National leaders, especially leaders of democracies, will tell you that if you want to lead a people into war, you had best have a pretty good reason for it. The world has seen its share of less-than-stellar casus belli, from a suspiciously fake-looking Polish attack on Germany on August 31, 1939, to fears of a gigantic communist domino setup in Southeast Asia, to the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But, over the last twenty years, some of the flimsiest provocations of all have led the populist Right to cast themselves as defenders in a series of great cultural wars that challenge the very future of America.
Casting policy in a military light is certainly not a new practice, of course, but today’s skirmishes are a far cry from the legislative crusades of the last century. With earlier examples like LBJ’s War on Poverty or Reagan’s War on Drugs, politicians from both parties generally agreed on the problems, if not the solutions. Presidents and legislators were the ones declaring war, and it was a point of pride to be engaged in a struggle against a universally recognized social ill.
Today, however, the political bickering has extended to the causes themselves. Instead of being used to fight a societal problem, the war motif becomes a playground game of “they started it,” with one party trying to score points by tarring the other side as aggressors. By their nature as a conservative party, Republicans fit more comfortably into the role of the entrenched defender of traditional mores, which is why right-leaning pundits are generally the ones trading in the imagery of cultural warfare.
And trade they do. Whether it’s Bill O’Reilly playing Cronkite as he tolls the body count of Christmas trees or congressman Mike Kelly comparing the architects of Obamacare to the perpetrators of 9/11, conservatives are quick to draw the parallel between making policy and making war.
And, from the false equivalency files, the dizzying world of right-wing blogs brings us the War on Men. Contrary to the “War on Women” narrative of the last election, author Suzanne Venker says that it’s actually men who are the embattled sex. Bafflingly, Venker cites female competition in the workplace and other feminist goals as affronts not only to men everywhere, but to the very concept of manhood. The same feelings of persecution among a decidedly privileged majority has enjoyed play in various “common sense” conservative circles, from “white pride” movements to a push to name July “Heterosexual Awareness Month.”
The ignoble commonality among all these current congressional and cultural wars is their partisan nature. There is no War on the Deficit or War on Illiteracy being fought on the Hill, at least not by those names — the conflicts that are given the distinction of being called “wars” are not the most pressing problems, but the most divisive along party lines. While not surprising in the same legislative body where Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell introduced a bill that he opposed, then had to filibuster to keep it from passing, it is another troubling indicator of the widening chasm between parties in Congress.
The policy-as-warfare phenomenon’s partisan nature also indicates that, like McConnell with his DOA-by-design bill, many of these cultural warriors may not be entirely sincere in their intentions. While there are undoubtedly some true believers in the political sphere, the alarming discipline with which even the most moderate politicos tow the party line on these issues — see, for example, the stampede toward the far right in the Republican primary debates — hints that the force driving the narrative is not passion but point-scoring.
And while those in power celebrate their battlefield victories and mourn their losses, it is their constituents who must try to breathe in the toxic political atmosphere that such rhetoric creates. Like in a real war, the real casualties fall not on the elites who wage it, but on the regular citizens who suffer through it. Empowered as foot soldiers in the culture wars, many take to writing angry letters to the newspaper, or self-righteously half-shouting “Merry Christmas” to incredulous store clerks, or cutting off friends and neighbors of differing opinions because they constitute a part of the “enemy.”
But among those reasonable observers caught in the middle, war weariness is mounting. Polls taken after November’s election showed that economic issues topped voters’ lists of the most important issues at 64%, with “Ethics/Moral/Religious decline” — i.e. the War on Religion — far behind at just 3%. And these voters know which party is responsible for the warfare rhetoric, too; out of nine contested states in the presidential race, only North Carolina sided with Mitt Romney. Societal war-mongers, take note: invoking the language of cultural warfare is quite simply an outdated tactic, and it ought to go the way of the horse and the bayonet.
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