The Culture War Distracts Us
Fighting over cultural issues is fun. Meanwhile, economic elites get what they want.
Ron DeSantis, you might have heard, may be running for President in 2024. He has made a national name for himself as America’s foremost anti-woke Governor. He’s taking on Disney, banning critical race theory from the Florida schools, and going after drag queens and trans people. Republicans are eating this stuff up (although they might not vote for him for President, as former President Trump continues to lead the polls) and Democrats are appalled.
Ron DeSantis, you might not have heard, has a long record as a very conservative Republican who opposes the social safety net. I’ll quote from Matthew Yglesias on this: “During his career as a House member, he voted multiple times to privatize Medicare while cutting benefits, voiced support for privatizing Social Security, and backed huge across-the-board cuts in government spending on programs for poor people. He voted for the 2018 bank deregulation that contributed to the Silicon Valley Bank fiasco, and he voted for a much more radical bank deregulation bill that mercifully didn’t pass the Senate. He voted to roll back the Affordable Care Act’s regulatory protections for people with pre-existing conditions and to eliminate the ACA marketplaces that make it possible for us to run Slow Boring. He voted for savage cuts to Medicaid and has followed through on those anti-Medicaid views as governor of Florida.”
Now obviously I’m not going to claim that the culture war stuff that DeSantis is pursuing is unimportant. For one thing, it might get him elected President, and certainly there’s a certain importance to how he targets vulnerable populations and plays to some of the more ignorant parts of society. But read that list Yglesias sets forth— cutting Medicare? Privatizing Social Security? Radical deregulation of banks? Insurance companies denying you coverage for preexisting conditions? Slashing Medicaid? I don’t think it is controversial to say this is a lot more important than whether a library in Ocala puts on Drag Queen Story Hour.
And about that 2018 bank deregulation? How many of you actually knew about it in 2018? I will admit I hadn’t known about it until the past week and a half when it turned out it was integral to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, which is requiring a bailout from the US government and which raises serious questions about whether banks are engaging in too much risk-taking with depositors’ money. As it turns out, in 2018, medium size banks like SVB lobbied for an exemption from regulation that would allow them to engage in more risky activities without being deemed “Too Big To Fail” and subjected to stricter bank regulation. If you are bored by that last sentence, so am I. But the result is a big bank failed because of a significant, lobbied for change in the law that even a lot of political junkies (myself included) paid little attention to. What were we talking about in 2018? I don’t recall for certain, but I suspect it was probably something relating to Donald Trump’s public persona. He had a way of distracting and polarizing us, remember?
Or take this recent anecdote from Freddie deBoer: “Consider two recent events: the Academy Awards giving Oscars to many people of color and Michigan repealing its right-to-work law. The latter will have vastly greater positive consequences for actually-existing American people of color than the former, and yet the former has been vastly better publicized.” Exactly. The culture war is fun, at least for partisans and political junkies. Labor policy is so not fun. But the Oscars could go back to the days of #OscarsSoWhite and while it wouldn’t be very good for minorities in the entertainment industry (and to be clear, I cheer the progress that has been made and would not want to see it rolled back), the reality is that a fairly small number of people work in Hollywood, many of them are insanely privileged, and who wins the Oscars is of little import to society. On the other hand, the legal disempowerment of unions in a traditional manufacturing state like Michigan is enormously important and will do a tremendous amount of real harm.
The culture war is fun. Remember that. Repeat it. Absorb it. You may not admit it, but you know, deep in your heart, you love it. You love the outrage cycle. We all do. That’s why cable news draws viewers, why talk radio draws listeners, and why certain stories get shared throughout the Internet. You don’t have to learn anything or know anything to have an opinion on drag queens reading to kids. And people like Ron DeSantis and the folks behind the disastrous 2018 bank deregulation bill want you to be distracted by it. It’s the oldest story in the political world. Caesar allegedly said “give them bread and circuses”. Our modern day bread and circuses come in the form of prepackaged stories of cultural outrage.
Obviously this is all demand-driven. It’s very hard to get people worked up about banking or labor regulations. But the Silicon Valley Bank story should be something of a wake up call— the maintenance of a perpetual level of cultural outrage, on both sides, allows the elites to get what they want. If America does face a decline, we will likely be arguing about whether Lia Thomas should swim on the swim team all the way through to oblivion.