By DAVID A. HOPKINS DEC. 27, 2017, New York Times
Image from article, with caption: Protestors
against the Republican tax bill in
Westfield, New Jersey, this month
At the 1992 Republican National Convention, Pat Buchanan famously declared that
American politics had become a “cultural war.” In the years since, social issues and
identities have become more important in dividing [JB emphasis]Democrats from
Republicans.
Traditionally, the two parties fought mostly over economics. But now cultural
issues like abortion and gun control divide Americans more sharply along regional
lines than economic policies. One impact of the rise of the culture war in the 1990s
was to reorder the popular coalitions of the parties — for example, by attracting
evangelical Protestants to the Republicans while propelling secular voters toward the
Democrats. This also redefined their geographic constituencies.
But while it has been fueled by widening divisions over social issues within the
American electorate, this regional realignment has left a much larger imprint on the
direction of federal economic policy than on the nation’s prevailing cultural zeitgeist.
You might say that the winner of the culture wars is neither Democrats nor
Republicans. In legislative terms, American corporations have claimed the biggest
victories so far.
The growing sectional divide — the coasts and a handful of Midwestern and
Mountain West states vote blue, while voters in the culturally conservative heartland
of the South and interior West largely vote red — is magnified by winner-take-all
electoral rules that concentrate representation in the hands of local partisan
majorities. The Alabama Senate race was an exception, but this largely produces a
stable arrangement of “red” and “blue” states and districts that seldom deviate from
their normal partisan alignments regardless of the individual candidates seeking
office.
On balance, the trend of rising geographic polarization has worked to the advantage
of Republicans in both houses of Congress. The Republican Party has captured more
seats in culturally conservative red America than it has relinquished in culturally
liberal blue America, allowing it to control at least one legislative chamber in all but
four years since 1994 after six decades of near-permanent minority status.
Senate Republicans especially benefit from the equal representation of thinly
populated states in the nation’s midsection, which once regularly elected moderate
Democrats like Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Max
Baucus of Montana but increasingly favor Republicans in congressional races. Red
states now substantially outnumber blue states; in the 2016 election, Donald Trump
carried 30 states to Hillary Clinton’s 20 despite his loss in the national popular vote,
while the outcome of every Senate race matched the state presidential result — a
foreboding sign for the future fortunes of Senate Democrats.
The contemporary geographic coalitions of the parties primarily reflect the
nation’s roiling cultural conflicts, but the representatives chosen via today’s electoral
map are equally polarized over economic policies — and it is pocketbook issues, not
social matters, that dominate the business of Congress. Increasingly unfettered by a
declining bloc of dissident party moderates from the Northeast and Pacific Coast,
ascendant red-state Republicans have prioritized an ambitious conservative
economic agenda encompassing regulatory rollbacks, repeal of the Affordable Care
Act and substantial cuts to federal taxes — like the tax bill passed last week — and
entitlement programs. Departures from this small-government approach, such as
the No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D programs enacted during the George
W. Bush presidency, have fallen out of fashion among post-Tea Party Republican
leaders increasingly devoted to the pursuit of ideological purity.
Political analysts often argue that the rise of the culture war has had an
acrimonious effect on American politics by expanding the battlefield of partisan
disagreement to include a set of policies that provoke moral fervor, like abortion and
gay rights, or activate fundamental personal identities such as religion and ethnicity.
These divisions, they suggest, do not lend themselves to negotiation and compromise
as readily as differences over economics, where horse-trading and difference-splitting
are more feasible solutions.
But the growth of cultural conflict has polarized Democratic and Republican
politicians on economic issues as well, by providing the two parties with increasingly
distinct and insulated electoral constituencies, and bitter debates over health care
and tax reform have generated just as much partisan rancor in the current Congress
as any other policy domain.
The numerous Republican victories in congressional elections during the past
25 years have not managed to prevent the cultural change that has occurred over the
same period, from declining religious observance and increasing support for same-sex
marriage to the decriminalization of marijuana and the rise of the Black Lives
Matter movement. Cultural conservatism remains essential to defining the
Republican Party’s regional base, but its substantive fruits can be found more in the
implementation of conservative economic measures than in the repeal of liberal
social policies or reversal of leftward social trends.
Despite a 2016 campaign waged largely on cultural themes, the Republican tax
bill represents the biggest legislative accomplishment of the current Congress — and,
quite possibly, of the entire Trump administration. Though Mr. Trump once
presented himself as a populist enemy of Wall Street, and though many corporations
have come to adopt liberal positions on issues like immigration, gay rights and
affirmative action, big business and wealthy individuals stand to benefit the most
from tax cuts approved by congressional majorities elected on the basis of right-of-center
cultural views.
That is why the true winner of today’s culture war is corporate America.
David A. Hopkins is an associate professor of political science at Boston College and the
author of “Red Fighting Blue: How Geography and Electoral Rules Polarize American
Politics."
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