Culture Wars Are For Cowards
And most people don't like bullies.
If one person has principles and says what they mean, and another person shiftily changes their principles according to whatever they think is popular, most people will respect the first person more, even if they disagree with them. Standing up for your beliefs is an admirable quality, while selling out for momentary advantage is not. This is a prime reason why the public dislikes not just politicians of the opposite party, but politicians as a class. It is less that they disagree with them than that they are snakes. When someone has principles, you can disagree with them face to face. When they don’t, they will stab you in the back.
Malcolm X understood this. So does Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party leadership does not.
Earlier this week I wrote a piece arguing that there is an opportunity for independent candidates with a strong pro-worker agenda—health care for all, living wages, tax the rich—to win elections in deeply red states and districts, if those candidates are not Democrats. This, I suggested, could be where the concept of a “Labor Party” in America would be most useful. Organized labor itself could recruit, train, and fund working class candidates and take advantage of the fact that the majority of Republican voters in red states are being screwed by Republican policies.
There were two common reactions from those who disagreed with me. The first was that people assumed that any such pro-worker candidate in a red state would naturally have to embrace conservative positions on culture war issues, as “centrist” Democrats have been doing for decades, and they saw my idea as part and parcel of that doomed and divisive philosophy. This is not what I what I mean, nor is it what I wrote. But it is indicative of the fact that the conventional wisdom about the necessity of taking right wing positions on red meat issues in red states is so deeply established that people just assume that that is a necessary part of the package.
The other objections was much simpler. People just said, “That won’t work, because red state voters are racists/ bigots/ deluded/ brain poisoned by Fox News/ etc.” These people have made the mistake of conflating an observation of current reality with a deep, immutable characteristic. Is the South, for example, full of people who vote for racist, bigoted, delusional right wing politicians? Yes. Are all of those people therefore unchangeable deluded bigots who will never, ever vote for a candidate with better values? Not at all. You need not deny the reality of today to embrace the possibility of a better tomorrow. This, in fact, is the sort of political cynicism that spirals into exactly the awful cauldron of misanthropic politics that America now enjoys. If you believe that these voters cannot be persuaded into a better set of beliefs, you write them off, and the question then becomes how to marginalize them, to dissuade them from voting, to gerrymander their districts, to trick them, to lie to them, to do anything at all to minimize their participation in the political system. This is how parties conduct electoral politics now. Do you like it? I don’t. The other alternative is to understand that people’s views are often tenuously held and quite changeable and to think about how to do that.
I was born and raised down South. I have been reporting in the South and in other red states for 20 years. The idea that there is no political lane for a working class candidate who fights for everyone is ludicrous. That is, in fact, a description of the self-image of most of the population. Translating this into electoral politics is a substantive problem we need to think deeply about, but if you believe that Most Red State Voters Suck Forever and Deserve What They Get, you do not have any ideas interesting enough to listen to on these questions.
“Culture war” is an inexact term, but generally what people are talking about are issues that are driven by emotional appeals to various sorts of prejudices. Many people who would love to see working class candidates with a left wing economic agenda succeed in red states genuinely fear that doing so is not possible without, effectively, capitulating to the right on culture war issues. I disagree with this,. Furthermore, I think that the reason for not doing so goes to the heart of how we create change in the minds of people in these dreary political landscapes.
What principle are we standing up for here? We are standing up for solidarity. The solidarity of all working class people to throw in together and fight against those oppressing them from above—and, even more broadly, the solidarity of all people, as brothers and sisters, as the family of humanity. A candidate in a red state stands up before the electorate, which is made up mostly of working class people, and says: We all have the same interests, we are going to stand together and fight for one another, we are going to lift up every working person, we are going to give people the health care and the wages that they need to live, we are going to make the rich people like your boss pay their fair share, and the motherfuckers who tell you this is bad are the same motherfuckers picking your pocket and taking the money you deserve and living on that hill in their big house as you struggle. You know that you work hard, you know that you deserve more, and I am here to tell you that you can have more, and that the reason you don’t have it already is because rich motherfuckers like your boss have been siphoning off all the money for the past 50 years and cutting all the benefits that regular people use so they don’t have to pay taxes so they can buy new cars and new mansions while you can’t afford to go to the doctor. This is bad for everyone and we are all going to put a stop to it, together.
This message will resonate in any state because it is true in any state. This message is why Bernie Sanders has the highest approval rating of any major politician.
But! Must this message then be outweighed by prejudice, sunk by a culture war torpedo? Consider the demonization of trans people. This, I think, is the purest “culture war” issue of today, and it has the virtue of being the very same culture war issue that has been trotted out in American politics for hundreds of years, with various other groups substituted in. (Racism against black people has such a deep history in America that it is to some extent a separate issue of its own, but the same political mechanisms apply to it.) “Distract regular people from material issues by demonizing a minority” is the oldest culture war move in the book.
What was that issue that our pro-worker candidate was standing up for, again? Ah yes: Solidarity. We talked about how that principle manifests itself in economic policy. What about in the culture wars? What does this candidate do when their red state opponent starts accusing them of loving evil trans people and wanting to mutilate children and put men in women’s bathrooms and etcetera?
What our candidate does is: To uphold the principles that they believe in. Solidarity means everyone. We are, all of us, family, and we will help and love one another, and fight for one another. You ask me to throw my trans family under the bus? Fuck off! We do not throw people under the bus. We stand up to protect people who need to be protected. Isn’t that what solidarity means? We don’t let screeching snakes slither in our midst and try to divide us and pick people off and convince us to sell each other out. We are one, a family, an army. We leave no one behind, we fight for everyone, we look out for one another. We are wise to your tricks, fuckers! The oldest trick in the book! The trick of rich people trying to protect themselves by demonizing some group they think can be demonized. We don’t give in to that. We see what you are doing, assholes. Unfortunately for you, you have come up against people who have solidarity. So you will fail, and you should feel bad, and we do not respect you.
Nobody needs to be “woke” or to have studied gender in college to understand this. All you need to understand is what bullies are. These people are bullies. Nobody likes bullies. When we see a bully picking on someone, we protect them from the bully. Isn’t that what it means to be A Real Man, blah blah blah? Fuck off, bullies.
Also, stop talking about bathrooms all the time, you fucking freaks!
Besides being morally correct, this response has the benefit of making clear that a candidate believes in a principle and will stand up for it. In the long run, this quality is more beneficial to a politician than any particular culture war issue is detrimental. Please, for god’s sake, all of us, step back for a moment and realize: These issues are not organic. They are purposely cultivated by political actors to serve this divisive purpose. The regular people of Arkansas and Alabama and Florida and Wyoming did not wake up one day and say to themselves, “You know what issue I find to be most important in my life? Something about who is playing on a high school volleyball team.” These bullshit issues are created in a lab and dropped into the political discourse like a chemical weapon! They are viruses containing Bad Faith Arguments. To give them credence, to treat them as serious issues, to allow yourself to drawn into lengthy discussions of their minutiae—this is to lose. By giving these things attention, you have allowed them to serve their purpose. Just because your political opponent keeps yelling about mutilating children’s sex organs like a god damn lunatic does not mean that you need to make this the issue upon which your campaign will turn. You cannot stop the right wing from waging the culture war, but you can reduce its salience. You can make it less important, by relentlessly making other things important. The things that are actually important. The need to have a decent wage at a decent job and have decent schools and decent health care and the reason why you can’t have those things, because rich people are keeping all the money and then hiring psychos like your opponent to scream about unimportant things to distract you.
Have principles and believe in them and stand up for them and apply them everywhere. As soon as you respond in good faith to bad faith attacks, as soon as you start throwing people overboard in the name of political expediency, you have shown yourself to be weak, a sucker, spineless, unwilling to do hard things. By stabbing others in the back, you stab yourself, as well. This is a lesson of solidarity.
We do not need to pretend like the culture war will disappear as a tactic. We do not need to pretend like there are no hardcore bigots or racists or religious zealots. We do not need to win the vote of David Duke. We are talking about: Can you present a vision to the 20 or 30 or 40 percent of voters who don’t have strongly established partisan political beliefs, and make them understand and buy into that vision, and show them, by your words and actions, that you are serious, that you will speak your mind, that you will fight for them, that you will not sell them out? That is what this is about. Can you motivate the enormous portion of the electorate that does not vote at all, because they can sense that all this bad faith bullshit is bad faith bullshit, to believe in what you are saying, because it is not bad faith bullshit, but something real? Though most people know very little about the arcane details of public policy, they do have a very acute sense of insincerity. Part of Trump’s genius is his ability to appear to speak sincerely even when he is lying, because he is a pathological lunatic who believes his own fantasy world. The good news is that you can also create a sense of sincerity by believing in things and then doing them.
To believe that culture war issues—the most unnatural, inorganic, materially unimportant set of issues of all—are such deeply held core beliefs of half of the country that they cannot be changed is to step on a gargantuan political rake. To decide that these bad faith issues must be compromised on in the name of savvy politics is precisely wrong. The compromise itself does the damage. The compromise itself brands you as insincere, weak, a sellout. The compromise itself gives voters a good reason not to like you even if they never really thought about the underlying issue until two seconds ago.
I submit that solidarity is a good political principle and that we should go to some places that we haven’t been winning and run some candidates who actually believe in it and practice it and are unapologetic about it and see what happens. The results, I promise you, will not be any worse than what we already have.
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Related reading: How to Win Red States With a Labor Party; Do What You Believe In; Who Is Your Enemy, My Brother?; Bernie Sanders in the Lake of Fire and Brimstone.
I have mentioned and you may have read elsewhere about the workers at the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild who just won their strike, the longest in America, after three years. I am so impressed with their feat and hope that we all admire the hard fight that they waged in the name of solidarity. You can still donate to their strike fund right here. They deserve a great Christmas present.
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Thank you so much for writing this. It's a conversation I'm often having with local DSA members down here who discourage interaction with conservatives. We need them, especially in KS. They need us. The exception being, of course, situations where someone's physical safety is at risk. Other than that, you don't have to like or agree the people you're organizing with. In many cases, you don't even have to talk to them. But we're not going to win our rights unless we all stand together. Plus, as is often said by leaders of the KC tenants union, the more time bigoted folks spend with the people they are bigoted against, the more they realize how much they have in common. As you say, it's so important for the leaders of our movements to model this.
Not just yes..but HELL YES!
I've lived in the SE US for all of my adult life (>45 years, but who's counting) and for more than half of that time, I was on the deepest, redest side of the cultural/political/religious divide.
Then some wonderful folks (mostly, but not all, on the other side of that divide) decided to be kind and loving to me anyway, and invited me to be a part of their communities even though we had vastly different views of "how the world should be".
As an old Quaker once said, "My soul has been meeked," and I am now both humbly and proudly a DSA member. The transition was (and still is not) pain-free, but I now live with a sense of integrity that I didn't have for the first 2/3 of my life. If I can change, then I know that others can too...but that's also exactly why I won't run for office :)
I give that as background to say - please, stay involved. Please continue to engage, even when the Red Machine tries to shut us up and the Blue Machine tries to neuter the message that we really are all in this together, and we HAVE to be if we are going to survive as humans.