Culture War

The Culture War President

Trump has all but given up on governing. He’s a full-time cultural warrior now.

By BILL SCHER

In the wake of 9/11 and with the Iraq war not yet a year old, President George W. Bush bluntly described himself as a “war president” who makes “decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.”

President Donald Trump is a war president of a different sort: a culture war president. As the New York Times reported this week, “In private, the president and his top aides freely admit that he is engaged in a culture war on behalf of his white, working-class base … against ‘politically correct’ coastal elites … He believes the war was foisted upon him by former President Barack Obama and other Democrats — and he is determined to win.”

Who is winning this culture war presidency? Trump feeds a base that lives to thwart further liberal advancements, but starves everyone else. Democrats ponder endlessly how to win back the hundreds of seats they’ve lost across the country and regain the support of white working class voters, but are constantly drawn into cultural battles that fire up their base but can alienate those very voters. It’s a stalemate—we’re all losing this war.

When viewed from a crude, narrow, electoral perspective, the culture war makes no political sense for anyone. It dominates cable news, electrifies Twitter, revs up partisans on both sides and drives fundraising. But neither party’s presidential candidate cracked 50 percent last year, so neither can feel sanguine about the potency of their base. Our endless and escalating fights over race, abortion, guns, sexuality and now football make it hard for either party to assemble a governing coalition.

Trump may be the aggressor, but the bases of both parties are effectively demanding this culture war be fought, regardless of the political consequences. That leaves Democratic leaders trying to win back white non-college voters while remaining true to their multicultural principles. And it leaves Republicans, many of whom did not ask to be led by Trump and are privately embarrassed by their own voters, resigned to leading a party of white grievance in an increasingly diverse nation.

Tell me how this ends.

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Like Bush’s invasion of Iraq, Trump’s culture war is one of choice—a doomed effort launched after the previous conflict ended in failure.

At the 1992 Republican convention, presidential runner-up Pat Buchanan—a Trump before there was Trump—declared “a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself.” He thundered against “the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women and “putting our wives and daughters and sisters into combat units of the United States Army.” And he defended “the right of small towns and communities to control the raw sewage of pornography that so terribly pollutes our popular culture.”

Republicans didn’t lose Buchanan’s culture war so much as they surrendered. When same-sex couples were granted equal legal rights, few Republicans made a peep. Barack Obama’s policy of assigning combat roles to women was supported by Trump in the campaign and remains in place. Pornographic videos are not only more accessible than ever, but the current Republican president once starred in one.

Yet Trump has taken it upon himself to prosecute a new culture war, albeit one less obsessed with sex than race. He began his campaign playing on stereotypes of immigrants as rapists and hesitating to criticize former KKK leader David Duke. He panders plenty to religious conservatives, but such appeals are not as instinctual for him. For example, less than a year before he rescinded the Obama administration’s guidance promoting freedom for transgender students to use their preferred bathroom, Trump was on Obama’s side.

As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “He was elected to shred the dominant American culture and to give voice to those who felt voiceless in that culture.” One can’t dismiss the economic factors that led white non-college voters to feel so voiceless. But one can’t easily separate them from cultural factors either, as any Trump rally will prove.

Being elected to wage culture war via bully pulpit means less is expected from Trump inside Washington. He doesn’t expend energy navigating the congressional thicket to produce legislation. His main achievement to date, a sudden bipartisan deal to keep the government open for a few months, came after he “appeared to tire of the back and forth” of a tedious meeting. Trump does little on the economy but take credit for what was handed to him.

With the exception of a few cruise missiles lobbed at Syria, his foreign policy is marked by talk, not action. Trump’s actual North Korea policy is not apocalyptic “fire and fury” but the more traditional tool of economic sanctions. He threatens to unilaterally rip up the Iran nuclear deal, then puts out feelers for a fresh round of negotiations. He claimed to have pulled out of the Paris climate deal, but now is exploring a face-saving way to stay in it.

But the culture war? On that battlefield, Trump is the Jason Bourne of trolls: a superhuman, indefatigable one-man army. The man weaponizes rallies and turns tweets into grenades. The barely veiled racial comparison of his succeeding President Barack Obama to a lunar eclipse. The “good people” among the neo-Nazis who just don’t like disrespect for their Confederate “heritage.” The “son of a bitch” black athletes who should be fired for protesting racism during a sporting event. Trump doesn’t shrink from these fights; these fights are his oxygen.

Which is not to say it’s working for him. As a result of producing minimal policy and maximum conflict, Trump today retains majority support among only one demographic: white males without college degrees.

But that’s just fine with him, apparently. Who cares about backlash? The mere act of stirring outrage lets the country know the multicultural left is not calling the shots. If “social justice warriors” rage online and TV talking heads sputter, then as far as he and his #MAGA fans are concerned: Mission Accomplished.

In theory, Trump’s choice of being a culture war divider instead of a bridge-building uniter gives Democrats an opening to consolidate the majority of voters who would call the police if Trump shot somebody on Fifth Avenue. However, there’s little reason to assume Trump’s preoccupation with waging culture war brings any wavering Republicans or independents into the Democratic fold.

Listen to this regretful Trump voter who participated on a CNN panel this week: “I was hoping for his travel ban to kind of go through and not be so divisive.” But of course, a travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries is inherently divisive. It was the first salvo of the culture war presidency. Democrats can’t win over this voter by offering a less divisive version of a travel ban; they want to bury the idea for good.

A common critique of the Democrats’ embrace of cultural liberalism is that it signals a skewed set of priorities to white working-class and non-college educated voters. As the Mahoning County Democratic Party chair told the Washington Post after the election, “people in the heartland thought the Democratic Party cared more about where someone else went to the restroom than whether they had a good-paying job.”

Peter Beinart, in a July essay for The Atlantic, knocked Democrats for abandoning all “ambivalence” toward undocumented immigrants because they became “more reliant on Latino votes.” He warned that Democrats should address concerns that low-skill immigrants depress wages and they “must convince more native-born white Americans that immigrants will not weaken the bonds of national identity.” He did not argue Democrats should scrap proposals that would provide paths to citizenship, but counseled more emphasis on “assimilation” by putting “learning English at the center of their immigration agenda” and “celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.”

There’s just one problem with advice for Democrats to prioritize economics over multiculturalism: The Democratic Party is the multicultural party.

Thirty-five percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters were African-American, Latino or Asian-American. Eight out of every ten LGBT voters are Democrats. But it’s not just about party demographics. Democrats rebuffed naysayers and elected an African-American president. They defeated Buchanan in the last culture war. They became the party of civil rights in the mid-20th century and created a lasting legacy. Obviously, all those victories were followed by backlashes. But you can’t easily convince Democrats they should stop trying to be on the right side of history, when that’s their source of pride.

This is why it’s not possible for Democrats to muffle their voices when Trump forces students into bathrooms that don’t correspond to their gender identity, or kicks transgender soldiers out of the military. When Trump threatens to deport DREAMers, Democrats viscerally spring into action and demand a legislative remedy. When an unarmed African-American is killed by a police officer, they will say “Black Lives Matter.” While Democrats express hope that the young, diverse “Obama coalition” can be reassembled for subsequent elections, these reactions to culture war provocations are not the product of political calculation. They are reflexive. They are rooted in the Democrats’ DNA.

Democrats are nonetheless eager, even desperate, to offer working-class voters a compelling economic agenda. Party leaders—trying to put Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment behind them—insist they don’t view most Trump voters as racist, hoping to encourage them to give the party’s economic plans a fresh look.

But there’s little opportunity for Democrats to promote ideas like the “Better Deal” package that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer unveiled in July. When Trump wages culture war, Democrats fire back and most other issues get lost in the noise. Or if a bread-and-butter issue does break through—and break in the Democrats’ favor, as with health care—Trump will quickly launch a new culture war front. The president was not going to let Jimmy Kimmel hog the spotlight forever; he made sure to turn it to Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry as soon as possible.

It may not be fair to say Democrats care more about social equality and minority rights than jobs and wages, but they cannot care less.

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This is the great tragedy of the culture war: It produces almost nothing constructive. Most of what is fought over, while far from trivial, is symbolic. So there’s less space in our national conversation for complex policy challenges like dismantling institutional racism, providing health care for all Americans or reducing income inequality. Some lives – DREAMers, refugees, transgender soldiers and students – become political pawns or sacrifices. If anyone is reaping political advantage, it’s hard to see it – Trump’s job approval numbers are terrible, yet the Democrats’ edge in early midterm election polling is too thin to ensure they can overcome the culturally divided, gerrymandered map.

But there’s no dodging the draft. So long as Trump is committed to a culture war presidency, everyone will have to pick a side.