Democrats, You Can't Ignore the Culture Wars Any Longer

[Nevilledog]

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Seth Cotlar
@SethCotlar
The Republicans' culture war is a war on democracy. Those are the terms on which Democrats should engage it. Are LGBTQ Americans entitled to live lives of dignity and self-determination, or are they to be singled out for abuse based on who they are?

Diana Wolman, a school teacher in Brooklyn, was called before a Senate subcommitteeto answer questions about alleged Communist membership while she worked for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in New Jersey in 1953.

nytimes.com
Opinion | Democrats, You Can’t Ignore the Culture Wars Any Longer
The only alternative to fighting is losing.
9:18 AM · Apr 22, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/22/opinion/red-scare-culture-wars.html

No paywall
https://archive.ph/p8MON


Almost 60 years ago, the historian Richard Hofstadter described what he saw as the true goal of McCarthyism. “The real function of the Great Inquisition of the 1950s was not anything so simply rational as to turn up spies or prevent espionage,” he wrote, “or even to expose actual Communists, but to discharge resentments and frustrations, to punish, to satisfy enmities whose roots lay elsewhere than in the Communist issue itself.”

Likewise, in a much more recent book, “The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left,” the historian Landon R.Y. Storrs shows how conservatives used loyalty pledges to purge the federal bureaucracy of government officials “who hoped to advance economic and political democracy by empowering subordinated groups and setting limits on the pursuit of private profit.”

Left-leaning New Dealers in the federal government, she explains, “believed that race and gender inequality served employers by creating lower-status groups of workers who supposedly needed or deserved less, thereby applying downward pressure on all labor standards, including those of white men. They saw their mission as sweeping away beliefs and practices that were based on obsolete conditions but defended by those whose interests they continued to serve.”

The Red Scare is, in this view, less a sudden outburst of reactionary hysteria than a political project aimed directly at dismantling the New Deal order and ousting those who helped bring it into being, both inside and outside the federal government.

*snip*

[Budi]

1. Which Democrats are ignoring it?

We've fought this 'war' for generations.
Dumb headline.

[gratuitous]

2. That's my feeling

Republicans want another crack at issues they've lost historically. We've won recognition for the rights of citizens in the past, we're defending those rights now, and we're vigilant in protecting those rights into the future.

[Budi]

3. Yup. Ya don't even have to bother with the piece when the headline reads like this one.

Oh well.

[Caliman73]

4. Actually, I think the media is the entity that needs to report accurately on the "culture wars"

One side, the Democratic Party, Liberals, Progressives, and people a bit further left, want to advance acceptance of people with different and often marginalized identities. We want to promote a more equitable distribution of the benefits of society, especially because the poor and middle classes often contribute significantly to society but have seen less and less of the benefits while the wealthy continue to become more wealthy.

The other side, Republicans, Conservatives, and far right groups, want to impose a mythologized past onto modern society. They want a White, Male, Christian hegemony led by the wealthiest in the group. They want minorities, LGBTQ people, and women to "know their place" and "shut the hell up".

This is the culture war. These are the two sides. Conservatives have no valid argument so they make one up. This is how the "culture wars" should be reported.