Senator Obama and the Culture Wars

One key element of Senator Obama’s message of Unity is that American politics is unable to cope with new problems because it is mired in long-running ideological disputes that have been fought over since the 1960s-- disputes perpetuated by a generation of politicians on both sides who cannot see past the framing of their youth.

Obama is correct in recognizing that that modern American politics is mired in fighting old battles. He is as correct as the other 50 million or so people who have made the same observation year after year for the last generation. It is not a novel insight. It is a trite and crushingly obvious cliché. It is central to what Duncan Black (Atrios) calls "high-Broderism."

Every election cycle some candidate repackages this trivial observation as part of a “transcendent" message of unity and change. And it always ropes in a few well-meaning naïfs—usually younger people who haven’t seen the same message come and go a dozen times already. (The last major proponent of this stuff was George W. Bush in 2000.)

Nobody questions that we are fighting the same old battles. The question is, “What course of action would allow us to move past those conflicts?” The unity-peddlers seldom get too specific on that point because their frame cannot withstand any practical examination.

What makes these conflicts interminable is that they cannot be resolved through compromise. If they could, we would have dispensed with them long ago. The only way to get past a substantial and interminable political conflict is for one side or the other to lose.

Throwing bags of trash in the street was a 1960s issue that was resolved because the litter-bugs did not have a passionate ideological stance in favor of littering. There was no real divide to be bridged.

Abortion continues to be a hard fought battle today because it involves serious differences and questions of fundamental rights. Senator Obama says he believes that the American people have largely “moved beyond” many of those old 1960s ideological disputes. In the case of abortion, he is somewhat correct. The American people have settled on an uneasy and utterly unprincipled compromise position that is ethically incoherent, that abortion is bad and should be limited somehow as a cultural marker that it is bad, but it shouldn’t be banned… at least not for me and my friends.

The fact that a lot of American people think like that does not, however, mean we have “moved beyond” abortion as an issue. As a constitutional lawyer, Obama should understand that the law can not accommodate that kind of cognitive dissonance. At some point vague feel-good rhetoric must find expression in law. And the abortion divide cannot be casually bridged in law because the law must say one thing or another.

And those who want to outlaw abortion are not merely taking a stance for the fun of arguing with Democrats. They actually do want to outlaw abortion, and they are not going to stop.

When rights are at issue, compromise is defeat. Whatever grand cultural compromises Obama envisions, it must involve the abrogation of serious ideals of importance to most Democrats.

And here is where Obama’s shallow concept of American politics collapses completely… he seems to genuinely not understand that the Republicans are the ones who keep these issues alive, and that the republicans are wicked and wildly irresponsible. They would destroy the country without a thought, if it rewarded them somehow. So the only way to compromise with them is to surrender.

In any compromise the Republicans hold all the cards because they don’t care one whit for the welfare of real people. They will shut down the government and impeach a president without a care. They will destroy the US military and slaughter 100s of thousands of innocents to prop up support for tax cuts. They are, in games theory terms, the “mad bomber.”

The perpetuation of divisions is not a symptom of an old polical fight between Democrats and Republicans, it is the raison d'etre of the modern Republican party.

Does Senator Obama think his personal magnetism and wisdom will somehow assuage or transcend Republican hatred? We have been offering gestures of good-will to the Republicans for decades, and in every instance they have abused that good-will. We have offered a hand of friendship a thousand times, and every time the Republicans shit in it.

The Republicans must be defeated, not accomodated. Senator Obama is proposing to be the Neville Chamberlain of the culture wars.