Fractured

"The Opinions" from the New York Times is one of the podcasts in my regular rotation. A recent episode is part of a continuation of Robert Siegel's Friday politics wrap-ups that formerly ran on National Public Radio. David Brooks has retired from the New York Times, so there's been something of a rotating cast presenting the Conservative position in the discussions. This week, the chair was filled by Timothy Carney of The Washington Examiner and American Enterprise Institute.

While Messrs. Carney and Dionne were discussing how the Democrats could appeal to more conservative/Evangelical Christian voters, Mr. Carney made the following comment, which I quote here, at length, because I want to capture all of the context.

And that Religious Right is just harder for the Democrats to reach when you've got the national party -- I mean the Biden Administration, and Biden wasn't some crazy Culture Warrior, they changed documents to say "chestfeeding" and "birthing people" instead of "breastfeeding" and "mom." That cultural extremism, that's going to turn off people who, you know, are just regular churchgoing people in the Middle America, who might not even be 100% pro-life. They might not even care so much about the cultural issues. They just want somebody who seems sort of normal. And I think that is, part of Iowa, and if Democrats want to win that place back, you know, they're going to run candidates in those places who are more moderate.

Can those people distance themselves from the national leadership, or can the national leadership and the Democratic Party dial down the culture warring?

Mr. Carney's contention that use of terms deigned to appeal to the transgender community and other parts of the Democratic constituency that wants to push back against (or even completely overturn) conventional gender norms is "cultural extremism" and "culture warring" struck me as interesting. Changing some government documents is going to an extreme, and prosecuting the Culture Wars against Christians in the United States? That's all it takes? After all, there's no change in law in the example that Mr. Carney notes. Nothing new is being enacted on a policy level with the change in terminology. It's just the adoption of Progressive ideas of inclusive language. While I understand that (and why) this may be a big deal to some people, if that's what counts as extremism, I wonder what "more moderate" will need to look like in practice.

As an aside, I found it interesting that Mr. Carney spoke of inclusive language as "going to turn off people who [...] might not even be 100% pro-life." Inclusive language and abortion rights are not the same, even if both positions are associated with Progressives. Which brings me to my next point...

As the conversation continued, E. J. Dionne made the following comment, which I think is more important that in was credited for:

[T]he alienation between these two constituencies, is kind of a push-pull thing, because for an awful lot of liberals, including some religious liberals, the dominance of a hard Religious Right on the Conservative religious side has really turned off a lot of people.

One of the things that I have understood to be true about the United States for a long time now, and I don't believe will change anytime soon, is that the American public is not unified. Further, many of its factions have mutually hostile relationships to other factions. And I think that this is because many people see themselves as the primary characters in other people's stories.

I've told this story several times before, so I'm going to keep it short. In my time at a HBC/U, other students didn't see the fact that I spoke like a White kid from the suburbs as being the result of growing up in a suburb that was approximately 90% White. They saw it as an intentional repudiation of themselves; I had made a deliberate choice to not be like them, as a way of placing myself above them.

For many conservative/Evangelical Christians, people don't reject conventional gender labels and roles because those labels and roles don't work for them. They do it out of a desire to oppose conservative/Evangelical Christians and Christianity more broadly. And the same with abortion. This is why Mr. Carney conflates the two issues. There are many Conservatives who understand the entire Progressive (or more broadly Liberal) project as a hateful plot against their just deserts, rather than something with a rationale, and goals, of its own.

And this is a problem for the Democrats, because their coalition is made up of a number of smaller interest groups, which may or may not have much in common with one another, but (in certain races) can damage the prospects of the whole by staying home on any given Election Day. The LGBTQ-et cetera cluster of Democratic voters wants to be shown that they matter and are important. And there are Democratic politicians, candidates and party operatives who want to make that show for them, as a means of delivering something to a voting block that they can't afford to ignore. But the alienation (or, if you'd rather, hostility) between them and the "just regular churchgoing people in the Middle America," means that any overtures to the one are going to be seen as an attack on the other. But each side feels that it has a right to such overtures, and sees the resentment of the other side as unjustified.

This places Democrats in a difficult position, because it's then difficult to mobilize parts of their coalition to turn out for them without also giving Republicans ammunition to drive hostile factions to turn out against them. Because there's no such thing as distancing oneself from the Culture Wars, "Woke 1.0," or some or another flavor of "extremism." There's simply distancing oneself from people, and their interests. Mr. Carney suggests, without coming out an saying it, that Democrats should exile the transgender community to the political wilderness, in hopes that they'll pick up enough "regular churchgoing people" in places like Iowa to make up the shortfall. And in so doing, he legitimizes the alienation between those two groups, when that's part of the problem the nation needs to solve.