Why We Need to Push Back Against the Culture Warriors
Their effect on politics is very real, and they are harming real people
Welcome back to The Liberal View by TaraElla, where I react to things people write and say out there, from a liberal point of view. I believe this is needed because too many people have lost sight of what the liberal way is. We need to have a truly liberal discourse, and I’m doing my part here.
The theme this week is culture warriors, especially those on the ‘anti-woke’ right. My regular audience would know that I’m no fan of wokeism, but the right-wing culture warriors are doing dangerous things in the name of being anti-woke. It needs to stop, and we liberals need to make it stop.
In order for women to have the right to have their own bathrooms, you have to ban transgenderism entirely. You can’t just ban it for the kids. It’s got to be entirely. In order for women to be able to have their own locker rooms at the gym, you have to ban transgenderism entirely. In order to protect businesses from having to participate in weird, occult sexual rituals like the transgender transition, you have to ban transgenderism entirely. I love this bill because it is so much more aggressive than the other bills we’ve seen. The other — I don’t mean to knock the other governors and in the statehouses, they’ve done a great job laying the groundwork — the groundwork, rather. But this bill goes much further. And it reminds us of a truth in politics that Republicans all too often forget — you’re either on offense or you’re on defense. You’re either making gains in the culture or you’re losing ground in the culture. There’s no standing still. There’s no status quo. There’s no neutrality. -Quote from Michael Knowles that has rightly been the subject of controversy recently
The illiberal culture war Right has shown its true colors more and more lately. Well, we liberals are not in a mood for compromise with them either (I’m all for compromise but only for reasonable people). So yes, we say no compromise too. We didn’t waver when it came to the postmodern Left, and we won’t waver in the face of these extreme culture warriors either.
We didn’t ask for the war, but we will fight to defend our values. This is why, you can’t just oppose Trump, you have to oppose the culture warriors entirely, and that has to include unwavering opposition to supposed ‘lesser evils’ who still align themselves with the culture warrior faction, and don’t distance themselves from the extremists either. The reason is because embracing a ‘lesser evil’ signals that we are on defense and would be willing to give ground. We will not give an inch in our defense of basic liberal values.
Another important point to note about what is said here is that it implies the hard-won freedoms of the past few decades were all a mistake, and Western society should go back to how it was in the 1950s or so. These culture warriors would use government power to aggressively wind back these freedoms, and force everyone to live like it’s the 50s. This objectively represents a bigger threat to freedom than any woke movement, because at least wokeness can still be patiently argued against in the marketplace of ideas. While cancel culture does threaten people’s jobs sometimes, and we have to make it stop happening, universal enforcement of reactionary norms by law would be an even greater evil for freedom loving people, comparatively speaking, and more difficult to reverse, given the difficulty of reversing bad laws (compared to reversing bad cultural changes).
I think a lot of folks that I serve with generally are uncomfortable with male-to-female transgender kids playing in the sport for the gender that they choose. I think they want to do something about that. However, I think they are highly uncomfortable going beyond that. But if it is brought to a vote, then how do they vote no? Because somebody on the right is going to primary them. And run the ad: “Voted to support gender affirming care for transgender kids.” -Quote from Missouri State Sen. Greg Razer from the article ‘They Can’t Attack Me. Now They’re Coming After Kids’ by Kathy Gilsinan in Politico
Speaking the truth on the apparently increasingly anti-LGBT stance of the Republican Party, Razer thinks that many Republicans, even in a red state like Missouri, don’t really want to go that far. However, the political pressures of culture war politics means that they ultimately have to vote for anti-trans measures, no matter how extreme. Which is why we must push back against the new culture war politics coming out of the Right, often done in the name of ‘anti-wokeness’.
Evil policies (see Michael Knowles quote above) will get passed against people’s consciences, and real lives will be harmed, if we don’t push back before it’s too late.
Ronald Reagan was not a fascist. George H. W. Bush was not a fascist. George W. Bush was not and is not a fascist. John McCain was not a fascist. Mitt Romney was not and is not a fascist. But what about Ron DeSantis? To answer that question, we first have to ask if Hungarian president Viktor Orbán is a fascist. That’s because DeSantis is clearly modeling some of his culture-war initiatives on things Orbán has done in office. Yet I don’t think it’s accurate to call Orbán a fascist. He’s some kind of soft authoritarian or illiberal democrat-both of which are very bad. I think, likewise, that much of what DeSantis is doing in Florida-for example, his moves to severely restrict academic freedom at public universities in the state-is atrocious. But using a landslide victory in his re-election bid as leverage to impose a conservative clampdown on publicly funded universities is not fascism. It’s a power grab from the right that liberals should be fighting hard. But reaching for the most hyperbolic epithet they can think of and hurling it at him and his supporters on social media isn’t fighting hard. It’s a panic attack. -DeSantis is bad, but Trump is still worse by Damon Linker
The fact that DeSantis is considered to be the ‘lesser evil’, and could still be compared to Viktor Orban, the guy famous for championing ‘illiberal democracy’, is very scary. The fact that some people still think the woke Left is a threat to freedom (which I agree with) but the culture warrior Right isn’t is making me very frustrated. I’m losing my patience here, to be honest. I mean, what more evidence do you need? What else do I need to show you if you’re still not convinced at this point?
If DeSantis becomes the nominee, what I fear is that the anti-woke culture warrior Right will exaggerate the ‘wokeness’ of Biden (who has, objectively, governed as a moderate), tie campus woke excesses to Biden (when they were actually worse under Trump), and get DeSantis elected. And the moderates could accept this outcome too easily, because DeSantis is the supposed ‘lesser evil’. This is why we must oppose the culture warrior illiberal Right as a whole, rather than targeting specific personalities. And we must not accept the culture warriors’ attempts to exaggerate the ‘wokeness’ of their opponents (which is actually reminiscent of McCarthyism) and let them lead America and the West down the path of Hungary (which some of them have clearly stated is their goal).
While I agree that we need to use the correct words to describe phenomenon, and Orbanism isn’t fascism, a program of replacing America’s current status quo with Orbanism is still objectively evil. This is because any program designed to take away individual freedoms en masse, justified by irrational moral panics, is objectively evil. It is objectively evil because history has shown us what happens next: real people will get hurt, tragedies will happen, and the pursuit of happiness will become impossible for many. These are not consequences that any decent person could live with, I believe.
In the 1960s and ’70s, conservative opponents of school integration, women’s rights and LGBTQ rights coalesced around a similar narrative. They wrapped concerns about social and cultural change in a grim warning that America’s children were the target of gay people who aimed to “recruit” and abuse them. In many cases, it worked. It set back LGBTQ rights in many states and localities and effectively stalled efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment. It’s a cautionary tale. Some conservative politicians and pundits surely know that they’re spinning fantasies in the service of scoring wins. But as the Comet Pizza shooting demonstrates, too many people believe those fantasies and are willing to act on them. -From Pizzagate to Drag Bills: The ‘Groomer’ Myth That Will Not Die by Joshua Zeitz in Politico
I’m certainly not alone in worrying that the culture warriors are going to cause something really, really bad to happen. It’s good that more people are waking up to this dangerous possibility. However, we need to translate it into action, to effectively push back. How to do so is the important question.
In my opinion, it is most important that any attempt to push back against the culture warriors is led by liberals, rather than the woke. The woke’s challenge to classical liberal values like free speech, and the backlash it has brought, is what is being used by the culture warriors to launch an authoritarian, reactionary agenda. They do that by smearing liberalism as the precursor to wokeism, which anyone who properly understands philosophy would know is rubbish. Anyway, this is why the argument against the culture warriors must be fundamentally liberal, not woke (i.e. not postmodern, not infused with critical theory, etc.) Our arguments must be based entirely on free speech, free expression, defending the marketplace of ideas, and so on, and not contaminated by even a drop of Foucauldism.
To win back those who have been attracted by the culture warriors because of the backlash to wokeness, real liberals must show them that we are not woke, that we are actually completely opposite to the woke philosophically. I think the future of liberty in the West could depend on how successfully we do that.
New South Wales police has confirmed it will not charge Senator Lidia Thorpe for temporarily blocking the Sydney Mardi Gras parade on Saturday night. Thorpe lay down in front of a float on Oxford Street, momentarily stopping the parade, to boos from the crowd… Thorpe tweeted on Sunday morning that she was proud to have joined the float, implying that she was protesting against a police presence in the parade. “Black and brown trans women started the first pride march as a protest against police violence. Today, we still face violence from police,” she tweeted. -NSW police says Lidia Thorpe will not be charged for blocking Mardi Gras float by Mostafa Rachwani and Josh Butler in The Guardian
As a trans woman, I am sick and tired of unreasonable behavior being done in our name. Many trans people just want to live their own lives, and don’t want to be entangled with radical politics. To incorporate trans issues into the brand of radical left-wing politics, and hence make us a target of right-wing culture warriors, is very unfair to us.
It’s also important to stress that the blatantly anti-trans positions being taken by right-wing culture warriors (again, see above Michael Knowles quote) is pushing many trans people into the arms of extreme activists. Which is why we must make it clear that there is a liberal alternative. And take a strong stance against the culture warriors. As I recently said, any compromise on trans issues will need the support of trans people to succeed, which in turn would require that trans people not feel threatened that their basic rights and health care could be taken away.
Don’t get me wrong. You certainly don’t have to agree with Drag Queen Story Hour itself. Those who disagree with Drag Queen Story Hour can certainly speak up about their concerns. They can certainly argue against it in the marketplace of ideas. What they cannot do is to use state power to ban it. This crosses a line, similar to how Trump’s denial of his 2020 election loss crossed a line. In both cases, fundamental moral principles are at stake, and we must respond by defending those principles, and clearly condemning those who want to erode them. Also note that, once a line is crossed, it is more likely to happen again, as seen in the recent movement of election denialism in Brazil, and the ongoing worry about what is going to happen in 2024 in America. This makes pushing back against those who want to cross the line even more important. -Drag Queen Story Hour: The Liberal Way by TaraElla (myself)
The important issue here is the necessity of limitations on government power. The culture warriors want to make it all about Drag Queen Story Hour, but let’s not get distracted. Let’s focus on the implications of what they want to do, and see the bigger picture here. If we lose free speech, and most importantly, neutrality in the application of free speech, there is no going back.
Note: The articles quoted above do not necessarily reflect my views, and I do not endorse their arguments outside of what I have specifically agreed with.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com on March 5, 2023.
