There Can Be No Culture Peace Without Moderates

How the culture wars swallowed politics, why it matters, and why moderates must be part of the solution.

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

To call the culture wars toxic is an understatement. They are an unmitigated sewer of hysterical, authoritarian, tribal hypocrisy that makes cesspools seem like bubble baths by comparison. They ruin untold careers over minor or imaginary infractions, turn the innocent into pawns for scoring points, and politicize industries, workplaces, and social groups. They are a virtual playground for sadists, hacks, and ideological zealots, a nightmare for powerful people bereft of savviness or common sense, and, to those like myself, a migraine-inducing distraction from the real challenges facing society. So why do I write and publish about them? Why not just stick to policy, philosophy, history, book reviews, personal essays, satire, or political analysis? I have written that “culture wars are where ideas go to die.” The sad reality is, however, that the culture wars have swallowed everything. Ideas aren’t being snuffed out as much as slowly digested like some kind of metaphorical sarlacc pit. Reasonable people are naturally drawn to staying as far away from these clashes as possible, but not only are they becoming unavoidable, avoidance only makes them worse.

Culture wars are nothing new. Hell, we once fought a Civil War over one. Any society where humans live in large numbers and are free to voice their opinions will inevitably produce some degree of sectarianism over differing visions of how best to live. Where it becomes a problem is when this sectarianism begins bleeding into every other area of life. This is what we’ve seen in recent years. Rewind the clock to the 2000s, and the culture wars were about teaching evolution, prayer in schools, the so-called “war on Christmas”, and the Harry Potter series allegedly promoting witchcraft. These were clearly-delineated sideshows that occupied limited space and overlapped only very slightly with politics.

Fast forward to the 2020s, and it’s increasingly difficult to determine where the culture wars end and politics begin. Politicians and even entire political parties now campaign without real policy platforms, running entirely on cultural issues. There are now people who consider themselves political, in some cases even self-describing as activists, who take almost no interest in quantifiable results, legislative reforms, or the levers of government. Even wonky issues like taxation, trade, and zoning regulations have taken on a cultural valence. This isn’t just a US phenomenon, either. It’s gone global.

There have always been issues where politics and culture wars invariably intersect, such as crime, abortion, and education, but what we see today aren’t the edges of two Venn diagram circles overlapping, but rather circles so closely aligned that it seems at first glance to be a single sphere. Try discussing big tech, pandemic response, climate change, electoral politics, the media, or social policy without ever mentioning culture, and the analysis or commentary will feel palpably incomplete to almost every reader. That’s not merely popular perception or the product of mass illusion — to treat the big issues while ignoring culture is, in today’s day and age, to no longer properly treat them.

There was no one thing that caused this shift. What we’ve seen over the past several generations in the US is the weakening of institutions that were once great repositories of emotional energy. Some of these institutions have declined due to technological and economic trends, such as meaningful work and in-person communities. Others have justifiably lost the public’s faith due to their own failures, such as religion and politics. American politics, famous for its multi-layered system of checks and balances, works wonders at preventing incompetent leaders from mucking things up too horribly. But it also gums up the gears of progress and makes it extraordinarily difficult to get much of anything done. Democrats and Republicans, each lacking the unachievable supermajorities required to unilaterally pass their agendas, have taken to simply exercising the only power they have: blocking the other side. Francis Fukuyama has called this dysfunctional system of government a “vetocracy.”

After decades of this do-nothing partisan gridlock, plus the stubborn ubiquity of the low-information voter, the public no longer sees traditional politics — elections, political parties, and elected leaders — as a viable avenue for change. We no longer expect the government to solve problems, so we have fractured into countless mobs to mete out our many conflicting conceptions of justice on our own.

It’s no coincidence that popular culture is now little more than competing superhero franchises while political culture has descended into populist bloodsport. The former did not cause the latter, of course, but it is a reflection of where we are as a society. Weirdos in spandex unitards hiding behind masks take to the streets on the silver screen to beat up bad guys when the powers that be cannot govern the city. We have all become those wannabe caped crusaders. Our anonymous online handles are our masks. Our keyboards are our bat gadgets. And the mob is our superpower. Of course, Batman at least fights the actual bad guys, we often skeletonize the wrong people, which is why vigilantism, whether of the comic book or cultural variety, is untenable. One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s Joker.

While forays into the cultural battlegrounds may be inescapable, however, many have done far more than make the occasional sojourn. So many writers, commentators, pundits, and journalists have made the culture wars their regular beat, in fact, that it’s become an industry unto itself. The call and response of culture war commentary is accusations of “grifting” from whoever disagrees with the opinions expressed. I have complained about the wild and irresponsible overuse of such charges, and the misguided conflation of making a living with being a con artist, but it is undeniable that the culture wars have attracted their fair share of, if not grifters, certainly unprincipled profiteers. There are careers to be had sifting through the sewage of human thought, and perhaps making some contributions of your own. There’s gold in them there shit. That’s only part of the jumbled picture, however.

There are several motivations for focusing on the culture wars, and each one is often connected to the others. Culture wars are profitable, addictive, and effortless — and also engines of influence. They hit every note that makes for reliably high-traffic content: they inflame emotions, provoke responses and controversies, and become spectacles where everyone feels the need to chime in. Crossing tabloid drama with righteous indignation creates a perpetual motion machine of attention, one which is leveraged by people looking to build audiences, make money, and influence the conversation — and sustained by the public’s insatiable appetite for luxuriating in imagined victimhood.

It’s not difficult to see how these incentives can become intertangled. If one conceives of their culture warring as advancing a virtuous cause, then hey, there’s no harm in getting paid for your labors, right? And if you’re doing the Lord’s work with little effort and getting handsomely remunerated for it, it’s easy to get hooked. These motives can be endlessly reshuffled, and regardless of the configuration, they all feed each other. When culture war podcaster Tim Pool, for example, repeatedly told his audience of over one million people, in the run-up to the 2020 election, that Donald Trump would likely win in a 49-state landslide, what were his motivations? Was he telling imbeciles what they wanted to hear to grow his audience and revenue? Was he generating easy content in lieu of providing analysis that would require actual effort? Was he trying to hype the energy around the political right? Did he simply enjoy saying it? The answer is yes. No mind-reading required. 

Refuting the worst excesses of the cultural left and right is needed work, but intellectually speaking, it’s shooting fish in a barrel. Intelligent people are generally drawn to interesting or challenging questions, and when they criticize the low-hanging fruit, they often do so as a necessary chore that takes them away from their true interests. Those who spend almost all of their time on the low-hanging fruit, however, usually turn out to be unserious thinkers with a stick and a cash piñata. That’s who holds the monopoly.

If moderates simply check out, sure, we might spare ourselves a lot of headache, but in doing so we’d be leaving the craziest people in society a clear runway to pilot the culture and achieve escape velocity from sanity. Do we really want to cede the cockpit to Matt Walsh, Tariq Nasheed, Tucker Carlson, Alejandra Caraballo, Tim Pool, Nikole Hannah Jones, Steven Crowder and other such waste products? Do we not have a responsibility to at least offer a de-escalatory, philosophically liberal counterpoint to the bomb-throwing, shit-flinging, wolf-crying histrionics of professional culture warriors?

This is a tricky project. For one, being regularly immersed in the culture wars can, either through audience capture, online rabbit holes, or the motivations outlined above, rot your brain and turn you into an ideologue if you’re not careful. Just look at James Lindsay. As important as it is to avoid audience capture, it’s also important to capture the right audience. If the goal is to talk people off the ledge and make cultural politics just a little bit more nuanced, moderate, and principled, that message cannot be brought to a general audience. The far-left and right are not reachable. This stuff is their religion. The center doesn’t need reaching, because they’re already moderate, and also mostly unplugged. That leaves the 15 percent of society, give or take, who are further left than “left-of-center”, but still a notch or two shy of being far-left. This is the only segment of the population who are both in need of persuasion and actually persuadable.

The necessity for such a narrow focus is also driven by some unfortunate truths about the public. To produce cultural writing aimed at a wide audience is a waste of time, not only because most people don’t actually read, but because they have so poor an understanding of politics, culture, history, governance, civics, and current events that they don’t really even know what they believe, as pollsters amusingly demonstrate from time to time. If the persuadable slice of the population can join forces with the moderate center, they would form a coalition that might just be able to cool things down.

I said in the introduction that the culture wars are a distraction from the challenges facing society, but when a distraction becomes large enough, it becomes one of those challenges itself. 15 years ago, when the evolution debate raged in the culture wars, the triple-digit-IQ community argued internally over whether to even debate with creationists. Many worried that engaging them at all would give them credibility. But when creationists were 40-some percent of the country, they were worth taking head on. Lowering the temperature of our culture wars is one of the big challenges of our time, because we’re far too close to the boiling point.

The abstract assaults on freedom of expression, democratic norms, objective truth, individuality, egalitarianism, fairness, individual liberty, and liberal values aren’t just annoying trends online. They translate into the real world. Police departments were defunded in major cities across the US, only to be re-funded when crime soared. Book-banning is enjoying a new renaissance. Supreme Court Justices refuse to provide a definition to the word “woman.” Anti-vaccination movements are thriving. And we all hate each other more than ever. These are culture wars worth fighting. Even if, like me, you find yourself without a “side”, there is still a society worth preserving and a future worth winning. Just because I can’t root for either team doesn’t mean I’m going to stand idly by and watch as their crazed fans burn the stadium to the ground. I don’t have a silver bullet. I can’t tell you the one weird trick to herald in a culture peace. What I can tell you is that conscientious objection won’t work. There are so many ways to do culture wars wrong. Washing your hands of the whole enterprise is one of them.

See also: “Meaning Junkies”

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