Culture War and the Failure of Liberalism

Brad Carson, who ran for US Senate in Oklahoma as a Democrat eloquently writes

As a defeated Senate candidate in the most red of red states, many people have asked me for insights into the Democratic Party's failure to connect with culturally conservative voters. Much has already been written on this topic, and scholars will add more. But I do know this: The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself. Banning gay marriage or abortion would not be sufficient to heal the cultural gulf that exists in this nation. The culture war is about matters more fundamental still: whether nationality is, in a globalized world, a random fact of no more significance than what hospital one was born in or whether it is the source of identity and even political legitimacy; whether one's self is a matter of choice or whether it is predetermined, before birth, by the cultural membership of one's family; whether an individual is just that--a free-floating atom--or whether the individual is part of a long chain that both predates and continues long after any particular person; whether concepts like honor and shame, which seem so quaint, are still relevant in a world that values only "tolerance." These are questions not for politicians but for philosophers, and, in the end, it is the failure of liberal philosophy that we saw on November 2.

As written elsewhere, liberals fail to understand their own defeats, writing it off to some flaw in the masses that don't respond to their moral superiority. On this theme, Carson goes on to write

For the vast majority of Oklahomans--and, I would suspect, voters in other red states--these transcendent cultural concerns are more important than universal health care or raising the minimum wage or preserving farm subsidies. Pace Thomas Frank, the voters aren't deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones. The political left has always had a hard time understanding this, preferring to believe that the masses are enthralled by a "false consciousness" or Fox News or whatever today's excuse might be. But the truth is quite simple: Most voters in a state like Oklahoma--and I venture to say most other Southern and Midwestern states--reject the general direction of American culture and celebrate the political party that promises to reform or revise it.

Much comment has been made on the role of "moral values" in this election. While this is overblown, it does reflect what Carson is talking about. In the last year, there were two issues that rose up to define the so-called "culture war": gay marriage and the pledge of allegiance. The problem with gay marriage is not so much the issue itself, but the arrogant way some supporters responded. As George Will says,

Republicans should send a thank-you note to San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom -- liberalism's George Wallace, apostle of "progressive'' lawlessness. He did even more than the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts to energize the 11 state campaigns to proscribe same-sex marriage. All 11 measures passed, nine with more than 60 percent of the vote. They passed in Oregon and Michigan, while those states were voting for Kerry. Ohio's measure, by increasing conservative turnout, may have given Bush the presidency. Kentucky's may have saved Sen. Jim Bunning.

Newsom's heavily televised grandstanding -- illegally issuing nearly 4,000 same-sex marriage licenses -- underscored what many Americans find really insufferable. It is not so much same-sex marriage that enrages them: Most Americans oppose an anti-same-sex amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is why it fell 49 votes short of the required two-thirds in the House and 19 short in the Senate. Rather, what provokes people is moral arrogance expressed in disdain for democratic due process.

This arrogance of people like Newsom and the Massachusetts Supreme Court trying to shove a certain point of view down people's throats is what angered so many.

Both gay marriage and the pledge were examples of the cultural left going too far, undermining American traditions and values in a way that hadn't been done before. In the past, liberals fed off American values. For example on race issues, it was liberalism that woke people up to the injustices around them, appealing to American values of justice and equality. Now liberalism was attacking American values for the sake of some small group. It was liberalism gone amok. All the frantic warnings emanating from the cultural right for decades suddenly found a resonance for many Americans, including those well outside the religious right.

The liberalism avowed by so much of the Democratic party is out of step with mainstream America. Carson concludes, "And, while the defeat was all my own, the failure was of the party to which I swear allegiance, which uncritically embraces a modernity that so many others reject."