Recently in Culture Wars Category

Newt Gingrich is so given to rhetorical hyperbole that you're tempted just to quote it, roll your eyes, and move on. A case in point is this remark from Saturday's Mormon-deprived Thanksgiving Family Forum in Des Moines:

The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head on and described as what it is which is the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.

But it's worth recognizing that this is not just random red meat tossed into an evangelical barbecue pit. It's part of a kulturkämpfliche weltanshauung that the card-carrying historian expects will see him all the way to the leadership of the Judeo-Christian World.

Asked by moderator Bob Vander Plaats for a single value to instill into the American public, Gingrich launched into a riff on the Declaration of Independence's declaration that we are "endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights":

...secular, a term that comes actually from the Latin seculare, meaning century, and it basically says, "Life is very limited, so you might as well get the most you can now." A belief in God is the precise opposite. It's a belief that we are all part of an eternity, and that eternity stretches behind us and ahead of us. And therefore we have to measure what we do within the framework of God's greater plan. A country which has been now, since 1963, relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn't be surprised at all the problems we have because we've in fact attempted to create a secular country, which I think is frankly a nightmare. So I think the first step is (this is not sectarian; it's not Protestant, Catholic, Jewish; this is a factual historic statement): Our founding document, which is the base of our government, says, "We are endowed by our Creator..." and therefore we have responsibilities as citizens to that Creator, and if we simply have a system that reasserts that and educates that and tries to live up to that then we will be a dramatically better country and other policies follow from it."

There's a lot that's dubious here, beginning with the philological fact that what we mean by secular derives from the medieval use of the Latin saeculum, i.e. the world outside the monastery. The factual historic reality is that the framers of the Constitution, a fair number of whom believed in God, very much intended to set up their novus ordo seclorum on secular lines--sans religious tests for office or religious establishments--much to the consternation of many religious folk at home and abroad. Quelle nightmare!

For that matter, how does it follow that declaring human beings to have been created with certain unalienable rights implies that we as citizens have responsibilities to the Creator, whoever that may be? No Creator makes an appearance in the constitutionally mandated oath of office that Gingrich hopes to take in 2013. And how exactly does having a "system" that reasserts and educates and tries to live up to such a divine obligation square with the First Amendment?

But the real focus of Newt's exercise is the malignant force that for nearly half a century has been relentlessly driving God out of the public square. What is it? Later in the Forum, he specified: "What you have today is an outgrowth of the French Revolution...The French Revolution was an anti-clerical, anti-God rejection of the larger world in favor of secularism." In a word, it's latter-day Jacobins who, in the Gingrichian world view, control academe, the media, the courts, etc.

This is actually pretty malignant stuff, reminiscent of the ugly political campaigns waged in 1796 and 1800 by the Federalists against that notorious Jacobin and alleged atheist who drafted the very founding document that mentions those Creator-endowed unalienable rights--Thomas Jefferson. Of course, Gingrich has never been an ideologue but rather, as George Will quipped the other day, a "rental politician" with a gift of gab. So he doesn't believe a word he says. The problem is, other people do.

Democracy Corps' report on the GOP base is worth some serious pondering. What it claims to show is that the conservatives who constitute two-thirds of self-identified Republicans live in a mental world separate from the one you and I and fairly conservative Independents inhabit. What's that world like?

It's different from what has become the conventional understanding of conservative culture-war ideology Yes, these folks are pro-religion, but they see the public realm not so much as opposed to their own evangelical Christianity as hostile to a caricature of "Judeo-Christian values" they believe were present at the country's founding. They are not obsessed with abortion and same-sex marriage. And they are not--and this the report is at pains to emphasize--concerned with race, other than resenting being called racists for criticizing the president.

What animates them is good old American rightest fears of being beset by powerful and malignant outside forces that want to take away their liberties. Obama is, in their view, the agent of these forces--identified with elites dominating the government and, to some extent, immigrant outsiders. It's Obama's eliteness and foreignness, more than his race, that seems to give them the willies. This is the 21st-century version of anti-government nativism, and takes us back to the days of Birchite anti-Communism. In place of fluoridated water, we've now got a poisonous flu vaccine. (The first American anti-vaccine populist scare was ginned up against the powers-that-be in Boston in 1721, ironically enough by James Franklin and his brother Benjamin--as a way of getting at the clerical establishment presided over by Increase Mather and his son Cotton. From Franklin to Beck, o my!) In short, we've returned to Richard Hofstadter's paranoid style in American politics.

How seriously should we take a couple of "Republican base" focus groups in Georgia (set against a control group of a couple of focus groups of moderate-to-conservative Independents held in Cleveland)? Certainly a grain of salt is required. The implication, however, is that the Republican Party, now lacking a true moderate wing (albeit with some pragmatic pols), has essentially placed itself beyond the pale of reasonable public policy-making--at least domestically. Internal GOP dynamics are such that no significant domestic policy initiative can depend on Republican support in Congress. Efforts to compromise with the other side on the part of the administration and its Democratic allies should only be  undertaken to persuade Independent voters that they're making a good-faith effort to do so, and to hold enough Democrats in conservative parts of the country to get the bills passed. 

Explaining White House opposition to a Truth Commission in her article on Leon Panetta in the current New Yorker, Jane Mayer states:

Obama's political advisers dread any issue that could trigger a culture war and diminish his support among independent voters.

This strikes me as the critical lens for viewing the administration's approach to abortion, don't ask/don't tell, same-sex marriage, stem cell research, faith-based hiring rules, immigration, Guantanamo, you name it...

Gilgoff intervieweth:

I asked Gingrich if his conversion had changed some fundamental political beliefs for him. He said it was the other way around--that political developments had made him more overtly Christian: "The whole effort to create a ruthless, amoral, situational ethics culture has probably driven me toward a more overt Christianity.

Such as his engineering of the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994?

Even as President Obama was signing his revocation of the Bush rule on stem cell research, the Georgia state senate was getting set to vote on the Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act, which would define a living human embryo as a person and prohibit the destruction of an embryo for any reason, including embryonic stem cell research. What about those embryos that couples pursuing in vitro fertilization are keeping frozen in fertility labs? Suppose in these hard times a couple can't afford the $500 to keep them frozen? The senators haven't figured that one out yet.

The Georgia medical establishment and my old colleagues on the Atlanta Journal Constitution editorial board are agin it, even as Georgia Right to Life and the Georgia Baptist Convention and the Catholic Church are fur it. My guess is that the bill never makes it into law. Why? There are three lines arguments on these kinds of issues in Georgia. There's the moral values line, the Enlightenment line, and then there's the "what will this mean for Georgia's economy?" line.

Back in 2004, when the Georgia Department of Education tried to deep-six the word "evolution" from its science education standards, a University of Georgia Ph.D. candidate in genetics wrote in the AJC, "At a time when the state is desperately trying to court the biotech industry, these science standards encourage companies to look elsewhere." Sure enough, the DOE backed off.

This time, the argument is much stronger and it goes like this:

Charles Craig, president of Georgia Bio, a private nonprofit that promotes Georgia's life sciences industry, said the legislation would hurt Georgia's ability to recruit biotech firms.

"It would embarrass the state," Craig said. Georgia is trying to use an international biotech convention in Atlanta in May to showcase the state as a good place to do biotechnology business.

Kenneth Stewart, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development, listened to the committee debate but did not offer an opinion. All he would say was that during the upcoming biotech convention, "The eyes of the world are going to be on Georgia."

Tom Daniel, senior vice chancellor for the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, said the university system opposes the bill. "We're concerned it would have a damaging effect on research being done now and our ability to successfully do that in the future," he said.

 Religion may count for a lot in Georgia, but bidness is bidness.

It's been so hard to get past the culture wars because 1) they involve real differences of belief and principle; and 2) a lot of our politics has come to be structured around them. It is a bit churlish--OK, I'm a bit of a churl--to diss those who, with the best of intentions, are trying to mark out a middle ground for at least some moderate types on either side to occupy. But to imagine that middle-ground positions can, or indeed should, neutralize profound disagreements over the norms that govern abortion and the rights of non-heterosexuals in our society is a mistake.

So the culture wars will continue, in one form or another. And with that in mind, let me recommend A Field Guide to the Culture Wars by Mike McGough, sometime editorial page editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and now a Washington-based editorial writer for the Lost Angeles Times. Hot off the press, the book not only tells you who's who and what's what but provides essential context for understanding why. Mike's one of those old-breed intellectual journalists who combines deep knowledge of religion and law with a love of the daily cut-and-thrust of politics. On a subject that stirs ungodly passions, his is a dispassionate voice of reasoned understanding. So order your copy today.

Not.

But according to the big story of the day in our little neck of the woods, that's the goal of Third Way's exercise in brokering a "Come Let Us Reason Together" agreement on a few issues between some of the usual middle-of-the-road evangelicals and some of the usual bien-pensant progressive evangelicals. With the imprimatur and nihil obstat of that sponsor of all goodly coalitions, Rabbi David Saperstein. Brody puffs and Gilgoff's got the story and Pastordan snorts.

To me, this smacks too much of creating that elusive centrist evangelicalism we've all been reading so much about, and not enough about, well, policy coalitions. If you want to go for comprehensive immigration reform, go for it; and bring all those Catholics along. See how much of the pro-choice crowd will sign on to abortion reduction. Get behind a no-torture resolution in Congress. The way to end the Culture Wars is not to create a third way (pace Third Way), but to do the work itself. Sez I.

In one of those anniversary pieces that sometimes attribute more significance to what is being remembered than is deserved, Peter Baker suggests in today's NYT that the impeachment of Bill Clinton 10 years ago marks the beginning of the vendetta-like conflict that characterizes politics in the nation's capital:

Indeed, except for brief interludes, Washington in the last decade has been governed by a climate of anger and animosity, a modern-day tribalism pitting faction against faction that some trace to the days of the impeachment.

That seems a bit of a stretch. I'd be tempted to trace the phenonomen back another decade, to when Newt Gingrich, then just a journeyman member of Congress from Georgia, filed ethics charges against House Speaker Jim Wright. Eventually, Wright was forced to resign for what, even at the time, seemed a pretty minimal offense. This was the opening battle in the war that won the Republicans control of the House, made Gingrich speaker, and established the style of partisan combat that led directly to the Clinton impeachment.

What the impeachment may more truly have signified is indicated in a quote from Mark Corallo, an aide to former Louisiana congressman (and almost speaker) Bob Livingston at the time and later a Justice Department spokesman under President Bush:

At the end of the day, the Republicans were hurt more. We became the party of the moral jihad. I’m as guilty as anyone. We all got wrapped up in it.

This gets to the heart of the debate over the future of the Republican Party. So long as the GOP remains the party of the moral jihad, Republican candidates will continue to have trouble appealing to the young, the suburban, the better educated, and the well-to-do. And without those constituencies, it's hard to see how they recoup.