All posts tagged "Culture War"

According to a former federal prosecutor, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is afflicted by a combination of partisanship and corruption that could tank the entire institution if left unchecked.

In a recent op-ed for the Daily Beast, Shan Wu — who served as counsel to former Attorney General Janet Reno — wrote that members of the conservative majority on the Court are effectively functioning as "fractures" risking the credibility of the nation's highest judicial body. He emphasized that SCOTUS conservatives' brazenly partisan behavior "encourages" flagrant violations of precedent, like Louisiana Republican Governor Jeff Landry signing a bill into law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms.

"Such a law likely would not even have been contemplated but for the court shouting out its conservative majority’s willingness to take on radical causes," Wu wrote....

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Thursday night was allowing far-right officials to "load up the defense bill with culture war amendments" to get their support for the bill, but the extreme changes are dead-on-arrival in the Senate, according to Rep. Jeff Jackson.

Jackson, a Democrat, said votes on abortion, pride flags, and library books dominated the late-night session.

"I’m on the House floor right now (11pm) and basically what’s happening is the Speaker is letting the far-right load up the defense bill with culture war amendments in return for their support of the bill. So we’re voting on abortion, Pride flags, CRT, DEI, library books, etc.," he wrote....

Reading this dizzying array of Fox News attacks on various initiatives to promote healthy eating, I think it's time for an expanded theory on the right wing War on Health. I mean, on one level, this is just pure culture war. Healthy food and exercise have been relegated to "hippie" behavior, and sitting on your ass stuffing fried food in your face has been associated with "Real America", and so even the most innocuous reference to healthy habits causes a knee-jerk culture war reaction. It's a lot like the ridiculous temper tantrum over energy efficient light bulbs. (The most comical version of this fight in my direct experience was when I was on Bloggingheads, and my conservative debate opponent decided to rationalize this silly culture war tantrum with the usual aesthetic arguments. Sadly for her, I actually had one of the demonized light bulbs directly on my face---we were buying energy efficient light bulbs before it was the law, man---and was able to address her argument directly. The aesthetic argument is a favorite because people usually don't have the direct evidence on hand to refute it, but alas, Mollie didn't get lucky that day.) But the War on Health is particularly ridiculous because it seems so self-defeating for the people who buy in to it.

This remarkable cartoon that Matt got off of Hendrik Hertzberg says it all, doesn't it? Some of the terminology has changed since this cartoon was published in 1862, when there was a backlash against the Republican party of that era for its perceived liberalism. For instance, the term "Negro worship" has been replaced with "political correctness", though I do imagine the two terms are used to promote roughly the same argument. (Which is that white liberals aren't sincere in their anti-racism, but are just acting out of some sort of guilt that they impose on each other.) "Spirit rapping" is a reference to an admittedly silly trend of the era that is analogous to the various alt medicine and New Age-y crap that often takes off with liberal sorts who reject organized religion, but haven't graduated to rejecting irrationality. "Free love" has turned into an all-purpose complaint about feminism and sexual liberation. I think by "Puritanism" they might have been referring to a particular strain of 19th century progressivism. The modern equivalent would probably be conservatives complaining about the "nanny state". Complaints about "rationalism" have morphed into complaints about "liberal elitism", and particularly denouncing Obama as "arrogant" for having the temerity to suggest facts matter. And complaints about "socialists" and atheists haven't changed one bit, it seems.

[rebelmouse-image 24749702 original_size="432x300" expand=1]Ann was gracious enough to quote me in her marvelous piece on why the culture war isn't going away any time soon, so I'm kicking a link right back at her. Ann argues that the Obama backlash, in all its ugliness, is proof that the culture war was always about a lot more than gay rights or abortion, but was always fundamentally about who gets to lay claim to defining who "real Americans" are and what the larger values of the country are going to be. I don't think that the recent conservative affectation for dressing up in colonial garb* has as much to do with taxes as they're pretending. For one thing, the Boston Tea Partiers weren't actually protesting high taxes, and even a quick glance over Wikipedia demonstrates this. Tea taxes were just a catalyst for a lot of other issues of much greater importance that fundamentally go back to the basic desire of Americans to cease being colonized by the British.

Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith have an article up at Politico making the usual arguments about how Obama has managed to dodge one kind of culture war only to step into another. It's the sort of thing that I believe misses the point, because it implies---incorrectly---that the hysterical right changes much when they shift their focus around. That they've moved their emphasis from anti-feminism to pro-racism isn't really that noteworthy, nor does it mean the former goals are abandoned. It doesn't mean the culture war has changed or is off.