The culture war ain’t over til it’s over
by digby
That would be never. From my Salon piece today on this subject:
One of the more predictable tropes on the left side of America’s political dial is the notion that the culture wars are over, that Christian conservatives are in retreat, and that the far right is breaking up due to its irrelevance. This happens periodically, whether Democrats have recently won or lost an election, and it happens especially when liberals and progressives win a victory on policy. For some reason there is a great propensity for liberals to declare that they’ve vanquished the right for all time, only to get sucker punched by a conservative in mid-high five.
It’s a lovely fantasy but the culture war isn’t some little skirmish that happened sometime in the 1990s and became irrelevant in the modern world, like pagers or AOL. It’s always been with us — the ying and yang of American life. It’s not to say that progress is never made. It obviously is. But it’s almost always a case of two steps forward one step back, and sometimes that step back is a doozy.
Governor Mike Huckabee’s entrance into the presidential contest sparked more than a little derisive laughter among progressives, many of whom agreed with the premise of this article, which said he cannot win because, of course, the culture war is over. For all his populist rhetoric about economic security, defending certain government programs and raining hellfire on free trade, it’s assumed that his right wing hawkishness and social conservatism are relics of the past, rendering him an anachronism. This is wrong. Contrary to popular wisdom, conservatives are not a majority of the country, and never have been, but they do represent a majority of the Republican Party. (Indeed, finding a moderate in the Republican Party these days is like trying to find a non-millionaire in the US Senate. They’re there, but there aren’t very many of them.) And Huckabee isn’t saying anything on the culture war issues they don’t like hearing. Quite the opposite.
I went on to discuss a number of the culture war battles still being fought. I didn’t have 20,000 words so I only hit the highlights.