It’s Only a ‘Culture War’ When Conservatives Do It

Biden’s Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) was, for a moment, seriously considering a ban on gas stoves. That is, until conservatives noticed they were. And then they weren’t. Until they were again, now arguing that gas stoves are so toxic that they might cause brain damage (except for the ones in our house), claiming, according to The Science, that they might even be as toxic as parking a car in your apartment with the engine running, and wondering why conservatives are making this into such a big culture war issue. Really, it was the GOP’s fault for politicizing the ban-that-wasn’t-happening-until-it-was: “Forget all that stuff we said for the past 48 hours about how gas stoves are literally killing you; we’re tabling the ban.”

This is more or less the narrative arc of the Great Gas-Stove-Ban War of 2023. On January 9, Bloomberg reported that the CPSC “says a ban on gas stoves is on the table amid rising concern about harmful indoor air pollutants emitted by the appliances,” citing an interview with the commissioner of the agency. (That same commissioner had floated the possibility of “banning gas stoves entirely” last month: “We ought to keep that possibility of a [gas stove] ban in mind . . . because it’s a powerful tool in our toolbox and it’s a real possibility here.”) That was followed by a flurry of headlines to the same effect: “A US federal agency is considering a ban on gas stoves” (CNN); “Federal Agency to Consider Ban on Gas Stoves” (Mother Jones); “U.S. Regulators And State Lawmakers Consider Banning Gas Stoves — Here’s Why” (Forbes).

Then, of course, conservatives made the mistake of reading those headlines, and it began to look like a potential bad-PR situation for the Biden administration. The pivot was seamless: “U.S. Isn’t Considering Gas Stove Ban, Actually,” Gizmodo announced. “I want to set the record straight,” the CPSC chair chimed in. “Contrary to recent media reports, I am not looking to ban gas stoves.” The opening paragraph of a Vanity Fair piece on the topic provided us with a master class in “maybe it is, maybe it isn’t” mental gymnastics:

Is a ban actually going to happen? Maybe! Is it possibly not going to happen? Considering that “on the table” suggests nothing has been decided, and Richard Trumka Jr., the commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is mulling the ban, told Bloomberg that the group could alternatively implement emissions standards, maybe not! If the risk to one’s health is as bad as the agency says it is, would a potential ban not actually be a terrible thing? Perhaps!

The final version of this argument was that the question of whether or not the gas-stove ban is happening is actually irrelevant; the real problem is that conservatives are making a big deal out of it. In a piece titled “Right’s new fight: Gas stoves,” Axios reports: “Despite official insistence that fears of a ban are unfounded, conservatives are suddenly championing gas stoves in a new culture war.” A Washington Post headline declared: “GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars.” The Guardian announced: “Republicans turn up the heat on a new culture war target: gas stoves.” 

This is a textbook case of what some right-wingers describe as the “celebration parallax” — a tendency in progressive press coverage summed up by the line: “That’s not happening and it’s good that it is.” It’s also a perfect example of the legacy media’s general attitude toward any and every conservative objection to the left-wing program. As I wrote in response to a Barack Obama speech that tore into conservative opponents of radical race and gender instruction in public-school classrooms, this attitude is characterized by two distinct canards:

First, the idea that conservative cultural concerns — like, say, whether male students who are credibly accused of assaulting their female peers should continue to have access to girl’s bathrooms if they claim to be transgender — aren’t “serious problems that actually affect serious people.” Second, that the Right is always the aggressor in the culture war: In Obama’s framing, the culture warriors in Virginia are not the progressive educators who have pushed critical race theory–influenced curricula and transgender ideology in kids’ schools, but the parents and concerned citizens who are protesting these reforms. If progressivism is always on the “right side of history,” as the former president often liked to claim, then the steady march of cultural liberalism is inevitable; it is not until indignant right-wingers push back that such debates become the “culture war.”

The culture war is only a war when the Right is waging it. Go figure.