Opinion | Republicans Aren’t the Only Ones Who Can Play Culture Warrior

If only Republicans didn’t use cultural issues to cynically distract people from the kitchen-table concerns they should care about most, American politics would be more serious, and much more favorable to progressives.

This has been a staple of Democratic thinking going back at least to the famous 2005 Thomas Frank book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?

The idea has usually been, if only Democrats can better explain their economic policies or convince voters that their agenda is the true populism — as opposed to the GOP’s faux, cultural-issue-based populism — the spell will be lifted, and Republicans will be exposed as the cynical plutocrats that they are.

Suddenly, Democrats would be blissfully free of any need to moderate or play defense on culture, and they could make everything about, say, higher corporate tax rates and Medicare for All.

This was always a fantasy, and sure enough, the Democrats are regaining their footing in the midterms with a completely opposite approach.

Over the last couple of months, the party has set about to out-culture war the Republicans, using a different set of issues. As Republicans around the country desperately try to keep the focus on the ultimate kitchen-table concern, inflation, Democrats insist on talking about one of the most contentious issues in American politics, abortion — and for good reason.

It has Democratic voters energized, and Republicans running scared.

Back in July, I was dismissive of the idea that Dobbs would have a major impact on the midterms, but it has clearly made a difference.

Abortion opponents suffered a debacle in a Kansas referendum in early August. It turned out that, from a progressive perspective, there was nothing “wrong” with Kansas that couldn’t be cured by shooting down a poorly crafted ballot measure that stoked massive Democratic turnout. Since then, Republicans outside the deepest red areas have been in full-blown retreat, trying to avoid the topic or recalibrating on the fly.

Arizona GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters rewrote his campaign website to soften his position, a maladroit, if understandable maneuver. He had, in effect, a heedlessly maximalist pre-Dobbs, primary-electorate position on abortion, which he shifted to make an incrementalist post-Dobbs, general-electorate position on abortion.

He now insists that abortion is a media-driven distraction from other more important issues like inflation.

It’s not just abortion. Democrats have portrayed Dobbs as a threat to a suite of “right to privacy” issues, from contraceptives to interracial marriage and gay marriage. Senate Democrats hope to make Republicans squirm over the last of these, with a vote on a federal codification of gay marriage that will split the GOP caucus just prior to the midterms.

Even Joe Biden’s focus on Donald Trump, transparently a tactic to swing the midterm debate on to more favorable terrain, has a cultural element.

Biden’s case against his predecessor is swathed in the rhetoric of the defense of democracy and the threat of election denialism, but ultimately Trump is the biggest cultural lightning rod in the country. For both his supporters and opponents, what is most important about Trump is that he stands for a cluster of values. Depending on who you ask, he represents a defense of the nation or xenophobia, anti-elitism or anti-intellectualism, protean strength or a threat to the rules, authenticity or an untutored demagogy.

Surely, the suburban women who appear to be swinging back the Democrats’ way consider Trump, as such, a hateful figure.

Cultural issues have never inherently been a vulnerability for Democrats. It has always depended.

They are at their strongest when they can portray their positions as the logical extensions of individual autonomy and choice, as they do with abortion and gay marriage.

They are at their weakest when their positions conflict with strongly held community values like patriotism and lawfulness, reflect the priorities of a small, out-of-touch elite (for example, the push for the adoption of the term “Latinx”), or take on a hectoring tone.

The last couple of months should underline the legitimacy of culture-war politics, if there were ever any doubt. Appeals to such issues are not just a Republican plot, and they’re available to both sides.

Cultural issues are especially powerful because they involve a clash of values and elemental questions of who we are as a people. They are inherently “divisive” — people are deeply dug in and emotionally committed on both sides, which is what makes them cultural issues in the first place. And they almost always involve identifying an internal threat from which an embattled constituency has to be defended — in this case, purportedly, a runaway Supreme Court and extremist Republicans who want to trample the rights of women.

It’s not as though Republicans don’t have cultural issues of their own in this campaign. They want to talk about the border, crime and transgender issues. It’s the economy that they overwhelmingly want to focus on, though. It still looms, as it always does, incredibly large. Part of Biden’s modest recovery in the polls is clearly attributable to gas prices and inflation abating somewhat.

But Republicans, as Democrats have proved over the years, can’t simply talk or wish their way past cultural pitfalls for their party. They need to establish a compromise position on abortion that they feel confident defending, and they need to avoid, to the extent they can, falling into the trap of litigating Trump’s myriad conflicts with Biden and the Department of Justice.

It may provide some measure satisfaction to complain about the other side using cultural issues to their advantage, but it’s much better to have an effective answer.