Can Progressives Win the Culture Wars?
I’m back from getting married and various marriage-related activities. So far all is to the good, and not just because the Phillies are 7-1 since I tied the knot.

Meanwhile in the world... stop me if you’ve heard this before, but stars are arguably starting to align for progressives in the political arena. The list of Bush/Republican scandals continues to grow, with the Downing Street Memo and, just tonight, the story of the administration official who "edited" government reports on emissions and climate change to the advantage of his former (and future?) employers in the petroleum industry. Public distrust of Bush, and disgust with Congress and its prince of pay-to-play, Tom DeLay, looks like it will endure. Even last week’s revelation that former FBI #2 man Mark Felt was the Watergate source known as "Deep Throat" seems to have some in the public thinking anew about the official misdeeds and cover-ups of Nixon’s heirs currently in power.

Actually it was the Watergate stuff—long an obsession of mine—that got me thinking once again about how cultural issues have cut against the Democrats from the days of Nixon onward. Since 1968, the increasing importance of these issues—from drugs to abortion to gay rights—has served to crack the mid-century Democratic coalition and led to ever-greater Republican political dominance. It’s an enduring frustration to me that even many on the right—hell, DeLay himself—will pay at least occasional lip service to past Democratic leaders like Roosevelt, Truman and JFK, all of whom were far more "liberal" on economic issues than most modern Democrats; the explanation, I suppose, is that none of those past Democratic titans ever had to weigh in publicly about gay marriage or even whether or not they’d ever inhaled. For most in the kulturkampf krew, these issues far more than economic policy are prone to spike the blood pressure.

Marshall Wittman of the Democratic Leadership Council, better known as the Bull Moose, has a piece in the latest DLC magazine about the political importance of being "the party of order," and how Democratic failure on that question has largely led to the party’s presidential election losses these last 40 years:

Since the turbulent 1960s, Republicans have skillfully used cultural issues -- always surrogates for a sense of order -- as political bludgeons against Democrats. The tactic of playing what GOP candidates know as the culture card, the values card, or the social card has been a leitmotif of the Republican Party's post- Goldwater ascendancy from embattled minority status to the pinnacle of power in Washington. Republicans have repeatedly used order issues as a diversion from economic positions that do not enjoy broad support outside the plutocratic interests aligned with their party.

Thirty years after the Vietnam War, the GOP is still stoking the emotions that once divided the nation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the diversionary issues were law and order, patriotism and national security, busing, welfare, and the drug culture. Today, they still include patriotism and national security, but gay rights, abortion, religion, and the coarsening of popular culture have been added to the list. All these issues appeal to the voters' need for a sense of order and social stability. They reflect Americans' concerns about the breakdown of order and tradition, whether through Hollywood movies or terrorist threats.
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While economics would remain a critical voting issue over the next several election cycles, the ability of the Democratic Party to inoculate itself against culture war attacks would be decisive in its success. It is no accident that the only two Democrats who have been elected president since 1960 have been Southern Baptists. It appears that Democrats -- and even most Republicans -- must play against cultural type in order to win the White House.
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The order question runs through American politics of the past four decades like a bright red thread -- mostly to Democrats' disadvantage. The issue can turn quickly, as illustrated by this spring's upheaval in Congress, where Republicans supporting House Majority Leader Tom DeLay found themselves incurring public ire over the disorderly mess surrounding the investigation of DeLay's ethics, while controversy also raged over judicial appointments and a possible Senate filibuster rule change. Yet to take advantage of such reversals, Democrats face a special challenge: They must find a way to reassure voters that they can defend American values and uphold order, while still promoting progressive principles.

Now, I generally like The Moose—he’s even perma-linked here, up and (ironically?) to the left—but in this piece he offers a political vision that’s one-sided and even scary. If "order" were the be-all end-all of politics, we might be talking about President Pat Buchanan; you know that guy would "make the trains run on time." (Best not to think about who might be on them or where they’d be going.) I guess that last line about "promoting progressive principles" is the standard disclaimer, but the notion that Democrats can win by being super-prescriptive on social issues—the core of what Wittman’s saying here—strikes me as both foolish and repellent.

Especially when right-wingers might well be overreaching culturally, just as New Leftists arguably did in the late 1960s. While Americans might be ambivalent on abortion rights (though most polls still show broad support for some variant of the choice position), I don’t think even most anti-abortion voters are interested in the government dictating sexual morality to Americans. But this is just what the Dobson/Perkins crowd is doing in their opposition to common-sense measures like the Prevention First Act, introduced by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid earlier this year. For that matter, this is what the Bush administration is essentially doing in its insistence upon abstinence only and its various efforts to undermine support for birth control. The Prevention First Act is political genius, as it shines a needed spotlight on the fact that for many among the religious right, "abortion" is really about sex—and that they’re more interested in controlling individual sexual behavior than in really seeing fewer unwanted pregnancies.

There’s more to this story, obviously; as I’ve noted here many times, Democrats need to be more culturally sensitive to the other side of the abortion debate and must maintain a laser-like focus on the full Clinton-era formulation of "safe, legal and rare." And the other issues of the culture wars—gay rights, for one—present their own challenges… though I think that there’s a positive individual-responsibility argument, as well as a social justice argument, to be made there as well. But the larger point is this: Instead of running away from the cultural divides, hoping that voters will respond to their pocketbooks rather than their gut feelings, maybe it's time we started making our own pitches as to why we believe what we believe. If the ultimate choice presented to voters is between individual responsibility and the finger-wagging of would-be theocrats, I think we will find the country is with us.