The issue is not whether Republicans are the only ones fighting a culture war.

It's about whether the Republicans are only fighting a culture war.

What are their policies on healthcare? Infrastructure investment and repair? Climate change? Transportation policy? Childhood poverty? Topsoil depletion in the midwest? Extreme severe drought in the southwest? etc. etc.

Why do they appear to spend so much time talking about things in the "culture war" realm and so little time advancing policy agendas about things that really matter (not that are no "culture war" issues that matter).

Progressives are quite clear about the metrics by which they consider one state of a society to be better than another. More equality of opportunity. Less income/wealth inequality. A more even distribution of GDP between labor and capital. Reduced discrimination against protected classes. Improved health outcomes. Equal treatment under the law. Above all, the type of society you would choose to live in if you could not control who your parents were or where you would be born.

It is far from clear what the conservative/Republican equivalent of this is.

I'm not sure policies matter much in the end. If I went into a coma before election night 2016 and woke up today, how would I tell we just had four years of a hard-right authoritarian government and we are now about a year and three months into a moderate center-left government?

I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.

Nobody could tell; that's why we have cloth masks to differentiate ourselves.

About a year after Trump's election, I found myself thinking along similar lines. I mean, his administration made very little difference in my life, or the lives of anyone I know. Yes, I could be empathetic towards people whose lives I mostly just read about. But realistically, I had no actual evidence of any impact.

Then I met up with a very old friend of mine. Successful SV VC guy. Incredibly smart. Incredibly human. Probably reads Hacker News (actually, scratch that). Happens to be of Indian ancestry, though he grew up in Davis, CA. Very wealthy thanks to a few good choices made after he dropped out of his PhD program. So yeah, maybe he didn't have my middle class white anglo privilege going on, but if there's a ladder, I had always assumed he was only 1 or 2 rungs below me, at worst.

As it turns out, no. Trump's election had made him adopt a policy of no longer engaging in any business travel to anywhere in the USA except major metropolitan areas. Was it paranoid? I don't feel equipped to comment. But that was the verdict of a guy that I respect enormously for his intelligence and his decision making processes. He felt too unsafe in Trump's America to visit mid-size towns in Iowa.

So, when you say:

> I have to be honest it's not a night-and-day difference.

I'd advise checking in with some brown people you know (or don't know). Some immigrants not yet moved into citizenship. Someone in any group that Trump verbally attacked. Because I felt the same way until my friend gently but forcefully told me that I had no idea what the fuck I was talking about if I was trying to generalize from my own experience.

>Trump's election had made him adopt a policy of no longer engaging in any business travel to anywhere in the USA except major metropolitan areas

So not because of any negative experience with these areas, just because of some bigoted stereotype? Sounds like the parent post was right, nothing in daily life really changed, except perhaps the perception of some increased danger. Perhaps brought on by the way that Trump was reported on in the media?

The fact that people feel something does not imply that it exists. Humans are notoriously unreliable witnesses.

> The fact that people feel something does not imply that it exists.

I absolutely agree.

Nevertheless, to hear that an intelligent, savvy, world-travelling person could now feel unsafe in many parts of the USA was, to me, indicative of a type of change that is as real as them actually being unsafe. Which is to say: I don't know if they were actually in any more danger than they would have been before, but they now perceived American society as if they were. That didn't happen because they ate the wrong thing for breakfast.

The fact that the "overton window" of the visible culture seemed to have move enough after Trump's election that this person now felt unsafe, regardless of whether there was an actual change in their safety, seems really notable to me, and no doubt even more notable to the people who live with this shift in perception.

What actually made midsize towns in Iowa unsafe to visit for persons of Indian descent in Trump's America? Did the Iowans suddenly get more racist? Was Dubuque declared a "sundown town"? Have the Iowans calmed down now that we live in Biden's America?

I think my friend's explanation was that he felt that people who might potentially feel inclined to verbally or physically harass him now felt less inhibited after Trump's election. That is to say, there was no actual shift in attitude but a shift in the likelihood of public behavior based on those attitudes. I have not checked in with him since the last election, but based on conversations we've had in the past, I would guess he does not imagine that Biden's election has changed things much. The genie escaped from the bottle; putting it back is much harder.

So essentially the people in mid-size towns in Iowa were and are mostly racist (and not "implicit bias" racist but "shouting racial slurs and engaging in physical aggression" racist) but the national attitude during 2008-16 was holding them back from verbally and physically harassing people of color as they wanted to do, because they knew Obama would crack down on them like a ton of bricks.

After Election Day 2016 the formerly mild-mannered Iowans (a state so racist that America's first Black president won a majority of votes there in 2008 and 2012) decided to drop all pretense of being nice to people of color.

I'm sorry but it sounds frankly ridiculous.

That feels like a more or less willful misreading.

Let's suppose that my friend crosses paths with 100 Iowans during a business trip there. Let's suppose that 1% of Iowans are racist or bigoted enough to at the very least yell some abuse at this particular clearly non-caucasian individual. Before Trump's primary campaign and electoral win, social pressure kept the 1 person my friend may have encountered from acting on that impulse, but afterwards, that person felt much freer to just speak their mind (or worse).

Such an analysis says nothing about Iowans in general as people. It says that it's easy to be worried that the general attitude had shifted enough in Iowa (but not, say, in NYC or Chicago) that the tiny percentage of people who might act on their racist/bigoted impulses are now more likely to do so, changing my friend's risk exposure by visiting.

It's not for you or me to judge whether that's sufficient reason to avoid Iowa now. That's an individual decision to be made, and I do not sit in judgement of those who decide one way or another.

But you're also missing the deeper aspect of the point I'm trying to make. You don't have to believe me, but I'm telling you that my friend is a hyper-rational, highly intelligent, well informed individual. The fact that such a person could move from "I have never worried about being brown when moving around the USA" to "I will not visit anywhere outside of large metropolitan areas" - that's the change. You are free to argue that it is is irrational, or even "ridiculous" as you put it, but the point is that the state of American society pre-Trump left this individual feeling safe, and the same state post-Trump left them feeling anxious. If they were a person prone to irrational, emotive decisions or generally over-reacted to anything, then I would be inclined to dismiss the change in their sense of their own safety. If they had always worried about this aspect of life in the USA, I would be inclined to dismiss the change. But they are not and they did not, and so I take this change quite seriously.

> It is far from clear what the conservative/Republican equivalent of this is.

Amount of brown people in their voters neighborhood

This doesn't work in Florida.

Cultures change constantly. They’re never in a sort of stasis. Culture is just the expressions of a group of humans, how they think, and how they interact.

One could argue that rolling back abortion access (which has existed for decades and is part of US culture) is conservatives in America explicitly changing US culture. Same with bills like the one in Florida that disallow teachers from discussing human gender or human romantic relationships.

Everyone is generally trying to affect the direction of the culture of the US at the political level at all times. It’s not a right va left thing it’s a humans exist thing.

>Cultures change constantly. They’re never in a sort of stasis. Culture is just the expressions of a group of humans, how they think, and how they interact.

That doesn't obligate a people to quietly accept a culture imposed onto them by out of touch urbanites/intellectuals/ivory tower elites.

>Same with bills like the one in Florida that disallow teachers from discussing human gender or human romantic relationships.

Human gender and normalcy of romantic relationships are culturally defined. This bill isn't about forbidding discussion of genders, its about resisting the imposition of progressive culture onto the children of moderate/conservative parents. This isn't about bigotry, this is a genuine concern that normalizing fundamentally abnormal behaviors can do more harm than good to individuals and society.

That's a very particular reading of a very particular poll. Contrast with a Gallup poll from more or less the same time frame:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

"Would you like to see the Supreme Court overturn its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision concerning abortion, or not?"

No: 58% Yes: 32% No opinion: 10%

You can slice and dice the court of public opinion many different ways to demonstrate support for your preferred position on abortion (as with many other things). That doesn't mean that "conservatives are trying to roll back the law to reflect the culture" (emphasis mine). It means that they have an idea of what the culture should be, and are trying to make it so (like everyone else who is trying to accomplish anything politically).

Wait—who is “slicing and dicing” the polling here? The main political debate right now is over where to draw the line for elective abortions. Texas draws it at 8 weeks, Mississippi at 15, and Roe at 22-24.

Asking people a question framed in terms of weeks or trimesters produces a much more accurate reflection of the culture than asking them about a legal decision that most people have never read. Most people think that “overturning Roe” means “banning abortion nationwide.” Maybe you think that’s where Republicans are headed with this. I think it would be equally fair to say, given recent laws passed in New York and Colorado, that Democrats want legal abortion until the moment of birth (and after that if the abortion was unsuccessful).

But the actual legal issue in play right now are 8 weeks, 15 weeks, or 22-24 weeks. And public opinion is much closer to what republicans have enacted on those numbers than what Roe requires.

Your entire comment is slicing and dicing. Making claims about what is "a more accurate reflection of the culture" is slicing and dicing.

Just stand up for what you believe in. Stop trying to speak on behalf of "the culture" which is in most ways not accurately knowable, and even if it was, is of dubious significance. Most major shifts in societies (not all, but most) occur in opposition to "the culture".

> Making claims about what is "a more accurate reflection of the culture" is slicing and dicing.

You don't think it's possible to get a gist of what the public thinks generally? Most Americans (60%) think that abortion should be "generally legal" in the first trimester, while only 28% think that it should be "generally legal" in the second trimester: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-...

Insofar as Roe requires abortion to be "generally legal" in the second trimester--a position that 70% of Americans reject--it is a departure from the culture.

> Just stand up for what you believe in. Stop trying to speak on behalf of "the culture" which is in most ways not accurately knowable, and even if it was, is of dubious significance.

I believe in democratic values. I believe culture belongs to everyone, and cultural changes should be driven bottom-up, through social consensus, not top down by legal elites, big corporations, etc.

> Most major shifts in societies (not all, but most) occur in opposition to "the culture".

Much more so in the U.S. than in other developed countries, and that's a bad thing. Most European countries ended up making elective abortions available in the first trimester in response to changing social views. In the U.S., legal elites rammed through a second-trimester rule that decades later is still at odds with public opinion.

Likewise, in 2015, the U.S. the Supreme Court found that the Constitution's implicit marriage right encompassed same-sex marriage. A year later, the European Court of Human Rights reached the exact opposite conclusion--finding that the express marriage right in the European Convention on Human Rights did not extend to same-sex marriage: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... Accordingly, countries like Germany legalized same-sex marriage in 2017, through the ordinary legislative process, with the support of 73% of the population.

It’s slimy and dishonest to pretend that I said something that I did not say.