Last Wednesday, I focused on two introductory paragraphs in one of Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters. Today, I want to revisit another paragraph from that same letter, in which Richardson quotes from a speech made by our creepy, faux “Hillbilly” Vice President.
Here’s that quote, from a 2021 interview.
“American conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
That quote is the very essence of MAGA– the whine of White Christian males who are furious that American culture is depriving them of “ruling class” status, and who are determined to take the country back to the “good old days” when women, Black people and other “inferior” sorts knew our place.
I have previously noted that what Trump, Vance, Musk and the rest of MAGA are trying to do is inconsistent with today’s American culture–a point with which Vance rather obviously agrees. The question is: when politically powerful officials attempt to change the culture–when they embark on a project to reverse cultural changes–can they succeed?
Can this administration fulfill JD Vance’s fondest hope, and return us to the 1950s?
I doubt it, although they are certainly trying. (The recent attack on the Smithsonian Institution is a case on point, as are efforts to erase the contributions of women and minorities from government websites, and restore Confederates names to national monuments.)
I found an excellent 2020 essay on this point, in a publication called The Minnesota Reformer. It’s worth reading in its entirety. The author suggested that in 2016, Republicans “decided to nominate the man who most loudly voiced their fears, who promised most explicitly to protect them from the cultural changes threatening them.”
Conservatives may argue that with laws such as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, American liberals have indeed used the political system to drive cultural change, but that argument confuses cause with effect. Those laws, while historic, did not drive cultural change, they were the products of cultural changes that had already occurred. The civil rights movement of the ‘50s and early ‘60s, brought into American living rooms by the new technology of television, had made people see things differently, to think about things differently. Only after the civil rights movement changed hearts and minds, after it changed what was deemed culturally acceptable, were the laws changed to reflect that culture.
The essay argues that America’s government, with its constitutional limitations,
is not capable of producing cultural change on the scale that we are witnessing. It can slow such changes, for a while; it can adapt to them and regulate them and in the end it must reflect them, but it cannot create them. Only highly intrusive governments such as Soviet Russia, Communist China, Nazi Germany and revolutionary Iran can force such profound change.
As the writer notes later in the essay, “A government that is large enough, intrusive enough and brutal enough to tamp down cultural change in such an environment is not a government consistent with American traditions.”
JD Vance–a Yale Law “hillbilly”–clearly understands that. So do the (few) intellectuals in the MAGA movement–and so did the authors of Project 2025. Thus, the obvious conclusion: if only “highly intrusive” governments like Russia and Nazi Germany are able to force the changes they want, then America’s constitutional democracy must be replaced with such a government. Trump, Vance, Musk et al are proceeding at a furious pace with an effort to replace America’s admittedly messy and contentious liberal democracy with a fascist regime that will be capable of Vance’s desired “ruthless exercise of power.”
The author of the linked essay suggests that we may be witnessing the last stage of the culture wars, “the deciding battle of a decades-long effort by conservative Americans to enlist government as their champion against cultural changes that they have long fought against.”
Those of us who believe in the American Idea (and applaud the cultural changes consistent with it) simply cannot allow that to happen.
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