Tag Archives: culture war

Pool Tables And Gas Stoves

Sometimes, we need to remind ourselves that drumming up fear to achieve less-than-admirable ends is nothing new.

I was on the treadmill the other day, listening to old show tunes on my iPods. ( My very unsophisticated musical tastes run to Dean Martin and the Rat Pack, although I make exceptions, especially for show tunes.) I was speed-walking to the Music Man. 

“Ya Got Trouble” was the song sung by Professor Harold Hill when he is using the fact that a pool hall has opened in River City to stoke fear in the city’s residents.

You probably remember:

Friends, let me tell you what I mean. You got one, two, three, four, five, six pockets in a table. Pockets that mark the diff’rence Between a gentlemen and a bum, With a capital “B,” And that rhymes with “P” and that stands for pool! And all week long your River City Youth’ll be frittering away, I say your young men’ll be frittering! Frittering away their noontime, suppertime, chore time too! Get the ball in the pocket, Never mind gettin’ Dandelions pulled Or the screen door patched or the beefsteak pounded. Never mind pumpin’ any water ‘Til your parents are caught with the Cistern empty On a Saturday night and that’s trouble, Oh, yes we got lots and lots a’ trouble. I’m thinkin’ of the kids in the knickerbockers, Shirt-tail young ones, peekin’ in the pool Hall window after school, ya got trouble, folks.

Hill ramps up his warning, telling the “fine folks” of River City what’s in store:

One fine night, they leave the pool hall, Headin’ for the dance at the Armory! Libertine men and Scarlet women! And Rag-time, shameless music That’ll grab your son and your daughter With the arms of a jungle animal instinct.

Scary! Hill warns that, “the idle brain is the devil’s playground!” But then he offers the antidote to all this evil: a boy’s band. For which he will sell them the instruments and band uniforms.

Contemporary Harold Hills are selling medicines for imaginary diseases  all around us.

Did the Consumer Product Safety Commission issue a finding that gas stoves can cause asthma in small children? OMG! “They” are coming for our gas ranges! Those “woke” bureaucrats in Washington are going to ban the use of gas cookstoves, and they probably won’t even pay compensation! That’s what you get when you let Democrats run the administrative branch of government!

The fear and frenzy stirred up by GOP culture warriors prompted the head of the agency to issue a statement confirming the research results and the fact that the CPSC is looking for ways to reduce indoor air quality hazards, but does not intend to ban gas stoves. 

CPSC also is actively engaged in strengthening voluntary safety standards for gas stoves.  And later this spring, we will be asking the public to provide us with information about gas stove emissions and potential solutions for reducing any associated risks.  This is part of our product safety mission – learning about hazards and working to make products safer. 

There’s a lesson here for Americans who laughed at the comedic effectiveness of Harold Hill, or are currently marveling at the ability of Republican culture warriors to convince lots of people that “the government” is coming for their gas stoves. Stoking fear about– and then directing anger against– otherwise innocuous matters, works. In the Music Man, the tactic sold band instruments; in the great gas stove eruption, it allows angry citizens to confirm their anti-“wokeness” and determination to vote against “the libs.”

We see the tactic all around us. 

Are LGBTQ people more visible? Those Drag Queen story hours and library books about Heather’s Two Mommies are turning toddlers gay!

Are the kids learning about events we older folks didn’t encounter in school? Things like the Trail of Tears or the Tulsa massacre? Allowing teachers to include the seamier side of American history is a “woke” attack on American Exceptionalism and the firmly-held belief that we are–and have always been–the good guys.

Did epidemiologists tell us to  protect our friends and families from disease by wearing masks during a pandemic? They are obviously part of that “woke” elite that is constantly attacking American freedom!

Etcetera, etcetera.

Ya got trouble, my friend–right here in  America! You need to fight back. Threaten the library. Scream at school board members and have the smug culture warriors who dominate your legislature tell teachers what they can and cannot say. Insist that the President fire Dr. Fauci! (Whoops–too late. He retired.)

And tell your friends on Facebook that the government will have to pry your gas stove out of your cold, dead, oven-mitted hands.

Harold Hill clones are everywhere.

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When Common Sense Became “Woke”

In a recent column, Paul Krugman traced the growing anti-environmentalism of the GOP. He noted that, in the 1990s, self-identified Republicans and Democrats weren’t that far apart in their environmental views, but that since 2008 or so, Republicans have become much less supportive of environmental initiatives. After considering several possible reasons for that devolution (“follow the money” among them), he concluded that

What has happened, I’d argue, is that environmental policy has been caught up in the culture war — which is, in turn, largely driven by issues of race and ethnicity. This, I suspect, is why the partisan divide on the environment widened so much after America elected its first Black president.

One especially notable aspect of The Times’s investigative report on state treasurers’ punishing corporations seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions is the way these officials condemn such corporations as “woke.”

Wokeness normally means talking about racial and social justice. On the right — which is increasingly defined by attempts to limit the rights of Americans who aren’t straight white Christians — it has become a term of abuse. Teaching students about the role of racism in American history is bad because it’s woke. But so, apparently, are many other things, like Cracker Barrel offering meatless sausage and being concerned about climate change.

If this seems crazy, it’s because it is. Evidently, a substantial percentage of the American population is certifiably looney-tunes…

One of the most compelling explanations for that insanity was recently offered by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic. Nichols was opining about  political violence, or the possibility of another civil war. As he noted, however,  the actual Civil War was “about something.” Unlike today’s culture wars.

Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.

Nichols writes that the “soldiers” fighting “wokeness” talk about “liberty” and “freedom,” but those are really just code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and generalized paranoia.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.

Donald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do: He has made their lives interesting. He has made them feel important. He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character. Trump, to his supporters, is the avenging angel who is going to lay waste to the “elites,” the smarty-pantses and do-gooders, the godless and the smug, the satisfied and the comfortable.

In other words, Trump is leading the battle against “woke” folks. You know, people who have the nerve to suggest that conclusions should be based upon verifiable evidence, that many if not most of the issues we face are complicated, and that knowledge and expertise are desirable and not simply an elitist construct devised to make less educated people feel inferior.

It”s “woke” to admit that racism and anti-Semitism and homophobia still exist; “woke” to recognize that climate change is real and that it threatens our future; “woke” to criticize the “Big Lie;” “woke” to argue that women are entitled to agency over their own lives and bodies…

To those on the political Right, to be “woke” doesn’t simply describe people who have awakened to obvious realities and begun trying to ameliorate inequities. To the True Believers, the Christian Nationalists, “woke” is today’s “mark of the beast.” 

So here we are.

“Wokeness”  no longer means you’ve reached certain conclusions about contemporary society based on research, observation and  common sense. It’s morphed. It has become a label to be applied to one’s mortal enemies–and a threat to be defeated at all costs. 

 It is simply not possible for rational folks to reason with the True Believers. The old adage is right–you can’t reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into. 

Welcome to the all-encompassing culture war.

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Republicans Do Have An Agenda

A number of pundits have focused on the apparent lack of a GOP agenda going into the midterm campaign season.  They’ve noted that Mitch McConnell (aka “Dr. Evil”) has all but disavowed the list of unpopular proposals that Rick Scott produced earlier this year, and the lack of any other Republican platform.

So there’s no GOP agenda? Texas Republicans beg to differ.

As Heather Cox Richardson recently reported, Texas Republicans have put everything we suspected “out there” for all to see.  And if that platform, that agenda, that fever dream, doesn’t make chills run down your spine, there’s something wrong with you.

Delegates to a convention of the Texas Republican Party approved platform planks rejecting “the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and [holding] that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States”; requiring students “to learn about the dignity of the preborn human,” including that life begins at fertilization; treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice”; locking the number of Supreme Court justices at 9; getting rid of the constitutional power to levy income taxes; abolishing the Federal Reserve; rejecting the Equal Rights Amendment; returning Christianity to schools and government; ending all gun safety measures; abolishing the Department of Education; arming teachers; requiring colleges to teach “free-market liberty principles”; defending capital punishment; dictating the ways in which the events at the Alamo are remembered; protecting Confederate monuments; ending gay marriage; withdrawing from the United Nations and the World Health Organization; and calling for a vote “for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”

If this autocratic, theocratic and incredibly stupid wish list appeals to even a significant minority of Texans, I hope they will “assert Texas’ status as an independent nation” and secede.  Rational human beings–not to mention people who believe in the rule of law and the clear meaning of the Constitution and Bill of Rights–won’t miss them.

If Americans needed any further evidence of just how far the GOP has deviated from its former beliefs–not to mention sanity–Texans have just provided it.

Unfortunately, the GOP lurch off the radical cliff isn’t limited to Texas.

Here in Indiana, we’ve long had Republican legislators who are looney-tunes–the gun nuts who want everyone to be able to pack heat with no license or background check; the religious warriors who want to define religious liberty as the (limited) right of every American to live in accordance with the warriors’ own religious doctrines; the anti-intellectuals who fear new ideas and want to dictate educational curricula (or just replace the public schools with vouchers to be used primarily at religious schools); and of course, a hearty sprinkling of garden-variety homophobes and racists– but generally, saner heads within the super-majority have somewhat dampened their influence.

We’ve also been lucky that pious Pence was replaced by Eric Holcomb. While I have disagreed with Governor Holcomb on specific issues (sending back $ to taxpayers rather than using those dollars to address Indiana’s myriad deficits, for example), he has mostly been a reasonable and thoughtful official, out of the mold of former Republicans.

The Indiana GOP rejected Holcomb and the so-called Republican “establishment” this week in favor of the cult members and the Big Lie. Diego Morales defeated incumbent Holli Sullivan for the nomination to secretary of state in Indiana — an office documents show once fired him .

Sullivan’s loss is a major blow to the so-called establishment wing of the party, and yet another sign that Gov. Eric Holcomb’s influence is dwindling in his second term. Holcomb had appointed Sullivan in March 2021 after then-Secretary of State Connie Lawson announced her retirement.

As WFYI reported,

Morales’s bid was viewed by many as a challenge to the governor and the so-called Republican “establishment.”

Morales, whose family immigrated to Indiana from Guatemala, has previously pushed the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. He’s criticized Indiana’s election security, arguing the state needs to do more to prevent non-citizens from voting. And he wants to cut in half the number of early voting days before each election, from 28 days to 14.

“First of all, we are going to be efficient,” Morales said. “Number two, we are going to save some taxpayers money.”

After his win, Morales preached unity among his party. During the convention, many of his supporters booed and heckled current Secretary of State Sullivan.

In red states across the country, very much including Indiana, the inmates are running the asylum. I don’t know where that asylum is located, but it isn’t in the America I inhabit.

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The Right Kind Of Culture War

When we come across references to “culture war,” most of us–whatever our political orientation– immediately think of issues raised by the political right. (I tend to envision the fundamentalist Christian Right.) However we picture the culture warriors, the battles being fought are almost always focused on so-called “family values” (women’s reproductive autonomy, homosexuality, etc.) and a “law and order patriotism” that is performative and superficial–a stubborn “my country right or wrong” approach. Plus, of course, a generous dollop of racism/White Supremacy.

Jennifer Rubin deconstructs those issues in a recent column for the Washington Post.

Republican cultural memes are galling. The GOP has made a national issue out of something that does not exist: teaching critical race theory in public schools. Republicans claim to be on the side of the police and the military, but members of the MAGA cohort have regularly scorned Capitol and D.C. police officers who defended them on Jan. 6, smeared the military as “woke,” and even called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, a “pig” and “stupid.” Republicans claim to be “real” Americans but make traitors (e.g., Confederate generals, Ashli Babbitt) into martyrs.

But Rubin goes beyond a critique of these Rightwing tropes, arguing that a neglect to respond to Republican demagoguery and descent into anti-American authoritarianism equates to a failure to defend the ideal of multiracial democracy. She wants to see the rest of us move to reset and redefine America’s culture war.

Rubin wants Democrats, especially, to “flip the script”– to campaign on “democratic values,” and to point out that Republicans have become a party defending violent thugs and traitors.

Democrats defend the Constitution, which conservative “originalists” used to claim as their own, while Republicans support the man who sought to overturn the election (“just say the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” he told the Justice Department, seeking pretext for his Jan. 6 gambit).

Her basic charge (which is accurate) is that Republicans who continue to echo Trump’s “big lie” or who voted not to certify election results, or who pretend that January 6th was not an insurrection, are  behaving in ways that are anti-American.

Whose side was my opponent on? Why wouldn’t he/she vote to investigate the worst domestic terrorist attack in decades? Republicans have never been shy about challenging Democrats’ patriotism, and here Democrats actually have grounds to call out Republicans for refusing to both defend the Constitution and respect the votes of their own constituents. Democrats should also challenge their opponents to pledge to accept election results even if they lose and denounce any threat of violence to overturn the will of voters.

In a paragraph that really resonated with me, Rubin also advocated for policies to shore up civic knowledge. She suggests the establishment of a “democracy corps” that would pay young people “to set up civics programs, teach media literacy, serve as poll workers and engage in other pro-democracy activities.” She urges Democrats running for state and local office to endorse mandates for civics instruction in grades K-12.  And she quite properly advises them to call out the racists and crackpots trying to get schoolteachers to stop teaching about the Ku Klux Klan and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The bottom line–as Rubin obviously recognizes–is the danger in allowing the Right to define the terms of America’s culture wars. There’s an old saying among lawyers to the effect that “he who frames the issue wins the debate.” Those of us who reject the Right’s stance on its issues do so because we understand their positions to be contrary to what this country and its constitution are all about–in a word, we find the misogyny, racism, homophobia and the rest to be profoundly anti-American.

Rubin is absolutely right when she argues that we need to do more than just reject that anti-Americanism. We need to wage our own culture war on behalf of the democratic norms and equal civic status required by the  Americanism we embrace.

Those of us who recognize and accept the American Idea need to enlist–it’s a war worth fighting.

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Today’s GOP Even Frightens David Brooks

David Brooks frustrates me. Sometimes, I disagree strongly with his “take” on the American condition (usually offered from what seems a self-consciously “elevated” vantage point), but sometimes, he hits the nail squarely on the head. I continue to read his columns in the New York Times for those latter instances, of which last Friday’s was one.

Titled “The GOP is Getting Even Worse,” Brooks commented on the cultural hysteria that has clearly gripped the Republicans’ (declining) base.

There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

Survey research provides support for that observation. Brooks points to a poll taken in late January, in which respondents were asked whether politics is more about “enacting good public policy” or more about “ensuring the survival of the country as we know it. ” Fifty-one percent of Trump Republicans said survival; a mere 19 percent chose policy.

Another poll asked Americans which of two statements came closest to their view: “It’s a big, beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated” or “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”

Those who read this blog can guess what’s coming: More than 75 percent of Biden voters chose “a big, beautiful world.” Two-thirds of Trump voters chose “our lives are threatened.”

Brooks is absolutely right when he writes that

Liberal democracy is based on a level of optimism, faith and a sense of security. It’s based on confidence in the humanistic project: that through conversation and encounter, we can deeply know each other across differences; that most people are seeking the good with different opinions about how to get there; that society is not a zero-sum war, but a conversation and a negotiation.

He is also right when he observes that the Republican response to Biden and his agenda has largely been anemic “because the base doesn’t care about mere legislation, just their own cultural standing.”

For years, the refrain from what Americans call “the Left” (and what is globally considered pretty middle-of-the-road) has been “why do so many people vote against their own best interests?” That question, however, rests on a faulty premise. Moderate and leftwing folks define “best interests” in largely economic terms. Voters would be “better off” financially or more likely to find employment if they voted differently. But today’s Republicans see their “best interests” in cultural and racial terms, not economic promises.

The overwhelmingly White Christian supporters of today’s GOP see a demographic shift that will eventually rob them of what is clearly most important to them–far more important than a good job or a fairer tax system or the rate of inflation. Their “interest” is in continued cultural and racial dominance–and as the research shows, many of them are willing to engage in violence, a la January 6th, to protect that dominance.

It’s scary.

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