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Republicans started the culture wars, Democrats are finishing them. [1]

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Date: 2022-12-01

Jerry Falwell and company started the culture wars they were destined to lose.

I think the 2022 midterm elections will be regarded as the beginning of the end of the culture wars that have plagued the USA for the past 40 years. With us as the winners. Here is some powerful evidence: this is the headline from the news story on a remarkable post-election interview with losing Minnesota Republican governor candidate Scott Jensen:

Scott Jensen says Minnesota GOP can't win without new stance on abortion

Jensen ran as a hard right, Trump-endorsed, anti-abortion candidate. He courted the evangelical Christian base and pledged to work to “ban abortion” if elected. After the Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs Wade, Democrats absolutely hammered Jensen on abortion. Jensen complained that Democrats were trying to turn what should have been a favorable year for him into a single issue campaign on abortion. He lost, bigly, with (like in many 2022 races across the country) Republicans losing women and young voters by insurmountable margins. Voters whom, according to exit polling, were driven by abortion rights as their top issue. From NBC exit polling:

Democrats are overwhelmingly concerned about abortion: 46% named it as the most important issue, followed by inflation, at 15%, and gun policy, at 14%.

And now Jensen is saying the Republican party needs to ditch the anti-abortion position if they want to win in the future. From the same interview:

We need to be very clear. I can be a personally pro-life physician, having delivered hundreds of babies, and still understand from a policy perspective we will not ban abortion. But we will work hard to make abortion a less necessary consideration.

Wow. That is remarkable. That’s fundamentally what it means to be pro-choice! Your personal religious views are your own. I can respect that. But you have no business forcing women in infinitely complicated situations to give birth against their will. Now that "the dog has caught the car," losing elections on culture war issues is causing Republicans to rapidly abandon policy loyalty to the religious right.

Starting in the 1980s, Jerry Falwell and the rest of the religious right convinced most evangelical Christians, many of whom had previously considered their religious lives to be rightfully separate from politics, to make a deal with the devil. Transfer your religious devotion to the Republican party and they will crusade against the gays, against abortion, and against feminism on your behalf. Evangelical Christians became the most reliable Republican voting block in American politics. Republicans pandered to them without limit, found it politically advantageous to go after gay rights, abortion rights, women's rights, etc and the culture wars were on. Evangelicals and Republicans became so blindly loyal to each other that the relationship culminated in the bizarre and laughable Donald Trump as religious figure absurdity.

I have no words.

The deal was working for Republicans. An endless stream of votes as long as they kept taking the evangelical line in public and laughing at them in private. It was all fake, except judges. Far-right Christian judicial nominees was the one concrete thing Republicans gave them in return.

They lost the feminism front of the culture wars almost immediately. Their view of women in a “traditional” role without professional lives, submissive to they husbands in all things, restricted to the margins of society didn’t play well to a voting electorate that is 51% female. Culture was moving quickly away from them and most Republicans stopped parroting those ideas, it was a political loser. But the blind loyalty continued...because the gays and abortion. Then over the past decade they lost on “the gays” front of the culture wars. I don’t mean to minimize the challenges women and gay people still face in the USA, but the speed at which the culture embraced basic feminist values and gay rights like marriage equality is an astounding victory. Most Republican leaders have stopped railing against gay marriage and gay rights because its a political loser. Abandoning another key evangelical position. But the sick loyalty persists…..because abortion.

Now back to the Scott Jensen interview. He isn’t the only one who knows that forced birtherism is now a loser too. It’s no longer theoretical. It’s real. In the run up to the 2022 election, other Republicans were already scrubbing their websites of anti-abortion language as it became clear what was happening. In order to have a chance to win, Republicans must ditch the religious right on this last major front of the culture wars. And they will.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/1/2139515/-Republicans-started-the-culture-wars-Democrats-are-finishing-them

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