How anti-culture war politics becomes culture war politics

The painful culture wars continue to plague our politics, distracting people from the real issues of housing unaffordability, rampant health care inflation, forever wars, imperialism, ecological crises, and an economy worryingly dependent on building countless data centers. Yesterday it was transgender kids in sports, today it is Christopher Nolan’s decision to cast an actress of Kenyan descent as Helen of Troy. This leads to an equally persistent industry of think pieces on the right, center, and left calling for abandoning the culture wars in favor of issues of economics, class, regulation, and infrastructure. Yet in practice, this frequently leads to culture war politics in a new form. We simply end up with a new “faction” in the same culture war as before. We were hoping to escape the culture war, but now we just have a more balkanized culture war.

This tendency is more obvious on the political right. Feminists are blamed for culture war politics, and the alternative presented by the right is a kind of Christian, patriotic, flag-waving chauvinism. The liberal culture warriors tell us our culture is bad, so we will reject their culture. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” sums this attitude up well. There’s really not much to it, and it is transparent in alt-right references to the crusades, “trad” culture, and white identity.

The way progressive and leftist rejection of culture war politics becomes its own kind of culture war is more subtle and deserves more careful analysis. Consider the Graham Platner campaign. The concern was that white rural voters had legitimate economic grievances that ought to situate them on the left, but they were put off by liberal and left culture warriors and the central role of identity in politics. Logging companies exploit their labor and ruin their environment, crumbling infrastructure complicates rural logistics, rural healthcare and education is constantly eroding, and war takes the lives of their young men too early. We don’t necessarily have to abandon liberal discourse, the thinking goes (Platner did campaign on LGBTQ+ and minority rights), but we do need to find an “outsider” candidate with the “right culture” who can appeal to the rural white working class. Yet their approach remained within the culture war paradigm, as they found and rallied behind a candidate who had the superficial cultural signifiers of the “rural white working class”. OK he had an alcohol problem and PTSD from his time at war as a soldier and mercenary? He was not “politically correct” until quite recently? So are so many rural white workers. Look at how rugged he is, how gravely his voice is (and the nice, charismatic kind of gravely, not the RFK Jr type), his manly beard. Look at him chop wood with an axe and pilot his boat around the estuaries.

The issue here is that his status as a “working class white man” was entirely aesthetic and cultural. He wasn’t a member of the working class, at least not as defined by real economic sociology. He was a small businessman and former mercenary. None of these things mean someone cannot run on a platform that helps workers, but it does refute the claim he’s meaningfully a member of the working class. An adjunct professor is more a member of the working class than a guy who owns an oyster farm, but the adjunct professor does not have the right culture to appear as a member of the working class according to our cultural assumptions.

Ryan Grim made this clear when he celebrated the fact that Platner’s candidacy challenged bigotry against white men. There is a certain amount of bigotry against white working-class men, especially rural ones. Hillbilly, redneck, and hick are all slurs that won’t get you in much trouble, even if some of them like hillbilly have a legitimately problematic history of prejudice. Certainly, some liberals and leftists view any rural white man as a potential bigot. Some of this is from legitimate trauma on the part of racial minorities and liberal whites who left that world, but much is exaggerated. So there is utility in pushing back against the claim that rural white workers are basically reactionaries. Yet we see how the culture war discourse is slipping back in through the back door in Grim’s claim. It’s no longer a matter of encouraging solidarity between the cosmopolitan urban working class and the less cosmopolitan rural working class but making Platner the white “working-class” person a proxy in a rural-urban culture war. Urban culture is wrong and bad for demonizing the rural white men, and that cultural bias is challenged simply by Platner as a person. By being presented as an alternative to a politics of culture wars, Platner’s candidacy is itself taking up a side in the culture wars!

Yet there are stronger examples. Grim’s claim is just one instance of a broader culture war on the left over the status of white men and how their prejudices should be approached. The thinking goes that white men have been overly alienated by a leftwing political culture that views them as essentially privileged and hopelessly reactionary. No doubt there is some truth to this, as some on the left do engage in that kind of Manichean identity-thinking where one side is essentially bad and the other side is essentially good, and one’s side is determined by one’s race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, the thinking goes, we ought to reject this kneejerk liberal thinking on questions of identity and culture.

Much of this thinking goes back to the fateful decision by new left activists in the 1960s and 1970s to abandon traditional class-based politics in favor of one centered on minorities and students. The most coherent and influential advocate for this approach was the Frankfurt School Marxist Herbert Marcuse, who thought that post-war prosperity had hopelessly compromised the working class of the USA and Western Europe. After all, many of these workers supported the Vietnam War, corporate consumer culture, and the constitutional order. Instead, the left would have to struggle over cultural institutions and social reproduction and take this over as a means to transform society.

The various failures of this approach, as well as a general distaste towards a politics that centers cultural issues over bread-and-butter economic problems, lead to a call for a return to class-based politics. Many on the left were angered by so-called “wokeness,” decrying the way discussions on race, gender, and politics in general became an ad hominem appeal to the identity of a person, or the absurdly excessive policing of any “problematic” statement made long ago.

Yet the critics of this culture war politics ended up reproducing it, perhaps because they were themselves so habituated by the same political culture. The critique of the PMC in particular became guilty of this. I’ve discussed the PMC question before (and Tutt and Varn provide a very good analysis of this question in their recent book The People are Not One), but it refers to a supposed new class of professionals and managers that dominate postwar capitalism. The argument is that this college educated class, influenced by the kind of thinking expressed by Marcuse, bell hooks, and Kimberlie Crenshaw, disregarded the perspectives of the working-class in favor of representation within this elite class. Since they were relatively comfortable, they ignored problems like deindustrialization and stagnating wages among the working class in favor of cultural questions. They projected their cultural anxieties onto politics as a whole, and this lead to a liberal and left politics entirely centered on representation. The thing is, there is no such class. The “PMC” does not take up any singular role in the system of exploitation, or even just social reproduction. Rather, there are professionals and managers who might be working-class, small businesspeople, capitalists, or bureaucrats. The only unifying theme is their culture, and even that’s not fully unified since many are quite conservative.

Since there’s no real tangible class antagonism to rally against, anti-PMC discourse came to embody anger at a kind of hypothetical blue-haired feminist who celebrates the LGBTQ+ community, has cushy job prospects in middle management (not that many managers have blue hair, but I digress), and thinks that the release of Black Panther is the most revolutionary event since the election of Obama for featuring the first black Superhero (our whole culture evidently forgot Wesley Snipes was the star of Blade, but I digress). The funny thing is, many folks who roughly approximate this cultural description are not even members of the “PMC,” even if we put aside our critique of this category. You can find similar folks working as baristas, in bookstores, and a number of other service industries.

Thus, a specific liberal urban subculture becomes the scapegoat for culture war politics under the guise of challenging the PMC. I am not saying all PMC critique becomes this kind of vulgar crypto-culture war, but it has that tendency to become a proxy for the cultural divide between urban, suburban, and rural habituation. The urban working-class (professional, service, or even industrial) is more cosmopolitan, less patriotic, more educated, less “macho”, and more secular. This can translate into a kind of cultural chauvinism, expressed most brutally in the term “trailer trash” to refer to the rural working class. The rural working class has its own chauvinism for being more rugged, authentic, traditional, and patriotic. Yet if our rejection of urban chauvinism becomes a kind of rural chauvinism where the values of the cosmopolitan metropoles become bad and prejudice towards the cities becomes validated, we’re not escaping the culture war but falling right back into it.

Much of this becomes a kind of self-flagellation, a practice already all too common among a certain type of liberal. Some liberals really do wallow in guilt over whiteness, maleness, and other identities. Even more so do so performatively for some kind of social recognition for being one of the “good ones” (but you still have to cover your drinks around some of them). Consequently, there are members of the so-called PMC who undergo struggle sessions where they decry their urban culture and their complicity in institutions that reproduce their values. They self-flagellate just as much as the white guy who apologizes for plantation owners, they just are hating themselves for different sins.

All of what I’ve described thus far is mostly harmless, even if it’s not exactly helpful either. What’s far more pernicious is the kind of “progressive” who weaponizes culture war politics to advocate tailing social conservatism. Their thinking goes, “we ought to reject the urban woke feminist PMC culture war politics, and in its place we ought to center the values of rural white workers". The rural white workers hate immigrants, so we ought to embrace xenophobia and immigration restrictions.”

Thus, some wing of the anti-identity politics and anti-culture war politics dissolves into a kind of pro-rural, anti-immigrant, patriotic, and Christian social democracy. This is objectively a form of culture war politics. It’s about rejecting cosmopolitan culture in favor of conservative culture.

First, this thinking wrongly pins the blame of the culture war on progressives. This is simply historically illiterate. The church, veterans’ associations, and various other institutions that are definitely not conservative were fighting the culture war before Herbert Marcuse ever arrived in the United States of America. The Klan even went so far as to fight this culture war with violence. Thus, we cannot blame liberals for the descent into culture war politics. Consider the debate over gay marriage. We might blame the gay community for fighting a culture war with their pride parades and their push to change the definition of marriage. Yet before there was a gay rights movement there was a heteronormative culture that suppressed the gay community and forced them into the closet.

Second, it overlooks the material causes and real incentives underpinning culture war politics. The thing is, all politics is shaped to some extent by what Marx called “the base,” or the actual social hierarchy, ecology, and economic infrastructure. Culture war politics is usually located in “the superstructure”, or what Marx called the ideologies, moral ideas, juridical systems, and metaphysics. Marx presented the base and superstructure as two opposed categories, but he was careful in arguing that they were also intertwined and interdependent. Unfortunately, he never spelled out exactly how they’re related, and this has led to a kind of vulgar Marxist dualism between “base” and “superstructure” where the “base” is everything “real” while the superstructure is merely a realm of empty illusion.

The reality is that there are real incentives and needs embedded in culture war politics. When black actors complain that Hollywood movies don’t give them enough roles, they’re not only complaining that Hollywood does a bad job depicting black people. They’re also complaining that Hollywood doesn’t give them enough well-paid roles, at least not as many as their white colleagues. When the church complains about gay marriage, they’re not only complaining about the definition of marriage being changed but the increasing opportunity to form families that don’t go to church, don’t tithe, and don’t book their weddings in chapels.

The reality is that the culture war can only be overcome by understanding the real material grievances concealed within it, and trying to either reconcile those grievances or identifying them as fundamentally opposed to emancipatory politics. There will be many issues which cosmopolitan urban workers and rural white workers won’t see eye to eye on, but we can still build solidarity between them. To use an obvious example, hostility to immigration among rural white workers often comes out of fears about competition in the labor market. We must reject any solution that throws immigrants under the bus. Yet we could rethink the question, arguing that immigration is also a product of US imperialism and that the labor market questions are a problem with private employers not immigrant workers. The real enemy of rural white workers is the same enemy facing immigrant communities.

It also comes through questioning some of our simplistic narratives. For purposes of simplicity, I’ve been presenting urban culture as cosmopolitan while rural communities as homogenous, but this is a huge oversimplification. Many cities are not that cosmopolitan, while many rural communities are very diverse. Culture war politics feeds on simplistic divisions and challenging these simplified narratives will make it easier to find alternatives.

Nor is all culture war politics always unjustified. There are some genuinely narcissistic and inherently divisive trends in our culture that make real solidarity impossible. Yet these bad elements almost always emerge either from unquestioned traditions, such as homophobia or racial segregation, or from consumer culture. We can challenge those problematic aspects of culture so long as we do so without prejudice. Consider the habit of some to buy big trucks and modify them to produce more pollution. This is a genuinely selfish preference that literally poisons our air with particulates, and attacking it makes sense. It really is the apotheosis of the worst elements of US culture. Yet even then, we must understand these tendencies as a product of consumer culture and social atomization. Simply treating it as a mere culture war issue will prevent us from actually addressing it.

Finally, we must simply accept cultural difference. We ought to lean in fully on cosmopolitanism and argue that only real social democracy provides opportunity for most groups to flourish. The cosmopolitan culture of the cities can be extended to include rural and suburban culture. There’s nothing stopping Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Buddhist immigrants from living peaceably and happily alongside Protestant families. A measure like shortening the working day would provide more time for all these groups to spend time with their family, volunteer for their religious community, and participate in their civil society. Yes, there will be some accommodation being made. The protestants might have to learn to live next to a giant statue of the Hindu god Hanuman or live with the possibility that their daughter might date a Buddhist. Yet the actual substance of their cultural life benefits more from the same system that benefits those Hindu and Buddhist families. After all, most protestants already learned to live alongside Catholics, Jews, and Native American religious practitioners.

Ultimately, culture war politics are generally toxic. They’re also exceedingly hard to avoid, especially in our consumerist, narcissistic, and atomized culture. We’re all habituated into it, and so often every attempt to escape it falls back into the quicksand. Only a self-critical cosmopolitanism can really overcome it and generate the kind of universal solidarity and humanism which we need.