The Grammar of the Culture War

Culture wars are part of the deep structure of populism. To quote Democratic strategist David Kusnet, “There are two populist messages: #1 Left populism: They’re robbing you blind. #2. Right populism: They think they’re better than you. Progressives should stick with #1 and not fall into #2.”

In both recipes, the magic ingredient is resentment. There’s a lot of it to go around. The fragile and failing middle class is very angry, and they should be: If wage increases had continued to match productivity increases in recent decades, as they did after World War II, they would be 43 percent higher than today. This anger isn’t vanishing anytime soon. The only question is whether it will be directed at economic elites (“robbing you blind”) or cultural elites (“think they’re better than you”).

Far-right populism deflects anger away from economic elites onto cultural elites. This works because social class is expressed not just through economics but also through profound cultural differences. One central cultural fissure is the divide between self-development and self-discipline.

Middle-status workers highly value self-discipline and rule-following because that’s what’s needed to show up on time, without an “attitude,” take orders, and succeed in blue-, pink- and routine white-collar jobs. These workers also value the traditional institutions that anchor self-discipline. For example, the lower the education level, the higher the endorsement of traditional gender roles. This makes sense: in the eternal scrum for social honor, class ideals are unattainable, but nonelites can attain gender ideals. It is impossible to become a billionaire, but it is possible, through self-discipline, to be a “real” man.

The logic of life for order-givers is very different. Elites highly value self-development because they need to be at the top of their game to survive and thrive in professional and managerial jobs. Elites’ best move in the scrum for social honor is sophistication, which displays both their high human capital (“I am educated and intelligent”) and their moral capital (“I think things through for myself and am not bound by tradition”).

LGBTQ rights are a clear example of this divide. A 2022 poll found that nearly half of Americans with high-school educations or less, but only about a quarter of those with higher education levels, opposed gay marriage. Support for gay marriage rises as we scale the income ladder. Here we see the logic in action: elites’ concern for self-development extends to sexual expression, while their embrace of a wide range of genders and sexualities displays admirable sophistication.

Savvy economic elites use these class cultural divides to form alliances with nonelites. Think of Rupert Murdoch, via Fox News, intentionally building a coalition with average viewers via culture-war content that rails against “elites,” defined per David Kusnet’s populism #2. Tucker Carlson railed against elites in 70 percent of his shows between 2016 and 2021. Note that the target audience is not the poor: it’s middle-status people in routine jobs who have been pulled into these alliances, fueling the rise of the far right both in Europe and the United States.

The Right’s “they’re looking down on you” narrative taps something real: cultural elites do think of themselves as enlightened, and of nonelites as backward “deplorables.” Conservative elites understand the dynamics of culture wars far better than liberals do. It’s time for the Left to wise up.

The Gay Marriage Template

Facing repeated defeat in a long string of culture wars, some liberal commentators are calling for the party to become more moderate. That’s never made sense to me. I’ve been a social justice warrior for forty years, since long before the Right turned those words into a culture-war epithet, and I can tell you that the only way to change deeply embedded power differentials is to be a pain in the ass. In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans supported gay marriage. By 2022, 71 percent did. That never would have happened if advocates had tamely accepted majority values.

But how you’re a pain matters a lot. And here the success of gay marriage is singularly instructive, providing a formula for defusing the culture wars without giving up on cherished values. When the gay liberation movement pivoted to gay marriage, it demonstrated literacy in the values of ordinary Americans and modeled how to invite them into the struggle for social justice without condescension.

A million mainstream pundits have argued that Democrats have a messaging problem, and huge amounts of donor money have gone into initiatives to change messaging. They haven’t worked for three reasons. First, they typically rely on focus groups that uncover the same blue-collar cultural values again and again, without a deeper understanding of how those cultural values are cherished for their ability to turn servitude into honor. Second, too often the assumption is that the only problem is a messaging problem, which can lead to campaigns that feel like attempts to manipulate less-educated voters, further reinforcing the “looking down on you” narrative. Third, and most important, changing messaging often isn’t possible unless it’s accompanied by something deeper: changing priorities.

Here’s an oft-forgotten fact: gay marriage was not a priority for many in the gay liberation movement. In the 1990s, many leaders saw marriage as patriarchal and “would have preferred a different battle,” as Matt Coles, who led the American Civil Liberties Union’s marriage equality initiative, told me. Gay activists at the time were far more interested in legal protections against discrimination and the broader liberation of sexual expression. In that context, inclusion into the retrograde institution of marriage seemed to many activists like an uninspiring fight.

The movement’s pivot to marriage “really came from, for lack of a better word, ordinary folks, with the most overwhelming support for marriage coming from people of color and low-income people,” Coles told me. Not until 1990 did he begin to understand the wisdom of centering marriage and its relationship to the movement’s overall objective of minimizing homophobia.

After Coles and others helped pass a domestic partnership law in California, the Alameda County clerk organized a big celebration, with heart balloons and a procession down the grand staircase by couples who had just tied the knot. As Coles reflected to me:

I said, I want nothing to do with this,and I’m not even going to hang around for it because I thought it performative. But I stood there and watched, and a couple of things leapt out at me. The people coming down the stairs were not doctors and lawyers; they were ordinary average people. I looked at their faces and said to myself, I get it now. It’s the prom and the wedding ceremony and everything rolled into one. They’re finally able to say to mom, yeah, I got married.

The push for gay marriage came from people who wanted to join the mainstream, not smash it. Gay liberation activists had the good sense to pay attention. Importantly, Coles and other leaders didn’t back away from other facets of LGBTQ rights. But they listened to nonelites and changed the order of their priorities in order to build a broad coalition.

This involved shifting away from the language that most appealed to the movement’s gatekeepers — the language of discrimination and legal rights — to the language of commitment. The ACLU conducted focus groups where that word came up again and again.

Coles began to understand that this emphasis on commitment — borrowed from the discipline side of the discipline vs. development divide — was critical to combating homophobia on a mass scale. Gay relationships were stereotyped as “tawdry, shabby things,” Coles told me. The key to “changing the way Americans thought about this was to show them not so much the consequences of discrimination as to show them the commitment.”

Beat Them at Their Own Game

Gay liberation is a rare social movement that listened to nonelites and tapped the moral intuitions of ordinary people in order to realize progressive values. This is the path past far-right populism, which currently has a nigh-monopoly on the priorities of average Americans.

This advice differs sharply from the conventional wisdom that the only way for Democrats to bridge the diploma divide is for progressives to drop issues that are dear to them and become centrists. While it’s true that college grads of every racial group are more likely to identify as liberal than nongrads of their own group, it’s not true that nonelites are more centrist. In fact, people who identify as moderates are not necessarily more likely than liberals to embrace centrist positions — they’re called “moderates” because they hold a mix of liberal and conservative positions, often passionately so.

In an environment dominated by populist anger, becoming Republican-lite isn’t the answer. The answer is to respect that blue-collar values make sense in the context of blue-collar lives — and to develop the cultural competence to connect progressive goals with working-class priorities.

We won’t get anywhere by becoming tepid centrists who stand for nothing. But we do need to learn to listen respectfully to nonelites, be willing to make the trade-offs, and do the hard work of connecting to average people.