A new poll hammers home that Republican voters have a keen interest in the cultural battles some conservative elites would like to downplay.
A new poll hammers home that Republican voters have a keen interest in the cultural battles some conservative elites would like to downplay.
T he so-called “culture wars” have long been relegated to the position of a lesser, second-class issue set among many conservative elites — an unserious, or at least less serious, collection of political causes that divert attention from the real issues of importance in America. “The culture war is a distraction,” blared the headline of a 2020 column in the Hill penned by the Heartland Institute’s David D’Amato. A Dispatch piece from Jonah Goldberg the next year bore a similar title — “The Culture Wars as Distraction.” In 2010, Mitch Daniels, then the Republican governor of Indiana, famously urged a “truce on the so-called social issues” so that political leaders could focus on budgetary issues. Two years later, the RNC’s post-election autopsy presented the party with a similar formula: cultural moderation, paired with a refocus on “growth and opportunity.”
Republican voters tend to disagree. The fact that cultural conservatism is generally more popular with Americans than is Paul Ryan–era budget hawkishness has been consistently reflected in public-opinion surveys from time immemorial, even if Republican politicians often seem intent on ignoring it. But a new poll of GOP primary voters from the American Principles Project (APP), a scrappy social-conservative advocacy group, hammers home the point that Republican voters, in particular, have a much more potent interest in the defense of American culture than many conservative elites do.
As NR’s Ari Blaff reports, the APP survey “found that the vast majority want the party’s presidential candidates to lean into culture war issues, especially when it comes to education and health care. . . . 93 percent of the 1,000 Republican primary voters surveyed want presidential candidates to prioritize parental rights and school curriculum transparency.” Blaff continues:
There was also significant GOP voter enthusiasm for candidates who back federal laws banning permanent sex-changing medical procedures for minors (76 percent), prohibiting biological males from competing in girls’ sports (69 percent), and requiring age-verification measures for pornographic websites to protect kids (86 percent). . . . The poll shows the enthusiasm Republican primary voters have for many culture-war issues. It also found that those voters expressed less interest in more “establishment-preferred issues” like reforming Social Security and Medicare (64 percent), passing a pathway to citizenship for illegal migrants (59 percent), and providing funding and military aid to Ukraine (47 percent).
All this reaffirms an already self-evident truth: Culture-war hawkishness — an actual interest in wading into national fights over gender, religion, race and American history — is the key to the Republican primary electorate’s heart. The picture that the survey paints of the GOP base’s economic philosophy is mixed: On the one hand, a decisive majority said they would be more likely to support a candidate who prioritized welfare reform; on the other, just 4 percent of Republican voters ranked “government spending” as their top issue. But on cultural issues, the message was unanimous. (And both the Republican voters and Americans overall who have heard of critical race theory, which the APP poll didn’t test, give consistently negative impressions.)
What this tells us is not that Republican voters are necessarily left-wing on economics, but that the primary impulse that drives them out to the polls is a desire to protect their culture, and the way of life it enshrines, from the powerful forces arrayed against it. Their political priorities are distinct from many of the politicians who arrive in their communities every two to six years to pander for their votes, many of whom see cultural conservatism as an unfortunate but necessary set of motions to go through so that they can get back to cutting corporate tax rates. This was captured in a moment of unusual honesty from a former Republican staffer in a New Yorker piece last year:
“There was always an element of the Republican Party that was batshit crazy,” Mac Stipanovich, the chief of staff to Governor Bob Martinez, a moderate Republican, told me. “They had lots of different names—they were John Birchers, they were ‘movement conservatives,’ they were the religious right. And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them. We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised—and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.”
Republican voters are smarter than a lot of their elected representatives think they are — in fact, they’re smarter than a lot of their elected representatives — and have been vividly aware of this dynamic for a long time. From the Tea Party to Trump’s renegade 2016 campaign, the populist conservative uprisings of the past few decades have been as much a revolt against the GOP itself as they were an expression of dissatisfaction with the Left. But the Republican Party has a way of neutering those forces by the time they arrive in Washington, simply repackaging the same product and selling it back to their voters as something new and different.
The latest iteration of this is “aspirational conservatism,” outlined in a Politico piece this week from former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith and the American Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Streeter: “Many in the party think the GOP must choose between an anti-elitist nationalism and a return to establishmentarian small government . . . between waging war against wokeism and capitulating to the left,” Goldsmith and Streeter write. But the authors see an opening “for conservatives who want neither anti-government ideology nor hyperactive culture warring” — an “aspirational conservatism” that “could build on” the “compassionate conservatism” of the Bush era, focused on “opportunity, individual initiative and hope,” criminal justice reforms “that elevate trust through community policing and prevention strategies,” and a “break from a growing preference on the right for wielding federal power in pursuit of moral goals.”
The Left, of course, doesn’t think that way — even if they will pantomime at exasperation with “right-wing culture warring” whenever a conservative happens to object to the culture’s leftwards movement. That’s because progressives tend to have a more sophisticated understanding of what this culture-war business is really all about: “Culture wars aren’t a distraction, they’re a battle over everything,” declared a 2021 essay from Open Democracy, a progressive outlet. “Our culture is the filter through which we look at the world,” the author reasoned; “so a war over culture isn’t a foolish distraction from the ‘real issues.’”
Quite so. Goldsmith and Streeter may not be interested in the culture war, but the culture war is interested in them. As Bradley Devlin noted in a response to their piece in the American Conservative, “the public’s focus” on the issues Goldsmith and Streeter identify — education, crime and public safety, and so on — “is inextricably bound to the current culture war between a sane America and one fixated on race, gender, and sexuality.”
Until they realize as much, aspirational conservatives and their counterparts will have little to offer the electoral base of their party. In the past, they didn’t have to — as Stipanovich so candidly noted, Republican voters “could grumble, but their choices were limited.” But if the past few years are any indication, the long-ignored majority of those voters are getting wise to the program and beginning to lose their patience. When they finally do, one suspects that “aspirations” will no longer be sufficient.