The Guardian suggests that for 2022 Republicans will be all culture war all the time:
Emboldened by a string of off-cycle electoral victories, Republicans are embracing the culture war battles that Donald Trump waged from the White House as a strategy for winning back control of the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections.
“Lean into the culture war,” was the title of a June memo from the leader of the House Republican Study Committee, Indiana congressman Jim Banks.
The “culture war” offensive comes as Democrats, facing deep economic malaise and historical headwinds, race to deliver on the president’s domestic agenda, which includes an ambitious social policy package that faces serious legislative hurdles, hampered by Democratic holdout senator Joe Manchin.
“We have a plan to give you a better country, and they have a ploy to win back power for themselves,” said New York congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “We are tackling the tough problems of the economy and the pandemic. They seek only to win power and will say or do anything to achieve that.”
The GOP’s amplifiers go up to 12. Critical race theory, vaccine mandates, abortion, Democrats are commies, whatever it takes. They mean to “heighten the contradictions” or some such. Mostly, they think there is still headroom to dial up their base’s animosity and paranoia to a level at which they will still turn out to vote before collapsing from the exhaustion or begin having aneurysms.
A recent report by the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution, titled “competing visions of America,” found that 80% of Republicans believe that “America is in danger of losing its culture and identity”. By comparison, just 33% of Democrats agree. Meanwhile, 70% of Republicans say “American culture and way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s” while more than six in 10 Democrats say it has changed for the better.
As Democrats negotiate amongst themselves over how to pass Biden’s signature domestic policy bill, Republicans have been seeding outrage over – and fundraising off of – all manner of perceived injustices from cancel culture to Dr Seuss to the 1619 project. They are hammering the administration over its handling of immigration at the southern border and Democrats over rising crime rates in cities. And Biden’s efforts to pursue racial equity as part of his governing agenda has drawn accusations of racism from conservatives who say the efforts discriminate against white people.
The southern freakout over sharing power with the nonwhite Other, a voting majority in some southern states, precipitated the Compromise of 1877, the Jim Crow backlash to Reconstruction, and the Wilmington insurrection of 1898. Do you hear history rhyming?
Republicans mean to make hearing it unavoidable in 2022.
