The Only Way to Win the Culture War is to Not Play
I want to write briefly — very briefly — on the culture war, then I want to never talk about it again. Here goes:
Some great news, a shimmer in dark times; tidings of great joy, great healing, and reconciliation; a tone of finality, a seasonal change, turn, turn, turn, and I swear it’s not too late: there is no culture war. It is imaginary, it is entertainment, and if we want to we can simply walk off of the battlefield and go about our lives. There is no such thing as left and right, conservative and liberal. If you’re snickering, if you’ve just made a little puff out of your nose, not quite a laugh but your significant other’s looked up from the book they’re reading to see if you’ve sneezed or something, put the needle down at the start of that sentence and read it again. Here it is, for convenience: There is no such thing as left and right, conservative and liberal.
Politics are complicated because they address ideological differences in society. Issues. Differences of opinion across the landscape about how the society should handle situations, how it should behave, how children should be raised, how it should be governed. Discussing these issues is one of the more important things a society’s members can do for the betterment of their society, because ideas need polish. They need discussion, challenge, defense, and refinement. And as anyone who’s been in this sort of discussion knows, these discussions are hard. Desperately so.
Discussing these issues is one of the more important things a society’s members can do for the betterment of their society, because ideas need polish. They need discussion, challenge, defense, and refinement. And as anyone who’s been in this sort of discussion knows, these discussions are hard. Desperately so.
To facilitate discussions on difficult concepts, we often use mental models. Mental models establish a framework for discussion, help us communicate our positions. Consider the law of diminishing returns, which we use often to describe the point at which continuing to do a thing, continuing to pursue a goal, becomes more costly than the incremental value we seek to gain. The point of no return is a similar model. In each of these, we’ve set up a framework to discuss whether it’s time to discontinue our current course of action; we ask and discuss the question “have we reached that point or not,” and debate our positions and the evidence.
The notions of the ideological left and right are also a mental model. The terms actually come from the French Revolution of 1789 when, as the French National Assembly convened to draft a constitution, revolutionaries who opposed the monarchy sat to the left while its supporters sat opposite. At issue was the amount of power the king should have, and it was a deep debate. By the mid-1800s, the terms had cemented themselves in the political discourse as a prevailing mental model.
In the American political landscape, we’ve persisted this model for some time, though the poles have defined and re-defined themselves over and over. While no model is perfect, they do allow for meaningful discussion if we assume that those who use the terms of the model understand its limitations.
The danger we’re encountering now is that the model’s been used to oversimplify and polarize the political landscape. Reductio Ad Absurdum. Within the American two-party system, each party’s extreme side has used these terms to demonize the whole of the other side. Leftist Liberal Democrats maligning Right-wing Conservative Republicans as greedy, power-hungry, gerrymandering neo-conservative racists. Right-wingers calling Democrats lazy socialist leftists asking for a handout. In both cases, almost no one can admit they’ve actually met a human being that fits the description they’re putting forth, but the characterizations paint the picture of the other that’s easy to hate.
The model’s being used by demagogues to inflame populist sentiments and divide the ideological landscape. Pick a side, show people the line, let them pick a side, then take your share of the populace and fight like hell. Let your side fight for you, show them the enemy and let them hate with all their soul until you either have the country you want, or you have the half of the country you want.
But the model is dead and needs to be eliminated from the socio-political discourse in our country. It needs to be rejected, and its terms — conservative, liberal, right-wing, left-wing — eliminated from our political lexicon. Rejected in discussion; rejected verbally — “Look, I don’t recognize right and left because it’s a model that doesn’t fit anymore; let’s look at your position in different terms,” whether people like it or not. The model is broken and we must refuse to use it.
What we’ll find when we ask people to articulate their positions in new terms, is that many don’t have a position. They’ve borrowed their positions from the wholesale pre-packaged positions of left and right that have been manufactured by the environment. The 24-hour news cycle, social media echo chambers, work and school settings, friends and colleagues. They’re ordering off the ideological prix fixe menu; the gas station sandwiches of informed discussion. If we challenge others to form opinions a la carte, to address issues directly and with consideration, we force them to take a well-considered position. This is hard, and that’s the point. We need to make people think again, to stop wearing the uniform of mass-produced ideological viewpoints, and restore color to our social discourse. This work is hard but it’s worth it. These things are important.
