Republicans Are Losing the Culture Wars
Politico: “School board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty, a conservative vanguard whose members popularized restrictions on classroom library books, are losing elections in Florida and some swing states. Republican leaders who rallied against critical race theory and LGBTQ+ issues recently faced recalls in red pockets of California. And in the presidential race, Democrats are playing offense.”
The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity
David French: “There is a certain irony in discussions of masculinity. The group that is most convinced of a crisis of masculinity, the American right, is also busy emasculating itself before our eyes. It correctly perceives that young men are facing an identity crisis, yet it is modeling precisely the wrong response.”
“The release of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s new book on manhood is the latest peg for a national conversation about men, but the necessity of such a conversation has been apparent for some time. If there’s anything that’s well established in American social science, it’s that men are falling behind women in higher education, suffer disproportionately from drug overdoses and are far more likely to commit suicide.”
GOP Culture Warriors Lost Big in School Board Races
“Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out,” Politico reports.
“Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning record, they said, was particularly noticeable in elections where conservative candidates emphasized agendas packed with race, gender identity and parental involvement in classrooms.”
“The results could also serve as a renewed warning to Republican presidential hopefuls like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis: General election voters are less interested in crusades against critical race theory and transgender students than they are in funding schools and ensuring they are safe.”
DeSantis Told GOP Donors of Plans for Migrant Flights
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis told the Republican Party’s top donors last weekend he was considering transporting migrants to places like Martha’s Vineyard — just days before he secretly started the flights to the Massachusetts island,” the Washington Post reports.
“The 51-minute speech to the donor retreat gave a clear outline of how he might sell himself to Republican base voters during a potential 2024 presidential bid. The remarks were full of grievance and culture war pugilism, casting the nation’s political future as a battle against a conspiracy by leftists to impose their ideology and turn dissenters into ‘second-class citizens.’ His message, according to the people in the room, was that America should become more like Florida — and that he would be a culture warrior.”
Democrats May Be Winning the Culture Wars
“It’s already the consensus that abortion is going to be a good issue for Democrats in November,” Politico reports.
“What’s only now becoming clear — as Republicans scrub their campaign websites of prior positions on abortion and labor to turn the focus of the midterms back to President Joe Biden and the economy — is just how much the issue is altering the GOP’s standard playbook.”
“For the first time in years, Republican and Democratic political professionals are preparing for a general election campaign in which Democrats — not Republicans — may be winning the culture wars, a wholesale reversal of the traditional political landscape that is poised to reshape the midterms and the run-up to 2024.”
The Culture Wars May Help Democrats This Year
Washington Post: “The top lines for Democrats continue to be brutal heading into the November midterm elections: Voters are furious about inflation, they overwhelmingly believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, and President Biden is not at all a popular figure.”
“But based on recent polling, the issue matrix has shifted enough to provide Democrats some hope that they can limit some of their potential losses and outperform expectations, especially in statewide races for the U.S. Senate and governorships.”
Why Democrats Keep Losing the Culture Wars
David Brooks: “Over the last few decades, as Republicans have been using cultural issues to rally support more and more, Democrats have understood what’s going on less and less. Many progressives have developed an inability to see how good and wise people could be on the other side, a lazy tendency to assume that anybody who’s not a social progressive must be a racist or a misogynist, a tendency to think the culture wars are merely a distraction Republican politicians kick up to divert attention from the real issues, like economics — as if the moral health of society was some trivial sideshow.”
“Even worse, many progressives have been blind to their own cultural power. Liberals dominate the elite cultural institutions — the universities, much of the mainstream news media, entertainment, many of the big nonprofits — and many do not seem to understand how infuriatingly condescending it looks when they describe their opponents as rubes and bigots.”
“The Republican Party capitalizes on this. Some days it seems as if this is the only thing the party does. For example, Republican candidates could probably cruise to victory in this fall’s elections just by talking about inflation. Instead, many are doubling down on the sort of cultural issues that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s office in Virginia.”
Culture Wars Dominate Texas School Board Elections
NBC News: “One year after conservative parents began packing school board meetings nationwide to protest lessons on racism and library books dealing with sex, sexual orientation and gender, those issues are dominating May 7 school board elections across Texas, especially in the booming and fast-diversifying suburbs outside Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio.”
Democrats Punch Back Against GOP’s Culture War
“Democrats are starting to fight back against the bludgeoning they’ve taken since the Republicans seized on socially charged issues to help win this fall’s midterms,” Axios reports.
“Recent research has shown the barrage of ‘culture war’ messaging — on everything from critical race theory to bashing LGBTQ communities — is working, and Democrats now realize they can’t ignore it any longer. They want to make 2022 a referendum on MAGA nation and its agenda.”
Why Disney Couldn’t Stay Out of the Culture War
David Hopkins: “Regardless of where one might personally stand on this issue or any other, it seems natural to expect major corporations to avoid taking sides on controversial political topics—especially those that don’t directly affect the financial bottom line. Isn’t it just smart business to avoid alienating even one potential customer?”
“And yet the trend of companies weighing in on culture-war issues—and, crucially, on the left side of these issues—is on the rise, even though they have faced threats of reprisal from conservatives for doing so. Disney offers an illuminating case study that demonstrates why this is happening.”
For members: Democrats Need to Start Fighting the Culture Wars
