Democrats Are Losing the Culture War

The first year of Trump’s second term has been marked by a broad and growing assault on progressive values, norms, and practices. The administration regards anything associated with DEI, positive discrimination, and other expressions of “woke” social justice as anathema; public and private institutions promoting such ideas have been subject to federal investigations and financial penalties.

Aghast Democrats and allied advocacy groups argue this intimidation leaves no doubt about Trump’s autocratic motives. But their case has thus far proved ineffective. The broader public is increasingly concerned by Trump’s draconian immigration measures and his deployment of National Guard troops in U.S. cities to deter crime. Yet it remains uninspired by Democrats’ appeal to stand up for “democratic values,” which, in the minds of cynical and disaffected voters, implies a sociocultural agenda no less partisan and ideological than Trump’s.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to progressive activists. If “wokeness” isn’t exactly in full retreat, its popular support undeniably plummeted during the Biden era. Extensive polling, the surprising diversity of Trump’s 2024 coalition, and the share of minority voters who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn’t go to the polls last November all indicate there are millions of working Americans who think Democrats don’t share their priorities. Though some research suggests “wokeness” is a minor issue for swing voters today, the official stances taken to represent it—among them, elite support for mass migration, trans activism for kids, and inculcating schools and businesses with “anti-racist” and “decolonial” practices—clearly damaged the Democratic brand. When voters say Democrats are out of touch, the elevation of identity politics and relatively niche beliefs over populist economics is an obvious factor.

Given these hurdles, is it possible for left-populists and chastened progressives to chart a middle course on culture? One credible enough to win over some portion of wage-earners who disdain or have become disillusioned with “wokeness” but which the Brahmin left can accept? A lot will depend on whether Democrats come to terms with the cultural dissonance at the heart of modern progressivism. Progressives who grasp that Democrats lost the plot sometime after the George Floyd protests and Covid tend to focus on rhetorical excesses. Yet more costly than any single position related to progressives’ most valorized causes has been the impression that progressivism is fixated on subverting and supplanting traditional norms without regard to the consequences. However inconsistent this impression may be with the standard social welfare goals of the average House Democrat, it has distorted the public’s understanding of what the national party stands for.

At the same time, voter wariness is not the product of abject falsehoods. Partisan Democrats have a habit of blaming every disadvantage on “disinformation,” much as Trump decries “fake news” when basic reporting or public opinion is against him. But Democrats from the Biden White House down to the municipal level had indulged positions that average voters regard as misguided, wacky, or flat-out wrong and inscribed them into policy, usually without significant small-d democratic input. That helped lay the seeds of Trump’s return precisely at the moment of his greatest weakness, in the weeks and months after January 6.

To actually repair the deficit with the working class, Democrats and grassroots organizers aligned with the party must finally accept they are losing the culture war—not because the masses are hopelessly bigoted, but because the party line strayed from what reasonable voters are comfortable with. Americans from all walks of life share a healthy suspicion of dogma, inherited from the Enlightenment and the country’s own political traditions. Whether the proselytizing comes from the sectarian left or the sectarian right, they refuse to submit to beliefs that traffic in guilt and rely on manipulation rather than persuasion. Emboldened progressives forgot this, mistakenly believing the threat of the right’s illiberalism would always dwarf their own rising militancy. In a strange parallel to the Reaganite Moral Majority, identity politics at its most extreme encroached baldly upon the individual’s freedom of conscience. Accordingly, people rebelled.

Reformers sobered by this fact must confront progressivism’s two fundamental contradictions. The first is straightforward. Progressivism is theoretically predicated on building a more inclusive and compassionate society. Yet it shames and ostracizes not only those who, à la William F. Buckley, cry, “Stop!” but anyone who observes the means are sometimes coercive and the ends aren’t always what they are made out to be. The second contradiction is more insidious but critical to understanding why progressives have developed a reputation for misgovernance. It is this: even as progressivism propounds a paradigm of righteous social justice and secular moral uplift, it appears indifferent to, and may at times even condone, policies and behaviors that fuel social distrust, anomie, and self-destructive choices.

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Reckoning with these contradictions won’t be easy amid Trump’s crackdown. Democratic politicians hope to regain power mainly by dialing up economic populism and (perhaps) disavowing the left’s most sectarian tendencies. This is a tactical move to compensate for unpopular stances, not a solution to the disjuncture at hand. Skeptical voters won’t think a controversial position has been scrapped just because it is put more blandly or goes unmentioned in interviews. They will just conclude Democrats are in denial about why so many working-class people have deserted them.

The unwillingness to even scrape the surface of the party’s cultural woes is bad politics. It also shows a failure of curiosity. Radical cultural progressives in particular have yet to fully grapple with the grave “spiritual unspooling” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) identified in a 2023 essay. Murphy’s interpretation of America’s tattered social fabric—one that highlights but extends beyond Americans’ diminished economic prospects—makes them anxious. The progressive vanguard doesn’t want to amplify a “conservative”-sounding view on the breakdown of the nuclear family, the loss of associational life, the addiction crisis, and the loneliness epidemic. From its perspective, the institutions and norms that helped sustain rising developmental outcomes in the recent past were uniformly repressive. If culture does have a negative impact on one’s social environment and life chances, it can only be due to chauvinism or Christian nationalism permeating their community.

The progressive vanguard, however, doesn’t want to be accused of inadvertently diminishing economic pain through its focus on intersectionality. Thus, whenever the Brahmin left does admit that bigotry alone can’t explain the state of our politics, it argues that the economic pessimism highlighted by Sandernistas must be the only other significant variable.

The causal relationship between economic conditions, life chances, and spiritual self-worth is indeed pivotal to the story of how we got here. The vise of low wages, poor working conditions, and soaring living costs often leads demoralized people to make reckless or desperate decisions. Communities whipsawed by economic dislocation and technological change become ensnared by the downstream effects of disinvestment. In such cases, it is tempting to conclude that sheer imbalances in economic power, not our culture’s hyper-individualistic and libertine excesses, are leaving so many Americans hopeless.

And yet, the spiritual void that afflicts modern existence cannot be reduced to economic factors, important as vast disparities in wealth, opportunity, and economic power are. From the compulsions of social media and their troubling effects on adolescents and young adults to the omnipresence of hardcore pornography, sexual self-commodification, open-air drug use, and low-level antisocial behavior in everyday life, progressivism has struggled to offer a coherent vision consonant with preserving self-government. In fact, in the face of such ills, progressives typically refrain from the kind of blanket condemnations they direct at rural and working-class whites. These phenomena are largely inevitable, and trying to aggressively fight them, progressives fret, may inflict more harm on “marginalized communities” or undermine the hard-won freedoms of past liberation movements.

By now the folly of this outlook should be apparent. Progressives may believe they are compassionate and searching thoughtfully for the most humane approaches to the issues of the day. A movement, however, that essentially discards the feminist case against pornography and sex work, ignores the downsides of legalized drugs, shirks concern over public disturbances, declares all gender medicine to be settled science, prefers “equity” to stronger educational standards, and all but shrugs at the spread of migrant child labor offers a political gift to opponents who promise to bolster public order and give working families a modicum of control over the direction of their communities.

This does not mean that MAGA represents a more sincere or viable alternative. A disturbing form of cultural nihilism percolates on the “post-Christian” right. Trump, ever the cunning cynic, pulled significant support from “barstool conservatives” who lack a strong social code, have probably few compunctions over extreme porn, drug culture, and unchecked gambling, and are normally apolitical. Yet that outreach, alongside targeted overtures to working-class Latinos, blacks, Asians, and Muslims, also attests to MAGA’s adaptability. MAGA, in a bizarre twist, learned to present itself as a big tent open to anyone attracted to the concept of America First (and the resounding promise of lower prices). By contrast, hardline progressives became only more judgmental of those who wouldn’t parrot all of their beliefs and declarations.

Of course, progressives wedded to the social justice paradigms of the last decade insist that there is nothing elitist about promoting inclusion and respect for diversity. But this conflates support for pluralism and equality before the law with an agenda that zealously sought to delegitimize anything that, in the eyes of an ascendant activist class, perpetuated “cisnormativity,” “patriarchy,” and “white supremacy culture.” By employing this sweeping lens, the cultural-intersectional left kept finding and minting new adversaries. Liberal use of imperfect and often dubious historical analogies was put to illiberal ends. Modest disagreement with the latest innovations in social justice thought and its corresponding lexicon of correct speech was tantamount to being an apologist for the rising backlash, if not something much worse.

Hindsight has only made this harder to dispute. Still, professional activists, extremely well-funded nonprofits and NGOs, and their associated PACs continue to obfuscate the dynamics that fragmented the Democratic coalition and made critics out of erstwhile allies. They refuse to acknowledge that leading Democrats not only accommodated but also avidly supported and raised lots of money off of a form of identity politics that demanded strict conformity and which, by its operational logic, could never be satisfied with the reforms it had already won so long as it aroused opposition of any kind. Eventually, many thinkers and activists who identified more naturally with the “old left” grew tired of this pattern. It was psychologically exhausting, but more importantly, it was visibly accelerating the dealignment of working-class constituencies essential to any renewal of social democracy.

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Reformers determined to leave the political wilderness have been—and will be—accused of betraying “core” values. But neither the maximalist rhetoric at the height of “wokeness” nor the theories and demands that fueled it should be confused with the first principles that give a democratic and decent left its impetus. Working families want economic security and safe, healthy communities, not a cultural revolution teeming with rent-seekers and grifters.

Redemption thus requires taking more seriously the concerns of an electorate desperate to balance an admirable and distinctly American “live-and-let-live” ethos with social cohesion. Wokeness, the supposed antidote to Trumpism and all Trumpian sympathies, was discredited for seeming to violate both. And, at least at the margins, it helped return Trump to the White House. That is a bitter legacy to contend with—all the more so given that demographics were supposed to deliver Democrats to the promised land.

Although they are under enormous pressure to admit no error, Democrats have no real choice but to change course on the issues that have cost them dearly. The alternative is to watch MAGA finalize the contours of the political realignment so many of its acolytes and foes have already sketched. And this, not taking common-sense stances, will be the ultimate capitulation to the right. MAGA thinkers believe “multiracial” national populism, spear-tipped with Caesar-like proclamations, will deliver the order blue-collar voters truly desire. Recalling Seymour Lipset’s thesis about working-class authoritarianism, morose progressives are beginning to concur. Yet Democrats are not suddenly fated to resemble, of all things, the old “Dole ‘96” coalition. Nor should they reconcile themselves to such a strange and unhappy future. Democrats should instead draw courage from all the profound achievements their predecessors had a hand in authoring—reforms that were made possible precisely because of the authority vested in the party by the forgotten man and woman.

If American democracy as we know it is nearing midnight—and there are omens it might be—reclaiming that authority should be the overriding priority of every Democrat. Anything less would be an abdication of what American liberalism, in its finest moments, has stood for.