By Noah Rothman
Saturday, May 22, 2021
When it comes to the culture wars, President Joe Biden is
a conscientious objector—or at least that’s what the press would have you
believe. “The culture warriors keep knocking on the White House doors,” USA
Today’s Michael Collins insisted, “but President Joe Biden seldom answers.”
In the Washington Post, Paul Waldman argued that because he has broken
the link “between culture and policy,” Biden is “kryptonite to the Republican
culture war.” Most of Biden’s policies must be viewed as part of a concerted
“strategy to reduce the corrosive impact of hot-button social, cultural, and
racial issues,” according to New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall.
And while “Republicans are busy trying to bait Democrats on culture war
issues,” the Week’s Damon Linker contended, the party in power is
“refusing to play along” and getting high marks from voters as a result.
Joe Biden “offers the right, well, a nothingburger on
culture wars,” New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin most
recently observed. The use of “nothingburger” was a wordplay response to the
fizzling of the allegation, credulously promoted by rightist media venues, that
the president’s climate plan would require Americans to eat 90 percent less
animal protein by 2030 than they currently do.
Fact-checkers, professional Fox News hate-watchers, and
the industry that markets sneering condescension as comedy all sprang into
action. They demonstrated that while Biden’s climate agenda might be ambitious,
it does not actually propose curbing individual meat consumption. Conservatives
are so desperate for populist anti-Biden content that they fell for a poorly
sourced tabloid story and ran with it to their own detriment. In response,
left-leaning journalists and political news outlets used it to suggest that
Biden is so averse to cultural combat that Republicans have to cut allegations
of Democratic culture-warring from whole cloth. But that analysis is predicated
on the assumption that the culture wars progressives engage in aren’t really
culture wars at all.
Oh?
Joe Biden’s
push for unionization is culture-warring.
This administration’s members cannot use the word “job”
without modifying it with the prefix “good union,” and the White House is not
above leveraging its power to enforce its preferences. In April, Biden signed
an executive order creating a task force, chaired by Vice President Kamala
Harris, designed to bolster union membership, augment worker organizing, and
support collective-bargaining efforts. The move comes on the heels of a
humiliation that the White House appears determined to avenge.
The preceding month, Biden had taken the unusual step of
weighing in on a dispute at one Alabama-based Amazon warehouse during a
contentious push to unionize its workers. Unions “level the playing field,” the
president said in a video message. He added that it was his duty to “encourage
unions” and put his thumb on the scale in order to persuade that shop’s workers
to organize. He failed. By a vote of 1,798 to 738, those workers voted against
unionization.
It seems that neither Biden nor Democrats respected the
judgment of workers as much as they claimed, since the vote only made the
president and his party more committed to a legislative effort that would force
workers into affiliations with organized-labor organizations they would
otherwise reject. The PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act would
artificially inflate union membership by kneecapping the so-called sharing
economy. It would curtail an individual’s ability to leverage his assets in the
marketplace by limiting the legal status of “independent contractor” to those
who control the work they perform, are incorporated, or are performing a
service that falls outside a contractor’s normal scope of business. The bill
would also allow unions to override so-called Right to Work laws that allow
employees to operate in unionized shops, and it would effectively reverse the
Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME by allowing
unions to collect dues from nonmembers.
Finally, the bill prohibits employers from influencing
union elections by, for example, holding mandatory meetings at which firms can
lobby their employees against unionization. But it also allows employees to
cast unionization ballots remotely, where pro-union activists can freely
influence those proceedings in ways employers cannot.
“Today’s corporate culture treats workers as a means to
an end and institutes policies to suppress wages,” Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign
website insists. By contrast, “Biden will ensure that workers receive the pay
and dignity they deserve.” In this way, Joe Biden himself characterizes the
drive to unionize as a cultural issue.
Joe Biden’s
infrastructure plan is culture-warring.
The president’s initial proposal for $2.3 trillion in
infrastructure spending expands the definition of what constitutes
infrastructure in startling ways. Over and above conventional physical
improvements such as roads and bridges and airports or even the expansion of
broadband networks, the White House is also keen to invest in “social and civic
infrastructure.”
The pandemic, in the administration’s own words, has
exposed “the fragility of our caregiving infrastructure.” The president’s plan
invests in the “care economy” by dedicating between $400 billion and $995
billion to “creating new jobs and offering caregiving workers a long-overdue
raise.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand summarized the Biden plan more succinctly:
“Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is
infrastructure.”
And yet, as Vox’s German Lopez observed, one of the
biggest gaps in America’s ailing “care infrastructure” is the lack of a federal
mandate on businesses to provide their employees with paid leave. The Biden
administration hopes to remedy that with a separate $1.8 trillion proposal
tentatively called the “American Families Plan.” That bill would boost funding
for primary education and prekindergarten instruction, make community college a
tuition-free proposition, and fund mandatory paid family and medical leave.
Writing in Fortune, Arianna Huffington and
Harvard University dean Michelle Williams laud these “well-being
policies,” which are being “built into company culture.” The left-leaning think
tank New America agreed. The Biden administration should be commended for its
“use of incentives” to “create cultures” that encourage parents “to take leave
after birth, adoption, or fostering of a child.”
Once again, we must conclude that it’s gauche to describe
these initiatives as cultural only if you’re skeptical of them.
Joe Biden’s
emphasis on “equity” is culture-warring.
The Biden administration entered office with the mission
of pursuing “equity” in every aspect of governance. “Racial equity will not
just be an issue for one department in our administration, it has to be the
business of the whole of government in all our federal policies and
institutions,” the president said in February. Toward that end, Biden tasked
Domestic Policy Council President Susan Rice “with ensuring that the new
administration embeds issues of racial equity into everything it does.”
A remit that encompasses literally everything includes
the culture.
The pursuit of “equity,” as practiced by
Democrat-dominated municipalities and institutions, leaves objective observers
with the impression that the redistribution of both economic and social
goods is central to it. Education is one area in which “equity-driven reforms”
are most visible.
In April, Maryland gubernatorial candidate John B.
King Jr. told the Washington Post that the Biden
administration needs to tether the disbursement of education funding to states
to the condition that they adopt “more-equitable systems” for funding schooling
than local property taxes, which advantage “mostly white school districts” over
“high-poverty districts.” An administration source told the Post that
the president has “made clear” that he plans to tie school funding to equity,
though he has yet to propose such a scheme.
Similarly, the Biden administration’s Justice Department
summarily backed off its support for a lawsuit brought on behalf of
Asian-American students who allege that Yale College discriminated against them.
The DOJ also withdrew the Trump-era finding that the school had violated Title
VI of the Civil Rights Act. The Department of Education likewise dropped an
investigation into Princeton University after its president confessed that
“racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at
Princeton as in our society.” Under the rubric of equity, not all allegations
of discrimination merit scrutiny.
In April, the federal government released a draft rule
that provides priority access to U.S. history and civics grants to programs
“that incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse
perspectives.” That rule praises and, therefore, encourages grant-seekers to
lean into the work of prominent critical-race-theory proponents, such as Ibram
X. Kendi, and revisionist accounts like those published in the New York
Times’ “1619 Project.” Applicants “must describe” how they propose to teach
“systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and
practice in American history.”
The “1619 Project,” a work that its own publishers claim
was an effort to reframe “our national narrative,” and which has been sharply
criticized by working historians, has nevertheless been distilled down into
teachers’ resources, distributed to schools across the country, added to
curricula, and is now being promoted by the Education Department.
Republicans such as Senator Mitch McConnell noticed all
this and called on the department to block that proposed rule. So, how
did Politico report that? “McCONNELL LEANS INTO THE CULTURE
WARS.” Yes, “the Kentucky Republican no doubt is looking to throw some red meat
to the base,” so he and other conservatives have “pounced.”
Outside the realm of education, the administration’s
focus on equity has found its way into the conduct of both foreign and domestic
affairs, but it is the drive to embed racially retributive politics in monetary
policy that is the most ponderous aspect of the pursuit of “equity.”
Along with maintaining stable prices and encouraging full
employment, Biden ran for office with the goal of “making racial equity part of
the mandate of the Federal Reserve.” As the Wall Street Journal notes,
however, this third mandate complicates the Fed’s prime directives. The theory
of “social-impact monetary policy” favored by the White House takes a dim view
of rate cuts, which, while boosting earnings for workers, also increase asset
prices. Even if such a policy lifts all boats, it does so at disproportionate
rates and can exacerbate the “wealth gap.” Everyone is doing better, of course,
but that nevertheless conflicts with the demands of equity, which “takes
convergence of economic outcomes as an end in itself.”
Ultimately, the racializing of monetary policy is an
effort to impose a cultural mandate on an institution that is designed to be
removed from the political fray.
Joe Biden’s
sex and gender policies are culture-warring.
One of the Biden administration’s chief priorities when
it entered office was to roll back the Trump administration’s reversal of
Obama-era Title IX guidelines, which forced colleges and universities to
adjudicate allegations of sexual misconduct.
In pursuit of what Hillary Clinton described in 2016 as
alleged sexual-assault survivors’ “right to be believed,” the Obama administration
implemented rules that stripped the accused of due-process rights. As a result
of the changes to Title IX that followed a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter to
institutions of higher learning, schools were compelled to prosecute
allegations of criminal misconduct in a tribunal setting. What followed were
horrific abuses. In some instances, both accusers and the accused were refused
access to counsel; lower standards of evidence that apply only to civil cases
were used to “convict” students of criminal acts; Fourth and Sixth Amendment
rights were abridged, as evidence was withheld from the accused and the right
to confront an accuser was denied. This process ruined the reputations of many
who were later found by real courts to be not guilty of any crime.
As a candidate, Joe Biden said the restoration of due
process on college campuses amounted to an effort to “shame and silence
survivors.” The Trump administration, he said, had given colleges the “green
light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their rights.” Though it
was within the context of an apology to progressives over his 1991 treatment of
Anita Hill, Biden dismissed these jurisprudential standards as obstacles in the
pursuit of social justice. “This is English jurisprudential culture,” Biden
said with contempt, “a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.” As it turns
out, Biden wasn’t just blowing smoke.
Whether the administration will simply ignore the
precedents set by the myriad lawsuits won by the victims of “justice” meted out
in a systematically unjust fashion is an open question. But this administration
is proceeding with similar urgency to impose its cultural vision on the country
in an area in which courts haven’t weighed in yet: the redefinition of gender.
On his first day in office, Joe Biden signed an executive
order that jeopardizes federal funding for schools that refuse to allow
transgender women to join girls’ sports teams. Shortly thereafter, the
Democrat-led House of Representatives passed a measure that would codify that
order in law.
The Equality Act is framed as a civil-rights initiative.
Its advocates say it is designed to prevent institutional discrimination
against LGBT Americans, and they’re quick to dismiss objections to the proposal
raised not by conservative activists or defenders of religious liberty but by
the young women who believe themselves to be disenfranchised by this effort.
“Mentally and physically, we know the outcome before the
race even starts,” said Alanna Smith, a high-school sophomore and one of three
Connecticut girls who filed a federal lawsuit aimed at blocking biological
males from competing against women. “That biological unfairness doesn’t go away
because of what someone believes about gender identity,” Smith added. “All
girls deserve the chance to compete on a level playing field.”
The plaintiffs argue that “forcing girls to be spectators
in their own sports” conflicts with Title IX proscriptions against gender
discrimination. Moreover, they claim, initiatives like Biden’s could rob women
who would otherwise excel in their chosen sports of scholarships and other
opportunities. Their arguments aren’t hypothetical. In the plaintiffs’ school,
two transgender seniors have won 15 girls’ state indoor or outdoor
championships between them since 2017. One of those transgender students
finished third in the 2019 girls’ 55-meter indoor-track state championship.
Their biologically female opponents regularly finish behind their transgender
competitors.
These three girls are the underdogs. The American Civil
Liberties Union is representing both these transgender teens and backing the
power of the state. The entire apparatus of the Democratic Party is aligned
against what these girls and women insist are their interests. It seems “the
right to be believed” isn’t something Democrats think all women should enjoy.
Joe Biden’s
speech-policing is culture-warring.
It’s particularly galling to hear chroniclers of current
events who know better insist that Biden is entirely above cultural squabbles,
given the attention his administration pays to the linguistic obsessions of
progressives.
Facing a surge of illegal migrants at the southern border
larger than at any point in nearly two decades, the Department of Homeland
Security turned its attention to the urgent matter of rhetoric. By order of the
agency’s top officials, the DHS announced in April that it would retire dated
and offensive terms from law enforcement’s lexicon.
“Illegal alien” is no more. In its place, federal
officials are encouraged to use “undocumented noncitizen” or “undocumented
individual.” Despite the offense against brevity and the bizarre conviction
among progressive activists that the word “alien” conveys the impression that
an individual is unnatural rather than foreign, these substitutions are relatively
benign. The same thing cannot be said of another term that is being put out to
pasture: “assimilation.”
Federal officials are advised to avoid using this word to
describe the process by which immigrants successfully integrate into American
society. Instead, they should say “integration” or “civic integration.” But
those words have distinct meanings. “Integration” describes the process of
consolidating distinct units into a whole. By contrast, assimilation involves
the absorption of those distinct units to the point at which their distinctions
become imperceptible.
You can see why the latter so offends progressives, for
whom assimilation into American culture—to the extent such a thing exists—is
nothing to be proud of. But outside of intellectually isolated activist
cliques, assimilation is not an offensive term. Assimilating is what every
successful immigrant group has done since the country’s founding. Whatever we
call that process, it will endure.
While the DHS is busy catering to progressive demands to
pollute the English language, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is
also being made to genuflect at the altar of left-wing linguistic fashions, as
though it has little else to do these days. The CDC’s COVID-related guidance
for pregnant and reproductive-age women changed little during the transition
from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. With one exception:
They’re now “pregnant people.” References to women have been scrubbed from the
CDC’s site dedicated to COVID guidance for pregnant women, save for links that
direct users back to information that predates the Biden era or citations of
less ideological medical venues.
You can charitably chalk this up to inclusivity—a desire
among trans activists and their allies to popularize the notion that trans
women are women even if they still possess the reproductive organs they had at
birth. But that doesn’t alter the fact that this is an attempt to nudge the
culture in a direction preferred by a particular class of activists. And those
activists are not Republicans.
And yes,
Biden’s views of animal consumption are culture-warring.
The fact-checkers are right. Republicans who insisted
that Biden was coming after their burgers misinterpreted a claim published in
the Daily Mail alleging that the president’s agenda “could” require
curbs on meat production and consumption. But the source the Mail cited
to support that charge cannot be so easily dismissed.
That outlet referenced a study conducted by the Michigan
University’s Center for Sustainable Systems, which concluded that reaching
ideal emissions-reductions targets could involve dramatic reductions of meat in
American diets. This study is no outlier. In 2018, the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity had only about a
dozen years left to stave off a runaway greenhouse effect. The claim was
repeated by activists and broadcast by media outlets for weeks, but the
report’s recommendations didn’t make the headlines. Among them was the
suggestion that Western nations should reduce their production and consumption
of animal protein and dairy products by at least 30 percent.
A subsequent study conducted by University of Oxford
researcher Marco Springmann and published in the Journal of Nature a
month later went further than that: It said the West must give up at least 90
percent of its meat in favor of beans, seeds, and legumes. A report published
in the medical journal The Lancet in 2018 concurred. A global
move toward vegetarianism could substantially reduce greenhouse-gas emissions
and resource strain. “Therefore,” the Lancet report concluded,
“incorporation of sustainability in the dietary recommendations would require
inclusion of advice to replace livestock products with plant-based
alternatives.”
Reports like these have heavily influenced
climate-focused Democratic lawmakers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A draft
“Green New Deal” resolution called for “a more sustainable food system,” and a
Frequently Asked Questions section released by her office acknowledged the need
to develop a “greenhouse gas free food system” within the next decade, though
“we aren’t sure we can get rid of farting cows” that fast. We don’t know how
much of this Joe Biden supports, but his campaign website acknowledges that
“the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges
we face.”
But to hear the New Republic tell it,
making yourself aware of all this only marks you as a paranoiac. “Biden himself
has been astonishingly disciplined; the administration has largely ignored
right-wing attempts to bog him down in culture-war nonsense,” Alex Shephard
wrote. “That’s how you get a panic over a burger ban.”
Democrats act as though only those who are inclined to
nod along uncritically should be privy to these reports and the legislative
proposals based on them. The moment a skeptic encounters these studies, their
recommendations, or the political initiatives modeled on them, progressives
dismiss any criticisms as though they were the fevered product of an active
imagination. There’s a word that describes this kind of manipulative
dishonesty: gaslighting.
* * *
If we assume good faith among Democrats as well as their
ideological compatriots in the press, we must rule out the possibility that the
left knows full well it is attacking trends and traditions it regards with hostility
and that it’s simply lying. According to this line of thinking, the left’s
effort doesn’t constitute a culture war. It’s much more like a cultural
renovation. And we should be grateful for their efforts.
No, Democrats and progressives aren’t trying to nudge
Americans toward the consumption of plant-based meat alternatives. Rather,
they’re creating the conditions for sustainable agricultural practices to avert
the “climate crisis” that’s already upon us, and all while promoting healthier
lifestyles.
No, Democrats and progressives aren’t trying to ban
mentholated tobacco products out of a belief that it’s their role to control
the behavior of free adults. They’re just fostering an environment that rewards
good choices and punishing the firms that manipulate minorities who would
otherwise be lured unwittingly into a dangerous habit.
No, Democrats and progressives aren’t trying to
stigmatize and retire aspects of the language just to appease the narrow band
of activists who have embraced obscure and academic critical analyses as dogma.
They’re just trying to be inclusive, welcoming, and anti-racist.
No, Democrats and progressives aren’t trying to force
participants in the gig economy out of their chosen vocations, nor are they
trying to artificially increase union membership only to augment the
contributions these constituent groups make to Democratic campaigns. They’re
simply promoting fairness in the workplace, expanding National Labor Relations
Act protections to everyone, and making sure unions recoup the dues from
nonmembers who nevertheless benefit from the terms these organizations
negotiate.
That’s why they say these aren’t battles in the overall
culture war. No, they’re policy-driven, technocratic reforms predicated on
sound and objective analyses. The people who oppose them are not articulating a
valid point of view that deserves to be taken seriously. They are hidebound,
oppressive, and reactionary. All progressives want is progress; who could
possibly oppose that?
If you believe that, or you’re at least sympathetic to
it, you’re also unlikely to see Democratic culture-warring for what it is.
As USA Today’s Michael Collins put it, Joe Biden’s Department of
Education didn’t ditch all references to Dr. Seuss on “Read Across America Day”
(which, not coincidentally, falls on the author’s birthday) to appease insular
progressives who long ago arrived at the conclusion that his works are racially
insensitive. This “nuanced” administration is just striking a “delicate
balance” to avoid a “minefield of hot-button social issues.”
Democrats seem convinced they are only ever seeking to
establish a fragile cultural equilibrium that accounts for the views of all
stakeholders. By contrast, they argue, their opponents don’t seek fairness or
justice—rather, the right wants cultural hegemony for itself. If you think this
way, you can convince yourself that the only people with a taste for cultural
combat are on the right. But this isn’t logic; it’s a craven rationalization.
Democrats do seem to think they can convince voters that
Joe Biden is a noncombatant in the culture wars. But that’s a risky
proposition. The left and their allies are placing a potentially ruinous bet on
their ability to condition the American people to ignore the evidence of their
own eyes.
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