who are convinced, with some reason, that the GOP should be winning — not only because of Biden’s economic woes but because of the Democrats’ commitment to unpopular positions on culture-war topics, from transgender athletes to racial preferences. How can the Republicans be bleeding votes on one culture-war issue when they hold a decisive advantage on so many others?
The answer, in part, is that there is no longer just one culture war, but (at least) two distinct battlefields with different terrains — let’s call them Culture War 1.0 and Culture War 2.0. Culture War 1.0, exemplified today by the abortion debate, dates to the conservative backlash to the sexual revolution in the Seventies. It has seen the cultural Right fight a series of losing battles — with the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year standing as an exception that proves the rule. Culture War 2.0, consisting of a varied array of race and gender-related conflicts that have consumed public life in recent years, dates back barely a decade, but it did not truly come to the fore until the convulsions of 2020.
The GOP’s attraction to this second iteration are obvious. The positions increasingly embraced by the Democratic coalition on the relevant cluster of issues — for example, that a woman is anyone who identifies as such, that biological sex is not real, or that present discrimination is needed to counteract past discrimination — are broadly unpopular outside certain affluent, highly educated settings. Moreover, those leading the charge against the new liberal consensus are often disaffected liberals and establishment centrists, which suggests there is a potential for the Right to make inroads beyond its traditional base. Abortion, in contrast, is of greatest concern to religious voters, who make up a rapidly declining share of the electorate.
So, why do the Culture War 1.0 politics of abortion remain so resilient within the GOP, even as it threatens to torpedo the party’s chances in many contests? The answer lies in the difference between these two battlefields. Consider Florida governor and likely presidential contender Ron DeSantis’s recent decision to sign a bill limiting abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy. DeSantis has capitalised more than any politician to date on Culture War 2.0 issues, having declared war against critical race theory and gender ideology in schools, and against the progressive turn taken by corporations like Disney. These aggressive moves have polled well in Florida, even beyond the Republican base, and helped propel him to a midterm victory last year that set him apart from the mediocre performance of his party.
Why, then, has DeSantis embraced abortion restrictions, which poll poorly in Florida and have proven a losing issue even in solidly conservative states such as Kansas and Kentucky? In a recent commentary on DeSantis’s decision, political scientist Eric Kaufmann voices an exasperation shared by many Culture War 2.0 advocates: why would the GOP’s rising star make such a “withdrawal of political capital” given that barely a third of Florida voters support the measure? According to Kaufmann, the pursuit of abortion restrictions reflects the preferences of the anti-abortion GOP donor and activist class — whose support would obviously be vital in a presidential primary — over and against those of moderate swing voters.
Kaufmann hints at an alternative approach centred around a Republican version of what some Democratic strategists dub “popularism”: ignore the moral manias of activists and insiders, and foreground proposals that poll well with the electorate — such as ending affirmative action and banning the teaching of critical race theory and gender theory in schools. A number of major Republican pundits have lately offered a similar assessment; as Ann Coulter exasperatedly tweeted: “Stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.”
But the weakness of popularism, whether Democratic or Republican, is that it emphasises polling at the expense of organisational and institutional dimensions of power; that is, it conceives of politics as a contest between aggregate individual opinions. Political success, for the popularist, comes from identifying positions that appeal to the largest number of individual voters and highlighting them to draw these voters in on election day.
This might seem obvious, but what it misses is the fact that any political coalition is made up of what are derogatorily called “interest groups” — not atomised individuals weighing their stances on a laundry list of issues (the model of citizenship implied by public opinion surveys), but individuals embedded in social formations with shared interests and preferences, and a particular positioning in relation to institutions: churches, parties, NGOs, the media, and so on.
This basic reality accounts for many phenomena that often seem mystifying in our polling-obsessed political culture. What accounts for the many policies that command broad support according to surveys but have no chance of being enacted? The answer often given is that the preferences of the wealthy and powerful override those of the broader electorate, and there’s surely something to that. But in the case of abortion — as opposed to, say, marginal tax rates — there is no obvious reason why rich donors would favour outright bans, or on the opposite side, the maximal liberalisation of abortion laws. The question, here as elsewhere, is how partisans of a particular cause that isn’t overwhelmingly popular have managed to organise and cultivate support in order to achieve their desired ends.
The anti-abortion cause remains politically potent within the GOP because it has emphasised the slow, unglamourous work of building networks of single-minded activists and establishing institutional power where it mattered. The fact that it achieved a key goal despite its relative unpopularity — polling prior to Dobbs suggested fewer than a third of Americans supported overturning Roe — is the crucial sign of the movement’s formidable force.
And yet, Culture War 2.0 will likely prove irresistible to GOP candidates in general elections in the coming years, as the need for culture-war appeals clashes with the unpopularity of Culture 1.0 issues with moderate voters. As The New York Times recently reported: “Polling suggests that the public is less likely to support transgender rights than same-sex marriage and abortion rights” — the same goes, as Kaufmann notes, for teaching critical race theory in schools and racial preferences in admissions and hiring. Surely, given losses like Wisconsin, such a pivot would be prudent.
But in the long run, Culture War 2.0 may prove a paper tiger, because beneath its polling strengths and prominence in the news cycle, it lacks organisational depth, clear institutional ambitions, and even coherent political objectives. Organisationally and institutionally, it heavily consists of political influencers of various sorts: podcasters, YouTubers, Substackers, and the like. To the extent the movement includes people engaged in contests over power, rather than the battle of ideas, these tend to be imperfect proxies for a generalised opposition to contemporary liberal ideology. Overturning Roe, for instance, strikes at the heart of a practice the anti-abortion movement views as evil. In contrast, bans on teaching critical race or gender theory in schools, transgender athletes competing in school sports, or even youth gender transition only chip away at the object truly targeted by Culture War 2.0: the nebulous “woke” ideological complex, which, due both to its vague contours and speech protections, cannot itself be banned.
All of this is compounded by the fact that Culture War 2.0’s broad coalition is internally incoherent in its long-term aims — in what it hopes will supplant progressive hegemony. It includes people who desire colour-blind policies and adherents of “race realism”; people who want to abolish gender and people who want to reinforce traditional gender roles. The strength of Culture War 2.0 — its broad base of support — is thus also its weakness.
That is not to say any of this is permanent. Culture War 2.0, as already noted, is new; the movements under its umbrella could theoretically evolve into forces as durable, well-organised, and ruthless about the pursuit of institutional power as the anti-abortion movement was over the decades leading up to Dobbs. But the incentives of the media and political landscape differ immensely from the period when Culture War 1.0 took shape: winning the news cycle and achieving maximum virality now take precedence. The anti-abortion movement, incubated in a different cultural landscape, learned to ignore most of this in its single-minded pursuit of a clearly defined, difficult objective. Rather than dismissing insiders, donors and interest groups, those attempting to build any political movement would do well to follow suit.
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SubscribeA quality article and analysis, but the title is too “click-bait” for its contents. My compliments to the author!
Regarding the topic under discussion, I concur, and definitely suggest that retaining key industries, such as steel and machinery manufacturing, chip production, medicine and chemistry, etc., are essential to national security and as such should NEVER be subcontracted out to a third-party country, and especially an unfriendly country, such as China. “Cheap stuff” doesn’t compensate when your country lacks essential equipment, and can’t get it, either because of supply chain disruption, international tension, or war.
Our financial system unfortunately is based on a 30-90 minute phone call every three months; the quarterly earnings call tells analysts what they should “predict” for the next quarter, and for the bond market to adjust accordingly. THAT, coupled with many top-tier universities scrapping much of their engineering and STEM capabilities over the last 45 years in favor of finance, economics and “quant” subjects, has moved the U.S. into a weakened state. Making money in the short term was the poison apple that allowed us to snatch defeat from the jaws of post-WWII victory.
I had a similar reaction: I was expecting an entirely different kind of article. This is rather good.
The domestic equivalent of multilateral development banks (MDBs) sounds like a very bad idea as a solution to a problem that government may have contributed to, if not created. Obviously governments aren’t really capable of coming up with a plan for the country then implementing it. It may be the system itself that’s at fault, but whatever, the idea of a government financial institution, like the writer suggests, looks like the government going into business against the private sector, with huge resources and very little accountability. That looks like the perfect tool to destroy capitalism, if not with intent then through sheer stupidity.
Seems to me this pretty much already happened but in an even worse way. Quantitative Easing after 2008 and 2020 produced a huge amount of liquidity for banks and non-bank financial institutions. Because the speculative financial industry has direct access to this wealth they will do what they do best: producing financial bubbles and sit on it. This creates a situation where wealth becomes extremely concentrated leaving behind the real economy where things only deteriorate further and further. So in a way it is precisely the government outcompeting a large part of the market by supporting the financialized part, which was made dominant after the late 70s because they believed in supply-side- and trickle down economics back then.
The problem for America is that , comparatively, it is in the best position of any country in the world. That is, it can always get by, if only sub optimally.
At the moment it’s rather like a battered but unsinkable ship.
England’s administrative genius was what made the difference for its colonies, as compared to the colonies of Holland, France, and Spain. The Judeo-Christian heritage combined with Anglo-Saxon sense made a perfect combination of a just and morally upright people, well-managed.
Sure, tell that to the Tasmanian aborigines (if you can find any surviving).
Innovation and adoption on a wider scale can only happen in societies with high levels of trust and confidence. This can only happen in homogeneous societies where you can implicitly trust your neighbours and institutions. Once that is lost there is invariably a circling of the wagons (or the gated communities) and the instinct is to hoard what you can. This why China will win in the end. Japan had the chance but lacked the resolution to follow through.
What Japan lacked was the political independence required to break free from the suffocating grip of the USA. China has it, and that is why China is the target of America, the Tonya Harding of the world economy.
Good article. One would think that the reality of “too big to fail” after 2008 and the QE rounds after 2008 and 2020 should have incentivized innovation. However, instead, it seems we only amplified all the pathologies of financialization and cronyism. It seems that big capital is more interested in low hanging fruit or even things that only look innovative on the surface but are essentially mostly PR. Big tech is more vulnerable to this. We see a lot of unprofitable ‘Uber clones’ and even things that appeared to be scams, but still raised millions like Theranos. And it makes some sense. The ‘neoliberal’ system, introduced in the late 70s, is aimed at accumulating capital. So it will look for the path of least resistance to do so. Especially since the economy was flooded with liquidity after 2008 we get a situation where rent seeking and speculation is a better method to protect relative wealth than risky investment into complex technology or bringing back actual production. If one can raise billions with just PR then this is what people will do. Meanwhile the ultra-wealthy and big capital put their wealth into private equity who offer big returns, not rarely by stripping corporations from what makes them productive. Another strategy is simply putting money where others put their money, the result is endless financial bubbles. We get into this persistent situation where the asset economy booms while the real economy stagnates. Real estate is another example, it appreciates beyond the moon but is also completely dysfunction. A problem is that those who profit from this stagnant situation will defend it. We can also understand that symptoms like “labor shortages” are misdiagnoses of the actual problem: a dysfunctional economy.
So in the end it seems vital that we understand the role of the state in stimulating innovation but also in hampering innovation. However, as we can see, it is not as simple as regulation vs. deregulation. Perhaps in an ideal free market under “perfect liberty” – as Adam Smith called it – innovation would be maximized. But this has never been a reality, nor did neoliberalism bring us any closer. In fact, despite its rhetoric, almost the opposite. The truth is that if you open your phone and trace all the components from the semiconductors to GPS; much of it started in public sector, often military (DARPA) funded. Even Bell Labs, as a subsidiary of AT&T, essentially had something of a government guaranteed monopoly, so not precisely the market in action, but of course also not the suffocating control as we saw in the Soviet Union. It was, however, also the competition with that Soviet Union during the arms- and space race that incentivized government to invest in science and – also very important – high quality affordable education. In any case, we really need a serious paradigm shift.
It’s the politicians that have their hands on the controls. If they discourage innovation, intelligent and informed risk taking, and tax rewards, it’s not surprising how it’s turned out.
In addition, they announce the results of R&D before it’s been started, go full ahead with ‘state of the art’ projects without prototyping, controlled staging, or even a credible plan or experienced person in charge. And DEI is more important than making the company’s products.
If it wasn’t so damaging, it would be funny.
Heck, it’s funny, anyway!
There are companies working in the blood testing sector, steadily improving their machines. Such companies, with their experienced scientific staff, are well placed to take advantage of advances in biotechnology. However they will not get the investment. It is simply far more profitable to invest in fraudsters such as Theranos. These pump and dump schemes are enabled by a scientifically illiterate media in thrall to the charlatans.
The author laments the fact that ” policymakers still have not rediscovered how to do it.” while referring to innovation. His illusion is that policymakers EVER did discover innovation. The opposite is true: they are the people actively opposing innovation though the morass of ever expanding laws.
The elephant in the room is the idea that we should live lives deemed “safe” by someone else, and unthreatened by things new. Under the prevailing risk averse mindset, no innovation is safe, and nothing is ever fully proven to be safe. And the bureaucrats and policymakers are quite happy to “protect’ us from ourselves and our ideas that might change anything.
This cancer of the human spirit tells us that the safest thing we can do is just cower in the illusion that we are safe in our current situation and hope things don’t get worse. But of course this is a losing strategy, and not much fun either.
Life is fundamentally all about change. Death is the absence of change, and the death of civilizations can be predicted by the degree of their own self-enforced resistance to change.
The antidote to today’s despicable “safe” mindset is coming, as it came for the ancient Romans when the barbarians sacked Rome. They discovered that truly being “safe” was was not quite what they thought it was.
Just look who’s been in power for 12 of the last 16 years…Enough said!
Responding to the title rather than the article (which is more thoughtful) – capitalism is always flawed. It is a feature, not a failing. Capitalism promotes the ‘winners’ but that means there are also corresponding ‘losers’.
Much political debate and action has been aimed at minimising the ‘losers’ and it is that which undermines the uncaring dynamic of capitalism.
You can always choose state control of course (socialism or fascism), but that seems historically to be even less effective than flawed capitalism.
What contradiction exists in American capitalism or any other nation’s use of this means of organizing an economy lies in the level of govt intervention that is involved. Bureaucracy and regulation made it financially advantageous for companies to outsource/offshore what was previously done domestically. The consumer didn’t care as the result was a wide range of affordable goods.
It also didn’t help that people who did make things were told in derisive fashion to “learn to code.” Now AI is doing quite a bit of coding, so not great advice from Chocolate Jesus and his minions.
Capitalism is not perfect but it does work better than the other economic isms. Pity we no longer practice it, preferring instead a version of corporatism where business and govt are often in bed together, colluding against the ordinary person. The elected class, which has never made a product or a payroll, has far too much sway over those who make both.
A big part of the white collar rush started back in the 80’s/early 90’s in response to the tech boom. Computers were a HUGE deal at that time, as I’m sure you recall, and with many tech jobs, they do actually require some sort of secondary education (most likely college). Of course, computers still are a big deal, and there is lots of money out there for folks who want jobs in science/tech. Many of these are real jobs, and many of these scientists/engineers/programmers are absolutely necessary for future discovery/manufacturing.
The trouble is, we sort of forgot about the other side of the coin. I picked up CNC machining long ago, because I come from a blue collar family, and I’m good with numbers. It also helped that I could get started on a semester’s worth of courses at the local community college, which cost about 500 dollars at the time. Now I make pretty good money, and I love my career. I won’t ever get rich doing this, but it earns a solid honest living.
The good news is, there has been a recent huge movement to re-emphasize skilled manufacturing careers over the last few years. Hopefully, this syncs up well with a new manufacturing boom here in the states. We already have a bunch of boomers retiring, so we are at a shortage as it is.
I believe it’s simplistic and naive to assume the concept of a free market still applies today. When Adam Smith spoke of “laissez-faire,” he couldn’t have anticipated the rise of technology and its profound impact. In fact, David Bowie seemed closer to predicting how wildly technology would reshape the world. Referring to historical ideas often requires a pragmatic and realistic approach. With today’s advanced technology and other countries being equally capable, it’s unrealistic to think the market can truly remain free. Nothing influenced by humans is ever entirely free—if it were, no one would trust medicine or food! Common sense is still common sense.
That said, the real issue in the U.S. is the lack of a domestic policy to ensure the country has a long-term strategy. If private equity and capital organizations contributed even just 1% of their profits toward national development, we’d be in a much better position. At the most basic level, people need shelter, food, and interaction before they can innovate. Putting large groups of people in survival mode stifles innovation and ultimately leads to a country’s decline.
In the end, it’s Americans being exploited by their own system, and it’s hard for outsiders to fully grasp the severity of the situation.
The authors recommended answer to the problem of more government intervention into the capital market when it has arguably been government intervention and hyper-regulation that is a big part of the problem we are currently experiencing.
There is only one time that the fridge freezer can be invented
Good article, but I am not convinced. Capital will flow where there is a good risk-adjusted rate of return. The problem is that most sectors of the economy now are subject to government intervention or regulation. Western governments have shown, with the financial crisis of 2008, with net-zero, and with Covid, there is almost no limit to their potential intervention. When, today, financial institutions say they are willing to invest in infrastructure, they don’t mean capitalistic investment. They mean corporatist cooperation in government intervention. Elon Musk is a glorious exception.
“Special report: The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust…..Expect that to continue” “American productivity still leads the world.” These are the headlines of two feature articles this week in The Economist….normally seen as pre-eminently having the pulse of economic issues. Has the author of this essay read them I wonder?
If you call a growth rate of 2 percent versus zero “leaving other rich countries in the dust”, well, ok. I note that according to World Bank figures, the contribution of the US economy to global GDP has just fallen below 15 percent for the first time in over a century. The rag you quote is little more than a mouthpiece for neoliberal orthodoxy.