The Strategic Logic of the Culture Wars

I'd be interested to hear somebody who knows the history better than me address this issue:

After all, as long as public opinion on race was sufficiently conservative that there was no meaningful pressure on politicians to back civil rights, racial backlash politics were useless.

Well, sure, politics based on racism wouldn't count as 'racial backlash politics' unless the good guys had made some gains. But I'd be surprised to learn that there weren't a large number of whites before Brown v. Board who successfully mobilized against black people. Certainly there was unofficial mobilization of the "let's get together and lynch some black people" sort, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't something more official too.

Liberals always win in the end.

Not on economic issues.

as long as public opinion on race was sufficiently conservative that there was no meaningful pressure on politicians to back civil rights, racial backlash politics were useless

Neil said it better, but this isn't even close to true. Sure, there was no backlash, per se, against the civil rights movement when it didn't exist, but there was plenty of race baiting in politics.

Actually what I just said is imprecise. It would be better to say that this country has always had political conflict between some form of racist conservatism and some form of "let's stop shitting on non-white people" movement. I can't readily identify a time, therefore, when race baiting wasn't part of someone's political arsenal.

You're quite correct in your argument. But the truth remains that, in the culture wars, the conservatives will continue to be in a fighting retreat. Cultural conservatives feel marginalized, and rightly so, and this will only get worse. However, the socio-political dynamics of a minority fighting against an historical tide are not simple. Some will become more and more radicalized. Some will become less radicalized and move leftward. Some will continue with their beliefs but give up on impressing them unto the public sphere. And the relative mix of these things is very likely dependent upon how and in what ways the minority is marginalized and at what stage is the historical progression of their marginalization.

So the idea is that there's no conservative backlash until liberals are strong enough to lash back against?

It seems to me that this theory has been proven wrong by history, more than a few times...Consider the prevalence of lynchings in the South, long before black people even dreamed of getting equality there. Or consider the degree to which homophobia took over in the 1980s, long before gay marriage was even an issue.

Sure, conservatives seem to have been blindsided by the abortion issue. But when they can see change coming, right-wingers don't wait to make the second move. They engage in preemptive backlash.

You want to pick a weakness in this post, it's not in the margins of the culture war stuff at all, it's the blithe aside that of course we're going to raise taxes to throw the beast a banquet, won't even be an issue. Now, yeah, budget prioritization will take place in a context of moral appeal by way of identity and interest politics, but the model here isn't going to be the airy kulturkampf of the '90s, it's the selective budgetary retrenchment of the Reagan years.

Some will become more and more radicalized. Some will become less radicalized and move leftward. Some will continue with their beliefs but give up on impressing them unto the public sphere.

Don't forget that some will die as they age and won't be replaced by anyone with similar demographics or beliefs.

Kwame Anthony Appiah used to point out in seminar that he could guess the sex of the students around the table pretty accurately simply by looking at everyone's shoes.

This strikes me as a kind of silly example. Even if gender norms became utterly androgynous, it would still be the case that most women's feet are smaller than most men's, so you'd still be able to pick out the men from the women by their shoes, even if the shoe styles were identical. Unless, of course, the future adrogyny is accompanied by a newfound fashion for enormous clown shoes.

"It seems to me that this theory has been proven wrong by history, more than a few times...Consider the prevalence of lynchings in the South, long before black people even dreamed of getting equality there."

The liberals won the Civil War and enacted Reconstruction. A racial backlash resulted in the Democrats winning elections, but a generally much better situation for Southern blacks. And then the liberals won the Civil Rights Movement, and there was more racial backlash that resulted in the Republicans winning elections, but generally a much better situation for Southern blacks. Matt's thesis is supported, it just takes a DAMN long time to play out, when race is the issue.

After all, as long as public opinion on race was sufficiently conservative that there was no meaningful pressure on politicians to back civil rights, racial backlash politics were useless.

Uh, no. Not at all.

The Klan was an extremely strong political machine. Backlash against black people was a critical part of the machine. Their entire political justification was based on keeping black people from getting fair shake. When black people made real progress, they burned 'em out. And when there was no progress, they made something up--like whistling at a white woman--as "evidence" that black people were getting "out of their place," and they rang the alarm and did some violence.

Your mistake is in calling this "backlash politics." That's blaming the victim. This is scapegoat politics.

When black people, when women, when any scapegoat groups demand equal participation in society, they do not generate a "backlash." What you're calling a "backlash" is simply the threat of violent repression that they have been under all this time being followed-through upon. It's not a backlash, it's the threat of violence becoming actual violence. It's pulling the trigger of the gun you've been aiming at someone's head.

And, as klan lynchings clearly show, scapegoats can be perfectly meek and oppressed and STILL incur violent reprisal.

That's because scapegoats are very useful in politics. Everyone binds together with an enemy, and when you've built a political machine it's very helpful to have an outside enemy that you've all got to bind together and go beat on when unrelated internal politics threatens to change the status quo which has benefited you and your little machine friends.

Why do you think the Christians spent centuries getting together for a good ol' pogrom in Europe? It's certainly not because the Jews were doing anything, it's because it was USEFUL to the people in power to have a scapegoat on whom to sic the peasants. Now, when Jews started getting any power, or nice houses or something, they'd have another pogrom. Not because scapegoats need to be put down, but because they need to be kept down, because you never knew when it was gonna be useful to sic the peasants on somebody so they didn't storm the manor instead.

It's not backlash politics. It's scapegoat politics. It's gonna erupt in violence no matter what.

Sorry, not to pick on you, but I have a problem with the next sentence as well.

"Or consider the degree to which homophobia took over in the 1980s, long before gay marriage was even an issue."

Stonewall happened in 1969. The gay rights movement was decades old by the 80s. One of the things you might notice about homophobia in the 1980s was that it didn't have anything to do with gay marriage, because that wasn't an issue that liberals were strong enough to push yet.

Now, talk about homophobia in the McCarthy era and you'd have more of an argument.

Do I get to be the first to pick on "pubic opinion"?

Anyway, I'm not sure this is true either (though I'm not sure it's false):

Similarly, there was no political mobilization around banning abortions until pub[l]ic opinion became sufficiently pro-choice to make political mobilization around legalizing abortions seem like a reasonable way to spend your time.

Was political mobilization around banning abortion really a big deal before Roe v. Wade? Which was a judicial decision rather than a legislative one. Not that judicial decisions aren't driven partly by public opinion, but even so this makes the link a little more complicated than the model Matt puts forth.

Woman is still nigger of the world....

Stonewall happened in 1969. The gay rights movement was decades old by the 80s. One of the things you might notice about homophobia in the 1980s was that it didn't have anything to do with gay marriage, because that wasn't an issue that liberals were strong enough to push yet.

I'm trying to think of why anti-gay rhetoric could have taken on a new edge in the 80's.... Four letters seem to come to mind.

Woman is still nigger of the world....

Posted by: Minoo on March 23, 2007 07:28 PM

And a working class hero is something to be.

What you're saying sounds smart, but really, culture wars are centered around ignorance and fear. People don't mobilize political opposition; stereotypes and bogeymen and demonizations do. Once a minority group becomes prevelent in a given culture, the stereotypes cease to work. Thus, the only way for a culture to politically mobilize against a minority group is for that minority group to remain invisible.

I have to agree with a lot of comments above: of course racial backlash politics can only happen after liberal gains, but the political salience of white supremacy didn't just magically appear in response to the civil rights movement.

Conservatism fears change. Period. That fear is sometimes a reaction to real events that show the old regime slipping away, but other times that sense is just the weird combination of paranoia and nostalgia that is the conservative impulse. The "hell in a handbasket" view of the world is very old, and very widespread.

The culture wars aren't new, they certainly have been with us in terms of expanding the franchise since the founding, and, in fact they predate that. Thankfully in the US the forces of reaction have been fighting in retreat. But, you're right there will always be "Culture Wars"

You and Drum are looking at the in the wrong way. If you study the trends of policy preferences and vote choice, what you see is that there the public shifts back and forth, and candidates are elected when the policy preference/ideology crests, but declines during the actual reign of the candidate.
Thus in 1980 Reagan was elected when the public was moving rightward, Clinton was elected in 1992 as the public peaked in their leftward preference and Bush II in 2000. It's partially why the White House has, with several exceptions, changed hands/parties every 8 years. The public wants one thing, gets it, tires of it, and then elects the opposite and repeats the cycle.

The liberals won the Civil War and enacted Reconstruction. A racial backlash resulted in the Democrats winning elections, but a generally much better situation for Southern blacks. And then the liberals won the Civil Rights Movement, and there was more racial backlash that resulted in the Republicans winning elections, but generally a much better situation for Southern blacks.

You're missing about 75 years of history here. After Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s, the goal of Southern Democrats was to do everything possible to roll back Reconstruction, eventually succeeding in disenfranchising and politically and economically marginalizing the black population. No way you can say that this was "a generally much better situation" than before the Democrats retook power, unless you are obliquely referring to slavery.

Unlike everyone else MY, I agree with you.

Yes resentment culture always exists, but blacklash politics only hurts the liberal party (and therefore spillsover into other liberal policies) when minorities are able to start advancing a cause.

The periods when they disturb other policies being relevant. And i think we can all agree it will happen in the future. I personally feel a significant war over vegitarianism is inevitable.

Culture war battles overwhelmingly involve the left throwing the first shot...

A patently ridiculous claim.

Drum sez:

"Every year there's one or two percent more of the country that doesn't hate gays, doesn't want to ban abortion, and would just as soon see the Ten Commandments stay in church."

The problem here lies in misunderstanding the basic nature of rightwingnuts versus leftwingnuts.

Simplistically, rightwingers believe the masses should be governed by elites. Equally oversimplifying, leftwingers believe that government should function at the behest of popular opinion.

Men have bigger feet than women, don't they?

Equally oversimplifying, leftwingers believe that government should function at the behest of popular opinion.

I don't know about that. Depends on how hardcore "left" you want to go...

In America, our left-wing isn't very "left" compared to, say, Europe or Latin America ("left" in terms of socialism that is). The people who get called "left-wingers" here would be mainstream librals elsewhere.

But we are talking about U.S. politics, aren't we?

I don't know about that. Depends on how hardcore "left" you want to go...

Yeah. Liberalism might be big into popular opinion, but hardcore Communism, the farthest left you really get, won't let a little "false consciousness" get in the way of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Re: After all, as long as public opinion on race was sufficiently conservative that there was no meaningful pressure on politicians to back civil rights, racial backlash politics were useless.

And in what hacyone epoch of our history was it ever the case the demagogic politicians did not appeal to racism? Good grief, that nasty tactic was already old when John C Calhoun employed it!

Isn't gay marriage pretty much the last legal battle to fight? I think we'll have a more-or-less pro-choice stalemate forever. Civil rights for women and racial minorities are here to stay. I mean, there are still specific campaigns to be fought (Republicans supressing black voters, etc), but we're pretty close to finishing the big picture legal fights. The right-wingers like to think we have a permanent program of destroying traditional values. I don't think we do. We just hate bullies.

Seriously, it's not like we have an endless list of different kinds of hated minorities to defend. What other fights am I missing? Banning meat or something?

Most of these things were won in the courts, not the ballot box.

"Kwame Anthony Appiah used to point out in seminar that he could guess the sex of the students around the table pretty accurately simply by looking at everyone's shoes."

Totally off topic, but did you know that the Nigerian-born philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is the grandson of Sir Stafford Cripps, the famous Chancellor of the Exchequer during the British Labour Party government of the late 1940s?

"Liberals won the Civil War"

Funny, I thought it was Republicans who won the Civil War.

Northeastern Democrats were "anti-war", as they say today. Southern Democrats established Jim Crow in the wake of the Civil War.

The Democratic Party didn't start to make inroads with blacks until FDR created the welfare state.

"Totally off topic, but did you know that the Nigerian-born philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah is the grandson of Sir Stafford Cripps"

Well Steve, I guess we know which gang Kwame be banging with. It ain't the Bloods.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is London-born, not Nigerian-born, and his father is Ghanaian, not Nigerian.

I don't really get what Matt is arguing here. After race, gender, and sexual orientation there's only religion left that has the emotional impact required for a serious backlash. All of the cultural issues are already linked to one or more of these 4 categories. When those categories lose effectiveness at stimulating a backlash, then there isn't anything left. It's just not the case that theres an endless bag of tricks for the right to pull from. Personally, I think Matt's so used to being on the decline that he's incapable of recognizing an ascent when he sees one.

"Liberals won the Civil War"

"Funny, I thought it was Republicans who won the Civil War.

That's because the R's started out as the party of the left--Karl Marx sang Lincoln's praises--before switching left/right positions with the D's somewhere around the time of William Jennings Bryan . . .

Re: Isn't gay marriage pretty much the last legal battle to fight?

One woudl think so, but porbably not. I suspect this century will see some major political dust-ups over the moral implications genetic technology that is coming down the pike.
And that's hwo the culture wars have worked in the past: they move one from their old obsessions to new ones, generally with the conservatives losing. A century ago women's suffrage was the battlefield. At other times thinsg like legal divorce, birth control, Prohibition, slavery, and (a very long time ago) freedom of religion were the hot button issues. Any conservative who wanted to turn back the clock on any of those today would be thought slightly nuts (yes, the Catholic Church still formally teaxches against birth control and divorce, but its teaching is mostly by habit; few of its members actually harken to it and the Church has thrown in the towel politically on the issues, much as the Baptists admitted defeat on Prohibition.)

Culture war battles overwhelmingly involve the left throwing the first shot...

That's what everybody wants you to believe. Privileged liberals, so they can take justified credit for their bravery in choosing to force a change. And conservatives, so they can pretend they're just reacting to a situation as opposed to exerting a constant pressure to maintain an unjust status quo. It's like a killer who builds a brick wall across an expressway--it's obviously murderous and dangerous, but he can say "hey, it's not really my fault. They should have known better than to drive down that road"

The fact of the matter is that a "backlash" only hits the members of a privileged group who choose to throw their lot in with the oppressed. You know, everything from the white guy who protests when his co-worker tells a racist joke to the black man who stands up for equal pay for women. These are people who chose to get off the sidelines, and for these people there is a backlash for their chosen actions.

But for the oppressed groups, it's not a backlash. It's been there all the time. It's the game the folks on the sidelines were watching or ignoring.

Conservatism fears change. Period. That fear is sometimes a reaction to real events that show the old regime slipping away, but other times that sense is just the weird combination of paranoia and nostalgia that is the conservative impulse. The "hell in a handbasket" view of the world is very old, and very widespread.

This is right. Conservatives are a group made up of people who temperamentally fear change, and of people who are doing GREAT in the status quo, and who fear losing their plum position if things change too much. They're like overspecialized animals thriving in an ecological niche--they can't let the landscape chance, because they're terrified they won't be able to get a niche as good as the one they have now.

The thing is, the world ALWAYS changes. Even if nobody does anything, things change. The dust bowl comes, an earthquake happens, somebody figures out the steam engine, or debt instruments, or how if you bang the rocks together, you make fire. And then there are consequences and changes that ripple through the system.

So, yeah, conservatives are an easy bunch to get riled up at minority groups. Because change is happening, they don't like it, and they want to stop it. They can't stop job loss from globalization, but they can stop Mexicans from standing on street corners looking for work. They can't stop the uncertain worldview of scientific thought from replacing the certainty of religion, but they can stop gay people from getting married.

But even if liberals didn't exist, conservatives would. And a group of 'em would still be pummeling the crap out of some other group in a more or less regular interval. Because change happens whether there's liberals to deal with it (or push it) or not.

"Funny, I thought it was Republicans who won the Civil War."

"That's because the R's started out as the party of the left--Karl Marx sang Lincoln's praises--before switching left/right positions with the D's somewhere around the time of William Jennings Bryan..."

Republicans were the party of business owners with a strong devout Christian component (the core abolitionists). Similar to today.

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Good comment.Thanks admin.

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