Beinart's piece is more of a survey, in which he seems to suggest that the "gist" of Obama's policy is that he is anti-culture war. Ross Douthat was able to pick apart the problems here fairly quickly:
Beinart's argument is shot through with the characteristic liberal conceit that the culture wars are a one-sided affair, in which right-wing culture warriors start fights and peace-loving liberals try to avoid them. In reality, what makes Obama promising to liberals isn't his potential to "end" culture-war battles - it's his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear.
This has been a complaint about Obama's rhetoric from those on the right since his inaugural address, and one which appeals to me in principle. Concerning the stimulus in particular, it's a nasty political trick to portray opposition as illegitimate. I do believe that Obama enjoys considerable consensus from economists for his plan, and I also don't for a moment credit today's GOP with the fiscal conservatism that they so hypocritically want to claim for their own. Nonetheless, there are healthy arguments to be made against the stimulus in its current form, and it's a dangerous move on Obama's part to pretend otherwise, both for the country and for hope of an enduring liberal majority.
But I will part from Ross in equivocating over the blame for the culture war. It's certainly true that liberals have a place in that war, most fully expressed in abortion, public religious displays, and gay rights. And it's no secret that left-wing vitriol, especially in the wake of proposition 8, can meet or exceed much of what comes from the far right.
But participation in the culture war is not the same as propagation of the culture war, and Ross lacks perspective if he thinks both sides are equally culpable. To be blunt, the right in general, and Republicans in particular, stand guilty of extending the culture war outside of purely "cultural" issues. Whether Democrats failed to do so because they're just not as good at it, or because their coalition was less likely to appreciate such politicking, is an open question. But for Republicans, the abuse of culture has been their primary vehicle of power since, in some sense, Nixon.
It was Nixon who birthed the drug war, which continues today to destroy innocent lives, eat away at the foundations of foreign countries, and trample federalism at every turn. (Something Ross, as an avid Wire fan, should have a sense of.) Is there any purer manifestation of culture war taken too far? Drugs and drug addiction were a medical issue, surrounded by questions of rehabilitation and control. Today, that should be the conversation we still have about drugs. But thanks to Nixon's rabid anti-Hippie campaign, drugs are an issue of punishment and war. This is the quintessential Republican abuse of culture war: take a real issue, develop a stance on it fueled by little more than frustration and resentment, and then lie about it to your base. Next stop: White House.
Lest anyone think that such tricks were isolated to anti-Hippie reactionaries, look no further than global warming for today's newest iteration of culture war outside culture. The world appreciates broad, transparent, and reasonable scientific consensus that man-made climate change is a problem that needs to be confronted seriously and immediately. Yet the far right continues to pretend that global warming -- despite its place in a worldwide conversation -- is somehow a plot of American cultural liberals, designed to neuter the right permanently. The odious phrase "liberal fascism," used to discredit honest, conservative attempts to reign in American environmental excesses, is the hallmark of culture war. Suddenly, environmental issues aren't about the environment; they're about the other guy, who wants to impose a new way of life on you and your family.
Should I continue? How about the way that the right has infected American foreign policy with the "war on terror," the newest subversion of smart diplomacy and military force in favor of "us v. them" culture war? Certainly, the left bears culpability in this newest fiasco as well -- Democrats' failure to oppose the Iraq War was an act of nearly-criminal cowardice. Yet Democrats may at least point to Obama's first days in office as an honest effort to confront and roll back the worst excesses of the new culture war. Whither the right? When even today Republican senators are trying to extract illegal promises of the new attorney general that he will not prosecute anyone in the previous administration, should constitutional violations be brought to light, is this the language of a movement that is repenting for past mistakes? Or is it the rhetoric of an ideologue?
I'll readily concede that culture war, when truly focused on culture, is a real give-and-take. The liberal position on abortion is no more coherent than the conservative position; and while I lean toward the liberal side of the gay marriage debate, there's no question that the way the message is delivered is nasty, intractable, and as much about "the other guy" as it is actually about gays. And yes, even I find the ACLU annoying sometimes.
But the notion that liberals somehow bear equal responsibility with conservatives for the sheer extent of the culture war today is a joke. There's a reason that Democrats are now governing with a broad coalition, while Republicans are left with nothing more than the red meat-eating base: one party has at least been trying to develop an actual stance on the issues of the day; while the other has consistently relied on culture war to make whatever temporary gains it could.
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