President Obama learned from Bill Clinton’s mistakes in 1993–94. He ran, relative to Clinton, a buttoned-up transition. He sought to avoid Clinton’s miscues on health care (all of them, that is, except for pushing an enormous overhaul of the system in the first place). And he steered clear of cultural landmines.

The backlash against Democrats in 1994 was famously attributed to “gays, guns, and God.” Obama has mostly avoided stoking opposition around that hot-button triad, but faces a very similar backlash. Why?

Big government became a cultural issue. The level of spending, the bailouts, and the extent of the intervention in the economy contemplated in health-care reform and cap-and-trade created the fear that something elemental was changing in the country — quickly and irrevocably.

Just as Clinton ran up against the country’s cultural conservatism, so has Obama. But Obama is encountering its fiscal expression, the sense that America has always been defined by a more stringently limited government than other advanced countries. If Obama is rebuked in November, it won’t be a “gays, guns, and God” backlash, but an “American exceptionalism” backlash.

Obama has added fuel to it with his serial apologies for America and his cringing attitude abroad, which has made him sound, in John Bolton’s evocative phrase, like a “post-American” president.

In keeping with the nature of this backlash, it is not overwhelmingly manned by the Christian Coalition and other social-conservative groups, as in 1994. They have been supplanted in the front lines by the Tea Party activists, who — as a recent National Review Institute survey indicates — hold conventional conservative views on social issues but are driven primarily by their opposition to Obama’s fiscal bender.

Obama hasn’t avoided all cultural issues. His health-care bill — at least the Senate version — would fund abortions. But it is telling how that came to pass. Obama didn’t seek an abortion fight. In fact, he has consistently maintained that the bill wouldn’t fund abortion. But by creating extensive new subsidies for insurance coverage, the bill inevitably got entangled in the question of whether that insurance would cover abortion. It’s a cultural fight, in other words, driven by an expansion of government.

And Obama now seeks to overturn Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But, again, consider the context. Obama announced his intention to overturn it in a State of the Union that tried to tack to the center on fiscal issues at the same time as it sought to re-energize his core supporters. Going after DADT is a bit of an afterthought meant to please his base, with the main event still the argument over the expansion of government.

Of course, very few people — mostly the Tea Party activists — explicitly understand the fight over Obama’s agenda in the cultural terms set out here. And, obviously, the American tradition has plenty of latitude for the expansion of government or we wouldn’t have as sprawling a welfare state as we do already. But suffusing the populist, patriotism-soaked campaign of Scott Brown was an implicit but insistent “no” to a rush to social democracy. At stake wasn’t just a grab-bag of fiscal issues, but the meaning of the country — the ultimate cultural issue.

That’s why our politics has the same emotional charge as if it were dominated exclusively by radioactive issues. And why Obama had better find a way to defuse the backlash, or November will be 1994 all over again, except without gays, guns, or God.

– Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.