An attempt at self-reflection reveals a complete absence of it.
An attempt at self-reflection reveals a complete absence of it.
L ast week, FiveThirtyEight published a think piece titled “Why Democrats Keep Losing Culture Wars.” The article is an instructive demonstration of what’s driving the Left’s recent losses in cultural battles — but not for the reasons that its authors think.
Recent months have seen Democrats and the broader Left sustain a series of humiliating losses in the culture wars. Particularly in education, the energetic grassroots backlash to critical race theory (CRT) has spawned anti-CRT laws in at least nine state legislatures, and red states across the country are set to pass a slate of similar laws in the upcoming legislative session. Gender ideology’s march through our institutions has encountered similar resistance, as ten states ban biological males from competing in women’s sports, and two more ban transition surgery and puberty blocking drugs for minors. (Here, too, similar legislation is also likely to pass in more red states this year). And a record-breaking number of state-level abortion restrictions were passed in 2021, spurred on by a conservative Supreme Court that could well be set to overturn Roe v. Wade.
FiveThirtyEight thinks that this is the result of right-wing fearmongering and misinformation. The article, by staff writers Alex Samuels and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, operates from the assumption that fears over CRT and abortion are a ginned-up fraud deriving from ignorance and bigotry. That’s why Democrats are losing the culture wars, they argue — not because voters have any legitimate reason to object to left-wing orthodoxy on cultural issues, but because “Republican politicians, in particular, build entire campaigns around false or misleading information, then implement policies that respond to those falsehoods, cementing them further in our political landscape.”
This is the thesis that drives the entire piece. Samuels and Thomson-DeVeaux open with the now-common canard that Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s new executive order banning CRT “is less straightforward than it seems, because critical race theory isn’t actually taught in Virginia public schools.” As authoritative proof for this claim, they link to the PolitiFact article “Critical race theory isn’t in Virginia’s curriculum.” Leaving aside the absurdity of the appeal to PolitiFact — a partisan left-wing source with a long, well-documented history of partisan left-wing “fact checks” — the basic premise that CRT isn’t in Virginia public schools is simply and demonstrably false:
In 2015, then-Governor McAuliffe's Department of Education instructed Virginia public schools to "embrace critical race theory" in order to "re-engineer attitudes and belief systems." They explicitly endorse CRT—he can't wiggle out of this one with word games. pic.twitter.com/aLV4LGYFZJ
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021
Under the Northam administration, Superintendent of Public Instruction James Lane sent a memo to Virginia public schools endorsing "Foundations of Critical Race Theory in Education," calling it an "important analytic tool" that can "further spur developments in education." pic.twitter.com/jJLuqdAqi5
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021
Right now, on its website, the Virginia Department of Education recommends "Critical Race Theory in Education" as a "best practice" and derives its definitions of "racism," "white supremacy," and "education equity" explicitly from "critical race theory." pic.twitter.com/QVSJVpju2A
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 30, 2021
But, in the famous words of Upton Sinclair, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” At both an ideological and institutional level, all the “experts” that the FiveThirtyEight writers cite in their piece are invested in believing that the progressive worldview is the objective one, and that any deviations from it are the result of irrational or insidious impulses in the electorate. By virtue of their own biases, elite progressive opinion-makers are unable to see this. At times, the expert class seems literally incapable of self-critical reflection, even in articles ostensibly dedicated to such an endeavor. And that, of course, is the real reason that Democrats are increasingly out of step with voters in the culture wars.
We see this in FiveThirtyEight’s discussion of abortion, which Samuels and Thomson-DeVeaux cite as “another example where arguments are increasingly framed in ways that tend to benefit Republicans.” What that means, of course, is more “misinformation”: “For years, the debate over abortion has revolved around misleading or downright inaccurate claims — like when former President Donald Trump accused Democrats of promoting infanticide (they were not),” the authors write. FiveThirtyEight might have wanted to consult Virginia Democrats, who introduced a bill in 2019 that would legalize abortion up until the point of birth, including while the mother was going into labor. When asked about the bill, then-governor Ralph Northam infamously confirmed the exact implications of the bill:
If a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
All of this, of course, is par for the course when it comes to the mainstream media’s treatment of the culture wars. In the elite progressive worldview, left-wing cultural policy is simply the norm, whereas any attempt to push back against it is unserious, cynical political maneuvering. Hence, the aggressors in the education wars are not the educators who are pushing CRT, but the aggrieved parents and political activists objecting to it.
But FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of these issues is revealing for deeper reasons. The article argues that regulation of abortion providers is “often justified by the incorrect assertion that abortion is dangerous,” and that “abortion performed in a medical setting” is “safer than giving birth or getting your appendix removed, which a number of studies support.” To a pro-life reader, the idea that a procedure that takes a baby’s life is “safe” — or what’s more, that murdering an unborn child is safer than giving birth to one — would surely seem odd. But therein lies the problem: It doesn’t seem to have even occurred to Samuels and Thomson-DeVeaux that any well-informed, good-faith observer could actually believe that abortion takes a human life.
Progressive hubris comes from the elite assumption that the left-liberal position is the objective, scientific one. But the idea that abortion isn’t the snuffing-out of an innocent human life — implicitly taken as fact in FiveThirtyEight’s analysis — is a fundamentally ideological position. Backed by a legion of like-minded experts, progressive elites cloud their contested assumptions in the language of science and expertise, and they therefore fail to recognize their ideology as ideological. This makes it impossible for them to recognize dissent as anything other than the product of bigotry, “misinformation,” or cynical ulterior motives.
So instead of reckoning with their own blind spots, the progressive expert class waxes poetic about the racism and sexism of a huge swath of the American electorate. FiveThirtyEight quotes one political scientist at Wellesley College who argues that “calling critical race theory an ‘existential threat’ activates racial animus and fears around white victimhood, which are strongly tied to support for conservative candidates and policies.” The authors concur, citing yet another expert to argue that “it’s hard to separate the current opposition to critical race theory in schools from a white backlash to a perceived loss of power and status.” And on abortion:
Polls . . . have found that attitudes toward abortion track closely with broader attitudes about women’s place in society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who hold traditional views, which often emphasize women’s roles as mothers, are more likely to oppose abortion.
All this is a perfect example of why the Left’s cultural aggression is alienating to so many voters. Progressive elites are plagued by an inability to understand the nature and function of social issues in American life as anything other than a battle between the forces of truth and justice on one side and those of ignorance and bigotry on the other. But the culture wars are important precisely because they deal with competing views on foundational philosophical questions of justice, morality, and human life itself. These questions cannot be outsourced to ostensibly “impartial” social science. Though they fail to acknowledge it, the sociologists and political scientists quoted by FiveThirtyEight are operating from a series of progressive presuppositions.
Samuels and Thomson-DeVeaux show their hand here when they write:
Abortion has been a successful culture-war issue on the right because most people don’t need to know much, if anything, about the reality of abortion in America to have an opinion on it. The debate is about values: who gets to make the decision to have an abortion, who should be involved, how much to weigh the life of a fetus.
Similarly, they maintain that “invoking critical race theory is different from sparring over class size or test scores. Fundamentally, it’s also about values — specifically, how children should be taught about racism.”
Well, yes. It is about values. It is about “how much to weigh the life of a fetus” and “how children should be taught about racism.” But those are fundamental political questions. They can’t be answered by polls or studies. FiveThirtyEight and the experts it cites assume that a voter’s opinion would change if only he or she knew more, or were able to think more rationally, about social issues such as abortion and CRT. But that assumption contradicts the reality — noted by the article’s authors themselves — that these issues deal with core disagreements at the level of first principles.
More fundamentally, all this is an enormously patronizing way to think and speak about citizens in an ostensibly self-governing society. Progressives such as Samuels and Thomson-DeVeaux seem to think that the real problem is that Democrats aren’t effective enough at calling out Republican lies. “Why not just tell voters that critical race theory isn’t being taught and move on? Or say that abortions are safe and increasingly rare but will always be necessary for some women?” they wonder aloud. “So far, Democrats haven’t really figured out a way to convince voters that some GOP messages aren’t based in reality.”
That line of reasoning is why the Left is losing on the issues of abortion and CRT. It’s not just that the “experts” cited by FiveThirtyEight are ideologues with a firm commitment to repeating obvious falsehoods. It’s that writers like Samuels and Thomson-Deveaux are animated by the elite conceit that anyone who disagrees with them is operating from illegitimate premises. Americans have always been a stubborn, rebellious bunch; they don’t take well to being lectured to by smug elites. And they really don’t take well to being lectured to by smug elites who are lying to them. Democrats won’t be able to regain their footing in the culture wars until they recognize that the backlash to elite leftism is driven by genuine concerns.