The left has actually won the culture war, and it's a hollow-ass victory
Let's start this blog with a screed
It’s Halloween and I’m launching my blog with a Frankenstein1 built from comments I posted on somebody else’s Substack. This was all in response to some cultural dustup or other — it doesn’t matter which, because we’ve forgotten about it and moved on to the next one.
If you’d told me in, say, 2006 that a time was coming when Wells Fargo would be flying the pride flag, when Nike would be promoting feminism in its shoe commercials, when The New York Times would be calling Republican lies and anti-democratic tendencies what they were, when it would be not just normal but actually hip for people under 30 to care about politics…if you’d told me all that, I’d have thought: My god, we’ve won. With that kind of cultural dominance, I’d have figured that we — and “we” here means the left-of-center — would never lose another election. In fact, I probably would have assumed that the left’s political dominance had come first and the cultural stuff had just flowed naturally from it.
Obviously, that’s not where we are. In 2022, we find ourselves in a strange place where the left has won over all of mainstream culture without meaningfully diminishing the right's political power. It’s been wretched for both the right and the left, it hasn’t helped politics much, and boy has it wrecked culture.
Just 15-20 years ago, politically engaged and left-leaning pop culture figures like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert felt like a necessary middle finger to a culture in which it was still socially acceptable to take people like Bill O'Reilly seriously, and in which questioning the wisdom and righteousness of the Iraq invasion could get you actually, sincerely accused of wanting more Americans to die at the hands of terrorists. We weren’t many years removed from Bill Maher losing his show on ABC and the Dixie Chicks getting canceled before canceling was cool, in both cases because they dared go against the era’s rally-around-the-flag-and-the-president zeitgeist. Conservatives still had enough cultural clout that it could be transgressive to go after them with blistering critique or gleeful mockery.
But now, the left has got almost all mainstream cultural institutions on the same page, from Hollywood and academia, which we already mostly had, to pro sports and, hilariously, corporate America. It’s no longer transgressive to criticize conservatives, who have no cultural relevance outside the bubbles they've carved out for themselves, but lefties sure like to feel transgressive, so what to do?2 That's how you end up with people "bravely" "taking a stand" by saying stuff that all their friends and employers and audiences already agree with. It's great, you get to pretend to be a rebel without having to worry about any of the consequences that used to make rebellion risky!
The left has a hard time criticizing itself in any meaningful way, because we've decided that 1) we're speaking for the marginalized, and that 2) to make fun of those who speak for the marginalized is just as bad as making fun of the marginalized themselves, and that's punching down and harmful and will be Weaponized By The Other Side, and so it can't be allowed.
And because conservatives still hold a lot of political power, people who have tremendous cultural power can still look out at the world and feel like underdogs. We get to tell ourselves we’re fighting the good fight each time we flog all the same acceptable targets over and over again without a shred of self-examination.3 I'm pretty sure that every Twitter leftist culture warrior is sincerely convinced that all their preaching to the choir is helping, like maybe if we just shoehorn enough grad-school leftist gobbledegook into Disney Plus shows and kindergarten curriculums we can finally make people stop electing Republican state legislatures. I wonder if they know deep down that they're actually just weak and lazy and would rather bask in accolades for doing something easy than ever attempt anything hard.
Anyway, the result is a lot of art, commentary, comedy and more that is just...fuckin' boring as shit.
All this stems from our political polarization, and it drives further polarization. Right now, both the right and the left think they’re locked in an existential struggle with the other side, and they’re both convinced their own side is losing. So they both keep upping the ante. Conservatives see leftist messaging getting inserted into everything from superhero movies to math classes, and it confirms their persecution complex and their sense that the other side wants to completely eradicate their way of life, so they dig in and line up behind increasingly authoritarian leaders. Meanwhile, leftists take even the most measured pushback against their cultural values as further proof that most of the people around them are deeply bigoted, and need of further (and harsher) moral instruction. And so both sides act more and more like the evil caricatures the other side already believes them to be.
What bothers me as a leftist myself is we’re playing a worse hand. The winds of culture are ever-shifting, and we’re not going to be on top forever — especially if we keep alienating normies by beating them over the head with our ideas every chance we get. Don’t get it twisted: the terrible laws and leaders conservatives keep championing are vastly more dangerous than anything the left is doing. But those are are not things most people spend a lot of time thinking about. What the average person — the average voter — does think about is mainstream culture. They watch Marvel movies and Netflix, they listen to pop music and send their kids to public school…and I suspect they’re getting sick of our shit. People don’t like to be lectured, and anyway culture is fickle. The mood will shift because it always does, and in a few years a lot of people on the left will find themselves wishing they’d spent less time making sure all the celebrities said the right things about gender and more time building durable electoral coalitions.
I did not make this but I abide by it:
Now, it seems like the only way to transgress is to be right-wing, but the spectacle of right-wingers trying to be rebels is the most embarrassing shit I’ve ever seen. Conservatives are not and will never be punk rock. Just because the left has gotten obsessed with policing other people's behavior and punishing those who don't march in lockstep doesn't mean that the right, which has always been obsessed with those things, is now punk rock by default. Conservatives aren't rebels, they're just mad that the left is stealing their move; once conservatives get the cultural upper hand again, just watch how quickly they start trying to enforce conformity.
“I’m doing the work to reckon with my own complicity in white supremacy" does not count as self-examination.
I'm neither Right nor Left. Just some mutt in the middle with a few drams of each coursing through his veins. And I don't know who the heck you are. But by my lights this is a righteous piece of writing and hits the proverbial nail squarely on the head. Nice screed. Props.
Well, the "conservative" agenda is not more dangerous than what the left is doing... The left is now against almost every form of social authority and hierarchy, laws and law enforcement, borders, and in short almost every institution that nations rely on for survival. But while we disagree on that point, you make some other very good points... In particular, that leftist conformism has made popular culture and entertainment boring and stifled. I couldn't agree more, and I can't see any way out of it, since the left controls both and has made them into echo chambers.