Friday, July 16, 2004
Don Quijote's culture war
Thomas Frank has an excellent op-ed here on why the GOP fights the culture war to a standstill
The culture war is more useful to the Republicans as a failure than a success, and they know it.
But it could be worse. The Bush administration has taken a raft of old Republican shibboleths and actually made them policy, to disastrous effect. Iraq was more usefil to Bush as a whipping boy than as an ungovernable colony; it would have been better to run against high taxes than to cut them to the bone and produce huge deficits; SDI is better a pipedream than a very expensive non-functional weapon system. Moderate Republicans are the ones who know that the wacko ideas of the right wing must be praised but never ever made law, and they're gone. It's time to face up to the wackos themselves, before they privatize social security, ignite a real civil war over abortion, gut public schools with vouchers, or provoke war with Iran, North Korea, or Syria. Because if the first term is any guide, that's what the second term will bring us. Just imagine Bush without a re-election incentive...
Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage
Then again, what culture war offensive isn't doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.
Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party's all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior's very object.
The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote "no," and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.
Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.
The culture war is more useful to the Republicans as a failure than a success, and they know it.
But it could be worse. The Bush administration has taken a raft of old Republican shibboleths and actually made them policy, to disastrous effect. Iraq was more usefil to Bush as a whipping boy than as an ungovernable colony; it would have been better to run against high taxes than to cut them to the bone and produce huge deficits; SDI is better a pipedream than a very expensive non-functional weapon system. Moderate Republicans are the ones who know that the wacko ideas of the right wing must be praised but never ever made law, and they're gone. It's time to face up to the wackos themselves, before they privatize social security, ignite a real civil war over abortion, gut public schools with vouchers, or provoke war with Iran, North Korea, or Syria. Because if the first term is any guide, that's what the second term will bring us. Just imagine Bush without a re-election incentive...
