Don’t be fooled. We’re winning the war.
It would be easy to think the Left was losing. We’re not.
You could be forgiven for thinking that American political culture was undergoing a radical shift rightward these days. That’s certainly the narrative that America’s conservative movement (such as it is) would have you believe, and it would be a terrifying prospect — if it were true.
In this month’s Atlantic, Adam Serwer, a writer and thinker I deeply admire, writes ominously that “The White Nationalists Are Winning.” This is the latest in a long series of articles in elite media circles profiling the supposed ascendancy of American conservatism. This is in contrast with the perennial stereotype of a disorganized, rudderless Left — “Dems in Disarray!” — which is such a standard trope of the political press that it almost passes for conventional wisdom. The emergent Trumpist right wing has only amplified this message further. Pundits from across the spectrum constantly scold the American Left for lacking strong leadership, being too extreme and insufficiently “in touch” with “real Americans.”
Well, I reject all of that, and offer this instead: far from being beaten, the American Left is ascendant.
I know that this sounds like a strange thing to say, with consolidated (you couldn’t really say “unified”) Republican control of all three branches of government. Yet widen your aperture. Looking broadly at the sweep of American society, far from being on the ropes, progressivism, liberalism, “the Left,” whatever you want to call it — we have certainly lost some political battles, but we’re winning the war. We are winning the culture. We not only have better ideas, but they are increasingly the ones embraced by younger generations. And conservatives have been forced to resort to more and more extreme lengths in order to keep us at bay politically.
Don’t get me wrong — there is a long ways to go yet. No one is declaring victory. But I submit that there are ample reasons for a definite optimism. Make no mistake — the American Right is terrified — as Serwer notes, in fact, “panicked” — and believes itself to be fighting a rear-guard battle for a culture and society that it is losing (or has already lost).
In this, at least, they are correct. Here’s why.
Conservatives have lost the culture
I was born in the early 80s, and am just old enough to remember Dan Quayle getting upset about Murphy Brown, a TV character who was a single mom. Quayle, running for re-election as Vice President in 1992, complained that the character glorified single motherhood, which he considered morally distasteful. A lot of people took exception to that, and a national controversy ensued, and Dan Quayle wound up revealing himself as an idiot. Everyone still liked Murphy Brown and it ran another six seasons.
Conservative outrage campaigns against popular culture have not gotten any better, nor more effective. It used to be The Simpsons and Murphy, and today it’s the new Ghostbusters movie, Star Wars, comic books and even that bastion of liberal social values, the NFL. Let me spoil the ending for you: nothing ever changes. Meaningless boycotts are announced, moral highgrounds are claimed, and then everyone moves on. The outrage cycle burns itself out fairly quickly, because the reality is that no one actually cares. Mainstream audiences mostly don’t care. The pundits themselves don’t actually care either. It’s all a thinly veiled pantomime show for those conservative pundits’ audiences, who they entertain with stories of outrage for sponsors’ dollars. It has always been this way, and probably always will.
Here’s what has changed: as it continually straddles the fuzzy line between reflecting broader society and pushing its boundaries, pop culture today is reflective of far more permissive social attitudes than at probably any other time in history. Alternative family structures, interracial couples, premarital sex, drug use, irreligiosity are all completely common narrative elements today. None of this is to say that pop culture in 2018 doesn’t have its own problematic elements, of course, only that it is far less restrained by social conservatism than it was even 10 or 15 years ago. There’s simply no sign that “traditional family values” holds much purchase among modern audiences today.
And the society that culture tries to reflect? It has evolved, too, with conservatives losing just about every culture battle they picked.
Just one example is same-sex marriage. It is still bewildering at how short an amount of time it took for same-sex marriage to go from an “existential threat to Western civilization,” literally a central plank of George W. Bush’s 2004 presidential campaign, to being utterly unremarkable. Banning “gay marriage” has virtually disappeared from conservative discourse today. Obviously, this isn’t to say that LGBTQ people don’t still face discrimination — merely that the pitched battles over over their civil rights (like striking down sodomy laws and legalizing same-sex marriage) have advanced considerably, and for the most part, the liberals have won.
Pick an issue, and the pattern follows on almost all of them: marijuana, emergency contraception, school prayer, cohabitation — all cultural questions that our society has pretty much worked through by now, albeit slowly, and decided in favor of greater cultural liberalism.
Conservatives have lost the next generation
It has long been the case that the youth have gravitated towards progressivism, and then don’t vote. This is still the case today. Were people under 35 ever to turn out for elections at the same levels as their grandparents, it goes without saying that our country would look very different overnight.
Nevertheless, the generation gap between Millennials and the Boomers/Silents is more like a chasm. Millennials are far less likely to be religious or identify with an organized faith; they are less vocally patriotic, more permissive about others’ lifestyle choices, and more skeptical about an economic system that has saddled them with substantial educational debt, low wages and expensive housing.
Millennials’ attitudes reflect broader demographic changes in the country as well. Not only are Millennials the most diverse generational cohort yet, but they are coming at the front of even more rapid change behind them. In 2013, for the first time, a majority of infants born in America were non-white. We are quickly becoming a far more racially diverse country, which is directly reflected in younger generations’ attitudes towards racism (which they don’t like), immigrants and pluralism (which they do).
The back-to-back presidencies of the most popular president among Millennials and Gen-X — Barack Obama — and the most toxic one (you-know-who) has served to only further polarize younger Americans away from the conservative movement. It it possible, but highly unlikely, that they will be coaxed back. As the American Right entrenches as a whiter, older, angrier bastion of racist resentment, it torches its own bridges to the next generation.
Conservatives’ last stand: our politics
Consider this: Republicans have won the popular vote in only 1 out of the last 7 presidential contests. Since 1992, George W. Bush remains the only Republican who more Americans have chosen for President than the Democratic candidate. (In that race, his margin of victory was just under 3 million votes — nearly the same as Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over Donald Trump.) In that time, we’ve had two Republican presidents assume power despite winning fewer votes than their opponent.
Make no mistake — Republicans hold power in Congress largely because of partisan gerrymanders and the nature of the Senate. The examples of misrepresentation in the latter are almost comical: as just one example, Wyoming and Alaska have a combined population that is substantially less than that of Riverside County, California. Though Democrats in the Senate represent 53% of all Americans, they hold only 47 percent of the seats.
To offset their electoral weaknesses outside of big, sparsely populated rural states, the American Right has had to resort to more and more aggressive means of restricting the franchise. In short, the Republican Party has pursued a coordinated, nationwide effort to allow fewer people to vote. Behind a fig leaf argument about ensuring “voting integrity,” the conservative movement has lined up behind voter ID laws and efforts to restrict early voting and cut down on the number of voting sites in minority areas (which are likely to vote Democratic). While engaging in a pretense of debate about whether voter fraud is a major issue (spoiler: it is not), behind the scenes, Republicans have plunged ahead to make it harder for constituents to vote.
At the same time, Republican state legislatures have resorted to more and more aggressively gerrymandered districts in order to hold on to control. I happen to live in North Carolina, whose Republican-majority legislature made the argument — in open federal court! — that their gerrymander, among the country’s most brazen, was explicitly designed to elect more Republicans and fewer Democrats, and that this was legal, because partisan gerrymanders were not technically prohibited.
Baldfaced and legally murky dirty tricks like these are not the tactics of a political movement confident in its majority. They are last-ditch efforts by people who see the trendlines and want to prolong their power for as long as possible.
The Right is terrified
As I write this, neo-Nazis march again in Charlottesville, where they are met by ferocious counterprotests. The white nationalist wing of the conservative movement never went away, but it has certainly reawoken. Importantly, it has also lost the sense that its beliefs are unacceptable in polite discourse, or need to be hidden. That, as much as anything, will be the Trump legacy.
Serwer’s “white panic” serves as a useful rubric to understand Trump and the movement he represents. Trump has crystalized white nationalism as the unifying cause of the conservative movement because that is literally the only thing that can. The conservative movement struggles to articulate any cohesive vision or shared values today beyond the primacy of white grievance politics.
Yet as the middle-aged and elderly whites to whom this vision most appeals age out of the electorate, they are being replaced by younger voters who share neither this vision nor the values behind it. These younger generations have grown up in a culture that has largely rejected traditional conservative social values, and is increasingly repulsed by the horror show of Nazis parading in the streets and migrant families torn asunder on the border, all with a wink-and-nod from the President.
To be sure, none of this means our struggle is over. Political change doesn’t happen spontaneously — it requires sustained effort and organization, without which, the American Right could well cling to power for many years to come. But theirs is a hollow edifice. It is built on a graying constituency that is more outnumbered every year. They hearken back to social values that were shed — rightly, for the most part — decades ago. And with every election, and every passing year, their connection to the broader society grows more tenuous, and they are increasingly desperate to avoid exposing their cabal of power to the harsh scrutiny of actual voters.
If you’re a liberal, would you switch roles with a movement in their position? I wouldn’t.
