Politics And The Culture War

I’ve been noticing a sort of drumbeat lately. It’s still somewhat in the background, but articles keep popping up around the theme: Conservatives need to cool it on “cultural” issues and run the 2024 campaign on issues that will win the election—the economy and the border. The sell is, We need to save the country first so we still have a country, then we can pivot to cultural issues. Pushback is coming, from people who have heard that one before. John Daniel Davidson, for example (see below), gets this right. There’s no longer, if there ever was, a way to separate culture from “normal” issues. If we don’t win the culture, the rest won’t be worth saving. Remarkably, this ploy—please no culture war for now—is coming at a time when culture issues of transhumanism, transgressive Wokeness, racism under the guise of antiracism, etc. are roiling the country and are hugely unpopular.

Let’s start with a War Room video that is linked by CTH: Richard Baris Breaks Down Latest Political Polling. Bannon and pollster Richard Baris present a snapshot of the current state of the campaigns. Here are some quick takes:

Senate GOP to Trump: No mas! You’re the man.

Politico: Wall St. is solidly never Trump, but has soured on DeSantis as a Trump challenger--DeSantis is a "really weak option"

This reflects Dimon speaking to Maria Bartiromo several months ago. His position at that time as a “non-political” guy (LOL) was: Neither Trump nor Biden are the way forward. I took that to be an endorsement of DeSantis. I have trouble, on the other hand, seeing Wall St. turning to the Dems for salvation at this point. The Dems have shown that they can’t be left in control of government.

ABC/WaPo: Trump is dominant, close to unbeatable for the GOP nomination. [Will establishment go for indictment]

That means the big issue becomes: Will the Establishment go nuclear and try to land Trump in jail? There don’t appear to be credible alternatives to Trump for the GOP, and jailing Trump will cast strong doubt on what remains of the Establishment’s faltering claim to legitimacy—how many elections in a row can they throw without totally losing their base?

Next, Baris shows just how dominant Trump is at this point:

Trump is above 60% with white working class--Biden 24%, DeSantis in 40s but Biden polls better against DeSantis.

Evangelicals: Trump is winning 70% while DeSantis is at Dubya levels--and that’s not good enough to capture swing states.

Biden is losing the Underclass--under $30k, who depend on gov--to Trump, unlike 2016 or 2020. This is simply a different political environment.

Trump has an easy sell to the underclass: how were things when I was in charge, how are they now?

Bannon: Peace and prosperity.

Baris: Many of the underclass are Hispanic working class.

Confirmation?

Biden bleeding support with Black voters as 2024 campaign heats up: poll

Just over half of Black voters said they'd likely support Biden in 2024

In the face of all the above, Tom Luongo touches on what’s beginning to look like desperation on the globalist and Woke Left, linking to Joseph Paul Watson:

“Fox and Davos are trying to shut up Tucker for the push to war in 2024”:

Tucker Carlson Preparing For “War” Against Fox News

Popular host is locked into a contract until January 2025.

Both Newsmax and Rumble have reportedly offered Carlson more than he was being paid at Fox, while Carlson has also reportedly been in talks with Twitter owner Elon Musk about starting a new project.

“The idea that anyone is going to silence Tucker and prevent him from speaking to his audience is beyond preposterous,” Carlson’s lawyer Byran Freedman told Axios.

I don’t know how this will work, but I think Tucker wins this. Restrictive “non-compete” covenants are typically frowned on in the law, even though they’re legal. The circumstances in this situation seem outrageous enough that Fox will lose. We hope.

Then Luongo pivots to another media story with political implications—George Soros buying up the failing Vice News, and linking to decent Revolver article. Again, this story appears to signal desperation:

Tom Luongo (Head Sneetch)

@TFL1728

I've said for years that as Davos' control slips away they would double down on expenses needed to keep their control over the megaphone.

[Soros buying Vice News] is one of those moments.

It's also downstream of the Fed rapidly raising interest rates.

Private Equity built Vice News on ZIRP [zero interest-rate policy, free money to leverage for Davos]. Now Soros wastes some of his ZIRP bucks to hold onto [Vice, as a media megaphone] through the 2024 election.

George Soros buying Vice media signals something bigger… the end of an era…

Today, at The Federalist, John Daniel Davidson addresses the anti-culture war argument head on—it’s too late in the day to avoid tackling the cultural issues unambiguously. There’s no finessing this:

The Culture War Isn’t The Most Important Issue Of 2024, It’s The Only Issue

The more obvious it becomes that our domestic political struggles are in fact part of a much larger spiritual war over the fate of western civilization, that we are today engaged not so much in a political fight as a religious battle between good and evil, the stronger the urge seems to be among Republican politicians to deny this reality and take refuge in the comforting political narratives of the past.

A perfect case in point was a tweet last week from Kari Lake’s permanent campaign, which managed in one fell swoop to channel the deeply misguided political analysis of the entire neocon Washington establishment: “No one is saying not to fight the culture war. But it’s simply not the most critical issue heading into 2024.”

“The GOP must show the country how it plans to turn the economy around & prevent World War 3,” she added. “We need to take this country back from @JoeBiden before we can take our culture back from his friends.”

Ah, yes. The comforting fiction that if we can just show voters how we plan to turn the economy around, surely then we’ll regain power, surely then we’ll have a mandate from the people — and then (and only then) we can “take our culture back.”

... On the one hand, it’s a desperate cope, the embodiment of the stale, low-energy politics that have kept conservatives out of power in Washington for most of the last three decades. On the other, it’s a textbook neocon talking point, pretending the culture war is a distraction when in fact it’s the only war whose outcome really will decide the fate of our country.

... we now find ourselves in a different kind of struggle. Call it a culture war, a religious war, a battle between good and evil, or all of the above. It’s a war for survival between two competing and irreconcilable visions of what America will be. Any politician on the right that doesn’t understand that, who thinks we just need to show voters our plan for getting the economy back on track, needs to step aside and make room for leaders who know what time it is, that the hour is late, the day now far spent, and the time for fighting has come at last.

To me, the fatal flaw in the argument is the notion that a political party can credibly run and win on one issue and then pivot to a different issue. We know exactly what will happen—the party will be divided regarding the wisdom or practicality of the pivot and nothing will happen. Now, some, like me, will say, well, why not run on all the above? After all, so many of our economic issues are closely tied in to our cultural problems. In fact, name me one economic issue that doesn’t have cultural roots as well. You can start with the character issues and social justice issues that lie behind inflation, budgetary irresponsibility, de-industrialization, open borders and crime that turn our cities and pits of crime and dysfunctionality, and more. You can move on to to the Woke ideology behind false narratives about climate, about Covid and science, about censorship and educational institutions being transformed into ideological boot camps, and now the war on household appliances and the internal combustion engine. But then you can move on to the welfare fueled breakdown of the family that leads to struggling households that no longer constitute true families, to the false narratives of “sexual freedom” that lie behind that, and to the denial of the dignity of human nature as God made it. It all works together. Economics is not something that runs itself apart from human nature.

Again, today Tom Luongo is right on point. Most of us are familiar with Luongo’s Theory of Everything—Davos v. The Fed. Today, Luongo shifts to the “crisis of masculinity”—and I shouldn’t have to add that he’s not talking about the Woke narrative of “toxic” masculinity. He’s talking about the societal need for real men, and the Left’s war on real men. The embedded interview at the link is almost an hour long, but here’s my excerpt/summary of a key point for this post:

Luongo: Once trust in the institutions that are supposed to hold society together is lost, that's when things fall apart. That's where we are now, thanks to the "masculinity crisis," which Luongo argues is driven by the Davos types [roots in Cultural Marxism?] as a means of social control. That leads to authoritarian control and degradation of living standards. The crisis point comes when people who form the center realizes that the center isn't holding. Nothing is really working the way it should--no institutions are working for you and there are no alternative choices available in the established mode. We're close to that.

Precisely. The GOP establishment wants to hold on to a center that’s simply no longer holding. The center has been suppressed by the Left, driven out of the societal institutions that were intended to preserve it. This has been Trump’s great service, and continues to be so—the revelation of where we are, how close we are to the brink.

I’ll end with an interesting example that may illustrate the opportunities that the culture war offers to conservatives, if handled intelligently:

San Antonio Voters Overwhelmingly Reject Measure to Legalize Abortions

When LifeSite says “overwhelmingly”, what they mean is: 72 percent of voters shot the measure down.

Now, I’m not sure how representative of America-outside-Texas the city of San Antonio is. SA is 64% “Hispanic,” but in Texas that doesn’t necessarily translate into recent Mexican immigrant, and that makes a difference. However, one thing we know—SA skews heavily Dem. There hasn’t been a GOP mayor since 1991, and Trump lost the city heavily in both elections, 2016 and 2020. It’s a perfect example of what I was ranting about earlier: What do these socially very conservative Dem voters think they’re going to get when they vote Dem? It’s not as if they’re going to get representatives (well, outside of Henry Cuellar) who will buck the Woke ideological consensus on anything. The national party won’t tolerate dissent. The attempt to legalize abortion in the city is a perfect example of what those voters can expect from the Left. To give credit where it’s due, the GOP has been making progress in speaking to Hispanics and Asians and has produced some results in TX and CA. The years since 2020 may turn out to have been a necessary wake-up call to previously Dem voters, just as George McGovern was for so many of those voters in the Midwest.

Much will depend, no doubt, on two factors: How desperate are Dems to get rid of Zhou? and, How badly has Zhou tarnished the Dem brand with socially more traditional voters? It seems clear that the Dems and the DC establishment are increasingly desperate to dump Zhou and his criminal family. Nevertheless there are complications—the political mechanics of it all, the lack of a credible replacement. I would suggest that in this situation the GOP will need to rally behind Trump as the legal assault on him appears to ramp up with the goal of incarceration. The DC GOP establishment—the Never Trumps—is responsible for what could turn into a national catastrophe. Well, I guess it already has, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t get much worse. If Trump is removed from the picture it almost certainly will get worse, as the Deep State attempts to fill the political vacuum.