Instead, many are doubling down on the sort of cultural issues that helped propel Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s office in Virginia. For example, Republican candidates could probably cruise to victory in this fall’s elections just by talking about inflation. Some days it seems as if this is the only thing the party does. The Republican Party capitalizes on this. Liberals dominate the elite cultural institutions - the universities, much of the mainstream news media, entertainment, many of the big nonprofits - and many do not seem to understand how infuriatingly condescending it looks when they describe their opponents as rubes and bigots. Many progressives have developed an inability to see how good and wise people could be on the other side, a lazy tendency to assume that anybody who’s not a social progressive must be a racist or a misogynist, a tendency to think the culture wars are merely a distraction Republican politicians kick up to divert attention from the real issues, like economics - as if the moral health of society was some trivial sideshow.Įven worse, many progressives have been blind to their own cultural power. Progressive elites are plagued by an inability to understand the nature and function of social issues in American life as anything other than a battle between the forces of truth and justice on one side and those of ignorance and bigotry on the other.”īut over the last few decades, as Republicans have been using cultural issues to rally support more and more, Democrats have understood what’s going on less and less. He added: “All this is a perfect example of why the left’s cultural aggression is alienating to so many voters.
He noted that “all the ‘experts’ that the FiveThirtyEight writers cite in their piece are invested in believing that the progressive worldview is the objective one, and that any deviations from it are the result of irrational or insidious impulses in the electorate.” Nate Hochman, writing in the conservative National Review, recognized a hanging curve when he saw one and he walloped the piece. The essay had a very heavy “deplorables are idiots” vibe. In February, FiveThirtyEight ran a piece called “ Why Democrats Keep Losing Culture Wars.” The core assertion was that Republicans prevail because a lot of Americans are ignorant about issues like abortion and school curriculum, and they believe the lies the right feeds them. I’m a fan of FiveThirtyEight, a website that looks at policy issues from a data-heavy perspective, but everyone publishes a clunker once in a while.
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