As Democrats reeled from the magnitude of the November 2024 electoral loss, it didn’t take long for recriminations and scapegoating to begin. “I’m done with Democratic political purity tests,” announced the headline of Massachusetts congressman Seth Moulton’s November 29 Washington Post op-ed. In the article, Moulton used dismissive shorthand—“identity politics,” “word police”—to allude to the supposed existence of a purity brigade of discontents who, Moulton insisted, patrol the Democratic Party endlessly, “no matter how badly we lose.”
Transgender people were the only group Moulton specifically mentioned in his op-ed. Notably, Moulton had supported transgender rights in the past—but, he wrote, he is also a dad who doesn’t like “the idea of my two girls one day competing against biological boys on a playing field.” Others soon piled on. Politico political bureau chief Jonathan Martin asserted that “affinity group politics” delivered to Trump the support of “a working-class coalition that was once [Democrats’] own.”
Some Democrats publicly disagreed with this dangerous misreading of the political moment, notably Kentucky governor Andy Beshear. But mainstream media focused on those who blamed transgender and other never-clearly-defined “identity groups” for making Democrats vulnerable to collateral damage from the culture wars that the GOP is zealously waging against marginalized groups. (See a 2022 Inquest primer on right-wing GOP culture wars here.)
This storyline ignores or minimizes the right’s horrific assaults on the humanity and civil rights of transgender people, immigrants, and other vulnerable communities. It falsely implies that raced and gendered “identity groups” don’t really care about poverty and economic hardship; that the loss of this working-class coalition happened quickly; and that the Democratic Party itself bears no responsibility for losing support. But neither the authoritarian right-wing resurgence nor rightward working-class shift happened overnight. And the lifeblood of this politics of social fracture has always been the mobilization of resentment. This politics is exacerbated by the U.S. urban/rural divide that, in the words of political strategist Scot Nakagawa, leaves “cities holding the power and rural areas holding the resentment.”
But my focus here is not on the Democratic Party. Rather, my aim is to consider the larger dynamics and amassing force of culture wars—not just the issues and policies (and politicians) that animate them, but why and how so many people who are not right-wing fanatics—who may even detest Trump—have come to embrace those wars or simply fail to challenge them. We can’t respond effectively if we don’t more fully grasp the seductive pull, battering-ram power, disorienting intent, and violent force of those dynamics.
I’m tempted to try to explain today’s culture wars by drawing on my almost sixty years of activism in movements for social justice, peace, and economic justice—including a regrettable but informative stint as a teenaged working-class Goldwater Girl. But sometimes political analysis is not sufficient to explain something much larger and more roiling than issues, voting behavior, and elections. So I’ll turn first to whitewater rafting for an image that may be useful.
I’m no whitewater expert, but I’ve rafted on a number of such rivers in my life. Many years ago, I learned about a particular flow of water called a hydraulic because, on one of my trips, a guy on a neighboring raft was thrown into the water and got trapped in one. Imagine a situation in which you’re on a raft when it drops over a rock, ledge, waterfall, or low-head dam into deeper water flowing downstream. The water on the surface gets drawn back toward the rock or ledge. A reverse circular motion of water flow pushes you back down and back toward that surface, keeping you trapped and submerged, even though the water is constantly moving. It’s a dangerous situation, and most of us wouldn’t be able to get out without help. The guy on my trip couldn’t.
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Think of the endlessly repetitive emotional force and thundering noise of culture wars as a national hydraulic created by powerful flows of fear, anxiety, confusion, uncertainty, resentment, scapegoating, and supremacist—racial, gendered, religious—ideology. We’re all trapped in it, one way or other. That’s because its overwhelming force is as unconscious, even mythic, as it is political. The urgent and dehumanizing energies of culture wars place supporters on the right side of no-holds-barred combat against purported threats to their personal lives as well as to the nation’s health and very existence.
If I’m already anxious about social change, culture wars give definition and resonance to my fears, uncertainties, confusions, and struggles. I feel heard. They not only support my grievances and resentments but fuel, distort, and amplify them. If I feel invisible and disposable to the powers that be, I’m ushered into a well-organized supremacist validation of my worth in which I learn that it’s others who are disposable, not me. If I feel isolated and my rural community is in decline, culture wars offer me a circle of support. If I am frightened as good jobs in my community disappear, hospitals are closed, public schools are underfunded, I’m priced out of good housing and decent health care, and stores are shuttered, culture wars offer me scapegoats and right-wing “solutions.” Paradoxically, while joining this “community” requires turning neighbors into dehumanized enemies, it often, at least initially, feels comforting, reassuring, even wholesome and ordained by God. In 1992 paleoconservative politician and pundit Pat Buchanan characterized such politics as a religious “cultural war” fighting for “the soul of America.”
Because culture wars help me feel more virtuous, less alone, and more powerful, I am likely to respond with indifference and tacit acceptance, or even enthusiasm, when violence—social, economic, ecological, structural, bodily—is inflicted on my enemies. Culture wars inure us to supremacist violence in its vigilante, interpersonal, and institutional forms, in part by shifting blame for that violence onto the vulnerable communities against whom the violence is perpetrated. For those already inclined to be abusive, culture wars offer blank-check permission for vigilantes to declare open season on targets already marked as disposable. Organized campaigns of harassment and intimidation become the norm. The everyday structural violence—social, economic, and ecological—that already harms targeted communities intensifies and expands, becoming part of a much larger, punishing project of retributive cleansing. There’s a gleeful, celebratory, punishing energy about it all that is white supremacist, hypermasculine, and theocratic.
Every culture war advances under the rubrics of safety, protection, freedom, religious freedom, free speech, and morality. But we also need to pay attention to the “going for the soft underbelly” thematic currents and rhetoric: Degeneracy. Defilement. Unnatural. Crime-infested. Filth. Grooming. Predators. Vermin. “Poisoning the blood of our country.” Endlessly repeated, these words and phrases more fully reveal the real nature of the project and its attacks. We need to recognize that, beyond the dehumanizing and antidemocratic intentions of this rhetoric, it is also eugenic. It’s the same rhetoric used at various times throughout U.S. history to remove designated degenerates and defectives—as well as their purportedly polluting ideas—from the national body. The message, implicit or explicit, is “Let them die.”
While it’s tempting to believe that eugenic imperatives are the province of extremists, they actually have a long history of being completely mainstream in the United States. Mainstream U.S. “remedies” have included incarceration in prisons and asylums; draconian immigration policies; mass programs of involuntary sterilization (echoed in contemporary concerns about coerced sterilizations in immigrant detention); separating children from their families; medical exploitation and denial of appropriate health care; campaigns against charities and programs serving poor people on the grounds that such assistance helped “defective” people live longer; and more. In the 1930s German Nazi leaders in fact took inspiration from U.S. race-based policies—particularly anti-miscegenation and citizenship laws—to craft their anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws.
Today, though the policies are not explicitly labeled as eugenics, Trump and his state cohorts announce edicts and pursue policies that seek to erase from society transgender people, immigrants and refugees of color, and other targeted communities. Under the demonizing cloak of these attacks, the entire framework of civil rights is being demolished, social programs and safety nets are being destroyed, and the very rich continue to benefit from policies that accelerate the upward transfer and consolidation of wealth.
We can’t get out of this hydraulic as a society by abandoning vulnerable neighbors. We must help targeted communities survive. We can’t get out by trying to appease or placate the culture war architects, or by preemptively obeying their abusive commands. And we can’t get out of this hydraulic with a politics of reactivity; it is not only dispiriting but tries to fight by accepting MAGA terms of debate. Better political messaging and more focus groups won’t save us. And we can’t get out with a politics of contempt directed at the ordinary people (also neighbors) who get sucked into culture war because they (often rightly) feel no one cares about their lives and struggles.
None of this means that we don’t oppose what’s happening; that we don’t resist. It does mean that we must try to help get more lifelines to one another, particularly to those most immediately placed in the culture-war crosshairs. The challenge is to create new cultures of resistance and transformation. The root of this effort is building trustworthy relationships that over time begin to replace fear and enmity with caring community.
We have our work cut out for us. Today, a GOP/MAGA juggernaut rooted in white nationalism, Christian nationalism, and patriarchy controls all three branches of the federal government. In addition, Republicans have “trifecta” control (the governor’s office plus majorities in the state legislature) of twenty-three state governments. (Democrats have trifecta control in fifteen states; the remaining states have divided governments.) Republicans have veto-proof supermajorities in twenty state legislatures compared to only eight for Democrats. Longstanding right-wing efforts to pack the judiciary at all levels have helped to consolidate the advance of authoritarian rule. Add to this the enthusiastic embrace of Trump/MAGA by Big Tech and corporate moguls whose social media and publishing platforms exercise close-to-monopoly power to amplify fascist and right-wing voices.
The speed and force with which the incoming Trump administration showers the nation with executive orders—and turns over vital government information and functions to unaccountable, nongovernmental actors—is intentional. It aims to overwhelm and disorient us. To convince us that dissenting voices don’t matter and that, in the words of the villainous Borg of Star Trek, “resistance is futile.” It’s not. There are cracks in the MAGA edifice. It’s up to us to prove that their presumptive omnipotence is just another MAGA lie—first and foremost by defending, supporting, and working with the communities most immediately under violent attack. We must also recognize that hardship and suffering will widen and deepen, even for many MAGA supporters, as the promised hollowing out of the federal government, demolition of social programs and (already inadequate) safety nets, and crony capitalist privatization schemes gain momentum. Trump/MAGA will intensify efforts to mute protest and widening unrest. Political violence will increase. We must respond to it; it’s far too dangerous to ignore it. That’s why we have to think more imaginatively and strategically about how we organize.
The crafting of lifelines is up to us because no one else is coming to save us. For the most part, the Democratic Party leadership has been silent. Even if it begins to wake up, electoral politics alone cannot deliver us from this nightmare. None of this will be easy. There are no certain outcomes. In some instances, there will be legal risks and attempts to intimidate organizations as well as individuals into silence. But to do nothing is to surrender our own humanity and any hope of a better, democratic future. No one can do everything, but we all have something to contribute, primarily in the communities in which we live. Survival in this moment demands that we prioritize relationship building over reactivity; that we prioritize solidarity over silence. In this way, we create the possibility of emerging from this violent hydraulic as a society, transformed for the better. Wherever we are, we should try to connect with existing groups that are already on the ground. They have essential knowledge and insight.
I am searching for the ways in which I can be most useful in the days to come; I hope you are, too. Even the simplest, most modest actions can be lifesaving: preparing food, donating money, supporting labor organizing, providing shelter, providing and arranging for health care, creating art, writing music, offering transportation, mobilizing communities of faith, joining mutual aid efforts, running for local offices, publicly standing up for vulnerable communities that are under attack, speaking out against repressive legislation and policies, fighting ICE tactics of deportation and family separation, and more. Some of this work will be publicly visible; much of it won’t be.
Along the way, even as we support and try to create as much safety as possible for others, we should not neglect self-care. This will be a long haul. It is perilous, yes, and often frightening, but we’re not wearing metaphorical jackboots, and our goal is not authoritarian control. Our task is to become more caring, not less. We face incredibly difficult days ahead. Yet there will also be moments of joy as we work together in new ways to build caring communities. And to paraphrase novelist Jeff VanderMeer, joy reminds us why we fight.
There is no existing blueprint for how to help, no master plan, no central authority telling us what to do. But we are in this together. I hope—I trust—that our paths will cross somewhere along the way.
Image: Nik/Unsplash
