Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.
The upshot is that this new politics has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent. It appeals to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet. As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.
That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition. (Source)
I've been saying for years that Dems are delusional if they think the browning of America works in their favor because unless you are an elite brown American, the party doesn't really represent your interests except to be not the party of white nationalism.
Republicans will sooner or later figure this out and quash the white nationalist factions within the party and become simply the party of traditional values. Some already get it. As soon as they do, Dems become a rump party of coastal and urban elites. Once again, as I've been saying for years, the Right/Left divide is not primarily defined by economic policy. Sanders/Warren policies would be embraced by large swaths of traditional-values Americans if Republicans proposed them rather than Democrats.
Is that likely to happen? Well, the GOP would have to oust the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells from leadership if the GOP were to become truly representative of the cultural and economic interests of the bottom 80%. The question is whether the 1% will continue to be the real power in the GOP or whether MAGA crazies will come to dominate it. The strategy so far has been for the establishment (non-MAGA) GOP to use the culture wars to alienate as many of the non-elite 80% as possible from the Dems so that it can continue to represent the interests of the 1%.
If the MAGA folks take over, does that mean that there's no future for McConnell and his 1% politics? Will the 1% be able to keep control if leadership passes to people like Elise Stefanik and Josh Hawley? Probably. The House is more vulnerable to be led by a true believer MAGA crazy than the Senate would be or even, despite his anti-corporate MAGA posturing, a DeSantis White House. Hawley, Cotton, DeSantis know who butters the bread in the GOP, and they will do what they need to to keep the MAGA base in line while doing their work for the 1%. And in the long run it's more likely that most corporate cultures will bend to right-wing conservative pressure than the other way around.
In effect that describes exactly what happened during the Trump years. Bannon's populist nationalism was never really taken seriously. The most important accomplishments of the Trump presidency was his tax cuts and his getting a Supreme Court majority whose Federalist Society ideology is pro-Big Money and anti-voting rights, both of which favor the 1%. Everybody is obsessing about abortion, about which the 1% couldn't care less one way or the other. For them, the truly important thing about the Trump/McConnell court appointments is their having a court that supports an 18th century fundamentalist interpretation of the constitution that gives them an open field on which to run.
Bottom line–so much depends on which party captures the allegiance of non-elite Americans. The culture war, because it is the most salient driver of American politics, will be lost by Democrats in the political sphere unless they find a way to navigate cultural issues in ways that aren't so alienating to most non-elite Americans–whatever their color. If they lose the culture war, the GOP wins the political war, and whether or not that leads to a banana-republic or an Orban style autocracy, it certainly leads to the unfettered dominance of American society by the interests of the 1%.
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