‘Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War.’

Should responsibility for the rampant polarization that characterizes American politics today be laid at the feet of liberals or conservatives? I posed that question to my friend Bill Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings and a columnist at The Wall Street Journal.

He emailed me his reply:

It is fair to say that the proponents of cultural change have been mostly on offense since Brown v. the Board of Education, while the defenders of the status quo have been on defense.

Once the conflict enters the political arena, though, other factors come into play, Galston argues:

Intensity makes a huge difference, and on many of the cultural issues, including guns and immigration, the right is more intense than the left.

Galston put it like this:

When being “right” on a cultural controversy becomes a threshold issue for an intense minority, it can drive the party much farther to the left or right than its median voter.

Along with intensity, another driving force in escalating polarization, in Galston’s view, is elite behavior:

Newt Gingrich believed that the brand of politics Bob Michel practiced had contributed to House Republicans’ 40-year sojourn in the political desert. Gingrich decided to change this, starting with Republicans’ vocabulary and tactics. This proved effective, but at the cost of rising incivility and declining cooperation between the political parties. Once the use of terms such as “corruption,” “disgrace” and “traitor” becomes routine in Congress, the intense personal antipathy these words express is bound to trickle down to rank-and-file party identifiers.

The race and gender issues that have come to play such a central role in American politics are rooted in the enormous changes in society from the 1950s to the 1970s, Galston wrote:

The United States in the early 1950s resembled the country as it had been for decades. By the early 1970s, everything had changed, stunning Americans who had grown up in what seemed to them to be a stable, traditional society and setting the stage for a conservative reaction. Half a century after the Scopes trial, evangelical Protestantism re-entered the public square and soon became an important build-block of the coalition that brought Ronald Reagan to power.

One of the biggest changes in the country in the wake of the civil rights and immigration reforms of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s has been in the demographic makeup of the nation. Seventy years ago, the country was 89.5 percent white, according to the census. By 2019, the white share of the population fell to 60.1 percent. In 2019, Pew Research reported:

Nonwhites are about twice as likely as whites to say having a majority nonwhite population will be good for the country: 51 percent of all nonwhite adults — including 53 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics — say this, compared with 26 percent of whites.

In many ways, this transformation posed a challenge to customary social expectations. “How would the progressive cultural program deal with traditionalist dissent?” Galston asked:

One option was to defuse a portion of the dissent by carving out exceptions to religious and conscience-based objections. The other was to use law to bring the objectors to heel. Regrettably, the latter course prevailed, generating conflicts over abortion with the Little Sisters of the Poor, with a baker over a cake for a same-sex wedding, among others, and with Catholic social service providers over same-sex adoptions.

Recently two columnists who are hardly sympathetic to Trump or Trumpism — far from it — raised questions about whether the right or the left deserves blame or responsibility for the kind of conflicts that now roil elections. Kevin Drum, in “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals,” and Damon Linker, in “The myth of asymmetric polarization,” make the case that the left has been the aggressor in the culture wars.

“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn’t come as a surprise,” Drum wrote. “Almost by definition, liberals are the ones pushing for change while conservatives are merely responding to whatever liberals do.” Linker took this a step further, arguing that progressives do not want to acknowledge that “on certain issues wrapped up with the culture war, Democrats have moved further and faster to the left than Republicans have moved to the right,” because to do so “would require that they cede some of the moral high ground in their battles with conservatives, since it would undermine the preferred progressive narrative according to which the right is motivated entirely by bad faith and pure malice.”

Drum and Linker were quickly followed by other commentators, including Peggy Noonan, a conservative columnist for The Wall Street Journal, who wrote a piece that was summed up nicely by its headline: “The Culture War Is a Leftist Offensive.”

I asked Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, for his assessment of the Drum and Linker arguments, and he wrote back:

It strains credulity to argue that Democrats have been pushing culture-war issues more than Republicans. It’s mostly Republican elites who have accentuated these issues to attract more and more working-class white voters even as they pursue a plutocratic economic agenda that’s unpopular among those voters. Certainly, Biden has not focused much on cultural issues since entering office — his key agenda items are all bread-and-butter economic policies. Meanwhile, we have Republicans making critical race theory and transgender sports into big political issues (neither of which, so far as I can tell, hardly mattered to voters at all before they were elevated by right-wing media and the G.O.P.).

Hacker provided me with a graphic of ideological trends from 1969 to 2020 in House and Senate voting by party that clearly shows much more movement to the right among Republicans than movement to the left among Democrats.

There is substantial evidence in support of Hacker’s argument that Republican politicians and strategists have led the charge in raising hot-button issues. On June 24, for example, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the Republican Study Committee — a group of conservative members of the House — sent out a memo telling colleagues:

We are in a culture war. On one side, Republicans are working to renew American patriotism and rebuild our country. On the other, Democrats have embraced and given a platform to a radical element who want to tear America down.

The letter ends: “My encouragement to you is lean into it. Lean into the culture war.”

At the state legislative level, The Associated Press — in an April story, “In G.O.P. strongholds, a big push on ‘culture war’ legislation” — cited a surge in legislation restricting transgender surgery and banning the teaching of critical race theory.

In this view, the left may start culture war conflicts, but the right is far more aggressive in politicizing them, both in legislative chambers and in political campaigns.

Conversely, Andrew Sullivan, in “What Happened to You? The radicalization of the American elite against liberalism,” makes the case that the extreme left has created a hostile environment not only for conservatives but also for traditional liberals:

Look how far the left’s war on liberalism has gone. Due process? If you’re a male on campus, gone. Privacy? Stripped away — by anonymous rape accusations, exposure of private emails, violence against people’s private homes, screaming at folks in restaurants, sordid exposés of sexual encounters, eagerly published by woke mags. Nonviolence? Exceptions are available if you want to “punch a fascist.” Free speech? Only if you don’t mind being fired and ostracized as a righteous consequence. Free association? You’ve got to be kidding. Religious freedom? Illegitimate bigotry. Equality? Only group equity counts now, and individuals of the wrong identity can and must be discriminated against. Colorblindness? Another word for racism. Mercy? Not for oppressors. Intent? Irrelevant. Objectivity? A racist lie. Science? A manifestation of white supremacy. Biological sex? Replaced by socially constructed gender so that women have penises and men have periods. The rule of law? Not for migrants or looters. Borders? Racist. Viewpoint diversity? A form of violence against the oppressed.

Drum and Linker base much of their argument on Pew Research data (illustrated by the graphic below) to prove that the Democratic Party has shifted much farther to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On a zero (very liberal) to 10 (very conservative) scale, Drum wrote, “between 1994 and 2017, Democrats had gotten three points more liberal while Republicans had gotten about half a point more conservative.”

Jocelyn Kiley, associate director for political research at Pew, argues, however, that her data shows something quite different. The Pew analysis is based on responses to 10 questions, each of which asks subjects to pick between two alternatives — for example, “government is almost always wasteful” versus “government often does a better job than people give it credit for,” or “homosexuality should be discouraged by society” versus “homosexuality should be accepted by society.”

In recent years, Kiley wrote in an email,

on a few basic values — most notably, views around gay and lesbian people and same-sex relationships — society as a whole (including both Republicans and Democrats) has moved in a more liberal direction.

In addition, Kiley noted,

members of both parties hold more positive views of immigrants than in the past, even as the partisan divide on these views has become more pronounced.

The Democratic shift to the left reflects in large part a parallel shift in the general public. The median voter has become more liberal, and as a result, in 2017 Democratic voters were modestly closer to the median voter than Republican voters (by one point on a 20-point scale).

I asked Brian Schaffner, a principal investigator at the Cooperative Election Study and a political scientist at Tufts, about the Drum and Linker columns. Schaffner made an argument similar to Kiley’s:

The overall median among the population of Americans has moved leftward from 1994 to 2017. Even if Republicans have shifted less than Democrats, compared to their views in 1994, this hardly makes them less extreme in the current moment. To put a finer point on it, imagine an individual who supported school segregation in 1965 and who still held that same view 50 years later. Clearly it is the lack of a shift in views over five decades that would have made that individual extreme in the year 2015.

Schaffner observes that the data

shows a very clear shift among Democrats, while Republicans hardly move at all. But independents are also moving in the same direction as Democrats on these issues. Sure, Republicans aren’t shifting their views, but their unwillingness to update their assessments of racism in America is essentially leaving them behind as the rest of America’s attitudes are evolving.

Ryan Enos, a political scientist at Harvard, took the Schaffner argument a step further:

Most importantly, I think we should question whether the “culture war” metaphor is appropriate — war gives the idea that there are aggressors trying to change society to match their preferences, but much of the change in opinion we see from both parties is necessarily a reaction to society changing around them.

Democrats, Enos continued,

moved to the left on gay marriage because more of them were beginning to know gay people who had come out of the closet despite the legal and social pressures not to. And Democrats moved to the left on immigration because the Western world, not just the United States, is diversifying as economic and social trends have moved people from one part of the world to another. On these and other issues, Democrats’ attitudes change then not because they are trying to shape society, but because they are merely reacting to it.

It would be wrong, Enos concluded, “to think cultural change is all about politics.”

The Pew data is based on questions first developed in 1994 and include none of the contentious contemporary issues that have provoked pushback against the left wing of the Democratic Party.

In a March 12 column published before his “Myth of asymmetric polarization” essay, Linker himself assigned responsibility to Trump and to Republicans for a climate in which “it sometimes seems as if the culture war has swallowed up everything in American politics.” Linker traces this phenomenon to

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and victory against Hillary Clinton in November 2016. Trump won, in part, by blending strong support from religious conservatives with firm backing by more secular conservatives and moderates who responded to Trump’s strong, culturally inflected defense of immigration restrictionism, gun rights, and America’s distinctive national identity. Through his four years in office, Trump used Twitter, public rallies, and other presidential statements to frame many of his policy commitments in culture war terms, casting his opponents on these issues as morally alien from American culture and history. By the last year of his presidency, Trump had gone far beyond abortion, immigration, and guns to culturalize crime, race relations, economic policy, voting rights and even mask-wearing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory, expanded on this point in an email:

The questions that comprise the Pew index are not necessarily what is driving concern about extremism today. Today, we are concerned about who is more likely to believe in QAnon or which group is more likely to believe that armed resistance to government might be necessary to save America.

Recent data, Gillespie wrote, shows that Republicans are far more likely to believe in QAnon or that significant proportions of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary. This, Gillespie contends, is the reason “that the public discourse is focusing on right-wing extremism right now.”

As the 2022 election comes into view, the key issue is less the question of which party is the aggressor in the culture wars than whether Republicans can gin up enough controversy over the so-called woke agenda to make it salient to voters on Election Day, regardless of whether or not responsibility for these issues can reasonably be attributed to the Democratic Party.

Linker’s March 12 column, “Will the GOP’s culture war gambit blow up in its face?” describes the difficulties facing the Republican Party in achieving this goal.

At the moment, the electorate faces

a culture war that appears to be metastasizing, though with its left side displaying far more ambivalence about waging it than those on the right. In purely tactical terms, this makes sense. Republicans are motivated to pursue culture war battles, and to frame policy disputes in culture-war terms, because they think it benefits them politically. And they may be right about that — precisely because Democrats are more divided on those issues than Republicans.

But there’s a catch, Linker continued:

While Republicans and progressive activists are hurling invective at each other, Democrats in Congress and the White House are preparing to send substantial amounts of money, in the form of pandemic relief, to hundreds of millions of Americans. That’s likely to be pretty popular — and opens up an intriguing possibility. What if, while Republicans are busy trying to bait Democrats on culture war issues, those Democrats end up winning public opinion in a big way by refusing to play along, changing the subject, and actually making the lives of most Americans concretely better? If so, the culture-war play by the right could end up backfiring big time.

If right-wing manipulation of cultural and racial issues does end up backfiring, that will defy the long history of the Republican Party’s successful deployment of divisive wedge issues — from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush to Donald Trump. Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated that the half-life of these radioactive topics is longer than expected, and Democrats, if they want to protect their fragile majority, must be doubly careful not to hand their adversaries ever more powerful weapons.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.