Flickr/Rob Chandanais
The emphatically old-timey presidential candidacy of Mike Huckabee has spurred an interesting discussion among some liberal commentators about the status of America's culture war, beginning with this piece by Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig which all but declared the culture war over, leading to thoughtful responses from Ed Kilgore and Heather Digby Parton. When you view the changes of the last few years or the last few decades, it's easy for liberals to feel a little triumphal, even if there are some areas (like abortion and guns, as Parton points out) where the right is making more progress than the left. But the culture war never ends, it merely renews itself in an altered form.
If you take a broad view, much of the history of the United States is a slow but inexorable movement in a progressive direction, as one issue after another is eventually settled in favor of the position liberals had been advocating, from slavery to women's suffrage to Jim Crow to the legalization of contraception to sex discrimination and up to gay rights today. You can find exceptions, some of which are extremely consequential, but the fundamental trend in social relations moves in only one direction. It would be a mistake, however, to look at one historical moment's iteration of the long culture war and say that conservatism is on its way out or about to undergo some fundamental transformation.
As long as society is changing-i.e., forever-conservatism will find its purpose in resisting that change, because that's what it means to be a conservative. Conservatism seeks to conserve, and in many cases return to a previous order. And like liberalism, it adapts. For instance, conservatives lost the argument on most of the things that made up the culture war of the 1960s and 1970s-Vietnam, the sexual revolution, the principle (if not the reality) of equality for women-so they approached those issues in ways that accommodated the new reality, or moved on to other issues entirely. The culture war is infinitely renewable.
There's no perfect definition of what makes any particular issue part of the culture war or not, but I think that it often has to do with the ground where the personal meets the political and questions of identity are contested. It's often about who I am, who you are, who we are, who's part of "us" and who isn't. Which brings me to an article in today's New York Times that raises some of these identity questions with regard to Marco Rubio. If Rubio remains one of the leading contenders in the presidential race as other candidates begin to fall away, I think we're going to hear a lot more discussion of how the GOP's older white base thinks about this young Latino:
But there was something larger that drew Mr. Hallihan, a former Iowa State basketball coach, to Mr. Rubio, 43, the son of poor Cuban immigrants.
"The day of the older white guy is kind of out," said Mr. Hallihan, a 70-year-old white guy.
As Mr. Rubio has introduced himself to curious, and overwhelmingly Caucasian, Republican audiences from Iowa to New Hampshire, he has vaulted to the front ranks of the early pack of likely presidential candidates, partly because of his natural political talent. But it may owe just as much to the combination of his personal story and the balm it offers to a party that has been repeatedly scalded by accusations of prejudice.
He says he is highlighting his background only to share his own twist on the American dream-not out of any desire to make history on behalf of Hispanics. But Mr. Rubio and those around him are also acutely aware of the sometimes raw tensions in his party, between those unsettled by an increasingly diverse society and those who say Republicans must embrace the multihued America of 2015.
Now let's think back to 2008. As I've said many times, liberals were so excited about Barack Obama in that campaign because he embodied a certain kind of cultural change. He was the person they wanted to be, or at least be friends with: multiracial, educated, cosmopolitan, urban, and urbane. Conservatives' rage against Obama comes from the same place: he represents a change in American society that they find intolerable.
If you spend any time listening to conservatives, you quickly realize that their rhetoric, whether it's coming from politicians or media figures like Bill O'Reilly, is absolutely awash in nostalgia, a yearning for the supposedly simpler time of their youth, when, among other things, everything they saw was theirs. It was their kind of people who ran things, their kind of music that came from the radio, their priorities and values that were accepted as right and true. They look around now and see so much of American culture shifting away from them, and it's profoundly unsettling, few things more so than the fact that the president of the United States is a liberal black guy with a foreign-sounding name.
But what about Marco Rubio? I think that to some Republicans, he's attractive not so much because he's what they would want in a president in their perfect world, but because they think he might be attractive to other people. It's an acknowledgment of and accommodation to the fact that America has indeed changed, and their party needs to change in response. And if the conservative Republican with the best chance of winning the White House is a 43-year-old Latino, well so be it.
This could be a fascinating dynamic within the primaries, the tension between voters like the one quoted in this story, the older white guy who grudgingly acknowledges that "the day of the older white guy is kind of out," and the many other Republicans who want to stand athwart history, yelling "Stop." In many cases, that tension will exist within each individual voter.
Interestingly enough, the older white guy from a Republican royal family-Jeb Bush-might actually represent a compromise resolution of that tension, since in some ways he's a more modern figure, what with his Mexican wife and his fluent Spanish. On the other hand, if you're attracted to Scott Walker, your beliefs about the culture war probably sound something like this:
Of course, you can say that now, but before you know it you will have retreated from that line and there will be a whole new line that you'll decide is the point beyond which you absolutely will not move. And the culture war will continue on.
