Opinion | The Republican Pearl Clutchers Are Wrong

As you might have heard, Ron DeSantis is running against “wokeness” in all its forms. If anything, what already has been a major calling card of the Florida governor is likely to get even more prominent as he uses his culture war record and priorities to try to outflank Donald Trump on the right.

Yet there has already been tsk-tsking — even among Republicans — about the GOP being too invested in these kinds of issues.

In a Washington Post op-ed explaining his (very wise) decision not to run for president, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu wrote, “We need to expand beyond the culture wars that alienate independents, young voters and suburban moms.”

According to the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, Doug Burgum, the North Dakota governor who is mounting a long shot bid for president, “is betting that he’ll be able to break through the culture wars fixation and appeal to persuadable voters by his stands on important pocketbook issues including the economy and energy.”

The former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, in the midst of his own long-shot campaign, has said Republicans don’t need to “engage in every cultural battle.”

Of course, it’s no accident that none of these men are going to be the GOP nominee for president. But they are expressing a common point of view that holds that the traditional Republican Party is being distorted and knocked off its moorings by culture war obsessions.

In reality, Republicans have long leaned into cultural issues and typically benefited from them at the polls. There’s no reason to think that DeSantis’ muscular posture on the culture will hurt him politically, even if it would be wise if he didn’t focus on these issues to the exclusion of broader considerations.

It is also a mistake to view the cultural issues as distractions or manufactured. Some are more serious and enduring than others, but many are profoundly important questions: What it means to be a man or woman; what is going to be taught to children and college students; whether or not the country is fundamentally racist and sexist; and how to view the country’s past and its Founders.

These questions, or similar ones, have been taken up by conservative politicians for decades.

Ronald Reagan’s cultural issues were crime, abortion and school prayer, among others. He had an Education secretary, Bill Bennett, who wanted the schools to inculcate moral values and inveighed against the radicalism of the universities, while his attorney general, Ed Meese, fought against pornography.

In 1988, George H. W. Bush hit Michael Dukakis on Willie Horton, on the pledge of allegiance and for being a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.”

In the mid-1990s, Newt Gingrich called Bill and Hillary Clinton “counterculture McGoverniks,” and said that a gruesome murder of a mother and her children in Illinois showed what had gone wrong with “a welfare system which subsidizes people for doing nothing, a criminal system which tolerated drug dealers, an educational system which allows kids to not learn and which rewards tenured teachers who can’t teach while destroying poor children who are trapped in a process with no hope.”

The exact mix of issues have changed over time, but the Republican constants have been abortion, gun rights, education and patriotism.

In 1996, the left-leaning writer Eric Alterman was writing in Rolling Stone, “While art, literary criticism, gender studies and inquiries into race and class are all under conservative attack, history has emerged as perhaps the most hotly contested ground of all.”

Also in 1996, Robert Bork was writing, from an entirely different point of view, of course, “We must do nothing less than re-fight the battles we lost in the 1960s — battles over education curricula, the content of popular culture, the feminization of the military, the understanding of the family, the proper spheres of reason and emotion, and much more.”

Pretty much at any time over the last 50 years, conservatives have believed (rightly in my view) that they have been fighting a newly aggressive and far-reaching cultural radicalism, and progressives have believed that the right’s cultural concerns are alarmist, cynical, reactionary and illegitimate. Each side has viewed the other as the aggressor.

In this context, Ron DeSantis as culture warrior isn’t particularly new — even if the heavy emphasis he’s putting on cultural issues is unusual, the issues have changed and he’s more willing to use government as a means of fighting on that front.

For most other Republicans in the past, cultural issues have been an element of their argument; for DeSantis, it’s more like the main event.

Although there are antecedents for the current hot-button fights, the alphabet soup of DEI, CRT and ESG, as well as the various fights over trans issues, are new.

The common thread to these issues in DeSantis’ telling is big entities — from corporations to big tech and the media, from the educational bureaucracy to the medical establishment — over-stepping their bounds and imposing an agenda over and against the preferences of families and individuals, and outside democratic controls.

In other words, they aren’t just a clash over values, but a struggle for power. This is why government is viewed as a potential positive tool in the fight.

Relatedly, it’s typically been government, courts and academia that have been the main institutional antagonists of conservatives in the culture war, but now corporations are also an adversary. So, what the Warren Court or the National Endowment for the Arts were to conservatives in the past, the Walt Disney Company is to DeSantis.

There is a longstanding misperception that it is unpopular Republican cultural positions that detract from popular Republican economic positions, when it is really the opposite. Such was the premise of the misbegotten Republican “autopsy” after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012. Donald Trump should have put this theory to rest when he won in 2016 after doubling down on cultural issues and departing from Republican economic orthodoxy, but it hasn’t gone away.

The DeSantis, and broader Republican position, on the new matrix of cultural issues tend to be popular.

As a Washington Post headline put it, “Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP, poll shows.”

A survey where the language of the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law was read to respondents found overwhelming support, but the wording matters.

The same is true of “book bans.” No one is going to support a book ban, but parents being able to raise objections to age-inappropriate material would presumably fare better.

Where the DeSantis approach is lacking is in being too abstract from how culture can improve the welfare of communities and of individuals. When he was running for president in 2012, Rick Santorum attempted to connect his social conservatism to the economic wellbeing of people by arguing, “Graduate from high school, work hard, and get married before you have children and the chance you will ever be in poverty is just two percent.” This type of argument has fallen out of favor as populists have argued that it is the lack of jobs, rather than the lack of values, that undergirds family breakdown and other social ills.

DeSantis doesn’t adopt either of these views or have some other distinctive perspective on the decline of family and communities. His culture war operates in a different realm. Even if he were to be completely successful in, say, rooting out DEI at colleges and universities and in his battle with Disney, wages wouldn’t increase for anyone, GDP growth wouldn’t go up from its typical, unsatisfactory level of roughly 2 percent or less annually, no jobs would be returned to the industrial Midwest, the opioid crisis wouldn’t diminish, family formation wouldn’t be enhanced, and so on.

This is not to say that the culture war issues that are central to his political brand aren’t important. They are necessary, but not sufficient. DeSantis had a full-spectrum governing agenda in Florida and should have one running for president. There’s been a lot of mockery of his frequent use of “woke,” and criticism that the word doesn’t really mean anything, including from Trump. To the contrary, it’s a perfectly understandable and apt term; it’s just not a substitute for a compelling, fleshed-out vision on everything else.