Losing the War on Christmas But Winning the Battle for the Culture? A pre-Thanksgiving Reflection
Although Thanksgiving is still three days away, friends and family have been wishing me a happy Thanksgiving for nearly a week already, so, in the holiday spirit, I've decided to get the ball rolling with some reportage from the front in the perennial War on Christmas. But first some background.
So long as there has been a Fox News, there has been a "War on Christmas"--that is, a claim by the Fox News hosts and ostensible journalists that there is a concerted effort among secular/liberal/coastal-elite politicians/journalists/ordinary-citizens to prevent devout Christians from expressing their faith in public. The standard move is to hype some supposedly outrageous anecdote, which might be real or could be highly distorted and exaggerated but in any event is highly unusual, and discuss it ad nauseam as though it is the tip of a secular spear aimed at religion in general and traditional forms of Christianity in particular.
Because I don't watch Fox News, I can't say with any confidence whether coverage of the supposed War on Christmas has intensified or abated, but after I mentioned the concept in the seminar I'm co-teaching this semester ("The Woke Constitution," which I described earlier this month), one of my students shared this amazing compilation with me, identifying dozens of "wars" that Fox News personalities imagine are emanating from progressive HQ against all manner of traditional practices and institutions.
I have previously invoked Fox's War on Christmas multiple times (for example, in 2007, 2012, 2013, and 2019). Here I want to ask about its continued power: How is it that the religious right and the right in general are able to sustain their sense of aggrieved victimization even as they win and hold political power? The right now controls all three branches of the federal government and much of the apparatus of state and local governments. Maybe the post-election approach on Fox News is all gloating. Like I said, I don't watch it, so I don't know. But even if there is some gloating now, I strongly suspect that there will be a relatively quick reversion to aggrieved victimhood.
One possible answer to the mystery of aggrievement amidst success is that in our culture victimization brings power. That's ironic, of course, because one of the themes on the right is that progressives celebrate victimhood rather than achievement. Item 16 on the list of Forever Wars in that video my student shared is a "War on Achievement."
Putting aside the irony (or, if you prefer, hypocrisy), I want to suggest that the right isn't simply playing the victim. Among the most astute commentaries on this year's election (either before or after Election Day) was Adam Gopnik's essay in the October 14 issue of The New Yorker. He wrote that even as the right wins the politics, it loses the culture:
Right-wing political power has, over the past half century, turned out to have almost no ability to stave off progressive social change: Nixon took the White House in a landslide while Norman Lear took the airwaves in a ratings sweep. And so a kind of permanent paralysis has set in. The right has kept electing politicians who’ve said, “Enough! No more ‘Anything goes’!”—and anything has kept going. No matter how many right-wing politicians came to power, no matter how many right-wing judges were appointed, conservatives decided that the entire culture was rigged against them.
On the left, the failure of cultural power to produce political change tends to lead to a doubling down on the cultural side, so that wholesome college campuses can seem the last redoubt of Red Guard attitudes, though not, to be sure, of Red Guard authority. On the right, the failure of political power to produce cultural change tends to lead to a doubling down on the political side in a way that turns politics into cultural theatre. Having lost the actual stages, conservatives yearn to enact a show in which their adversaries are rendered humiliated and powerless, just as they have felt humiliated and powerless. When an intolerable contradiction is allowed to exist for long enough, it produces a Trump.
The House Republican leadership freakout over the election of one trans woman to Congress is a nice illustration of this phenomenon.
Even so, I could quibble with some of Gopnik's claims. For example, his characterization of academia is exaggerated. Yes, there are campus radicals who can seem like thought police, but they are a distinct minority of students and faculty--even at Ivy League institutions--and, with the exception of some relatively low-level administrators, are largely absent from campus leadership. That said, however, Gopnik is surely right that the overall vibe on campus is left/liberal/progressive. Insofar as college campuses are sites of "cultural power," the left has won the culture.
Yet Gopnik also overstates his case for left-liberalism's cultural victory. Sure, trendy neighborhoods in revitalized urban centers and college campuses are sites of cultural power, but so are NASCAR races and exurban mega-churches. And the fracturing of the infotainment landscape into streaming, podcasts, TikTokers, YouTubers, and more means that no single person or institution has the authority once exercised by Norman Lear or Walter Cronkite.
Despite these correctives, I nonetheless agree with Gopnik's core point. At least on cultural issues, the right's political power mostly hasn't translated into cultural victories--at least not on a national scale. Whether that changes in a second Trump administration remains to be seen, but there is at least some reason to hope that the trend of liberal cultural dominance will continue.
After all, political power doesn't necessarily translate into changes on the ground. Judicial rulings are instructive. Brown v. Board of Education didn't result in substantial desegregation for over a decade--not until the 1964 Civil Rights Act empowered the Department of Justice to sue. The Supreme Court's cases forbidding organized school prayer in public schools were widely ignored in large swaths of the country. The Supreme Court's overruling of Roe v. Wade was followed by a modest increase in the number of abortions. To generalize, law on the books--which is the consequence of the exercise of political power--need not affect law or practices on the street.
Admittedly, that's not a reason to think law is irrelevant or unimportant. Nancy Mace and Mike Johnson have opened a new front in the right's cynical and cruel war on trans rights (see what I did there?). It will bring setbacks for thousands of people, especially those living in communities where the loudest bigots will feel most empowered. At least locally, political power will matter even without any wider cultural impact.
If Gopnik is broadly right--and I think he is--there remains some reason for cautious optimism. Winning the culture means moving the center of gravity on public opinion. There will be a lot of pain along the way, but if we can get there before the planet fully melts, eventually the politics will follow the culture.
In a year in which it's difficult to find much (outside of one's personal life) for which to be thankful, I'll take winning the culture.