The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars (see Justice Scalia in Romer v. Evans, and the Wikipedia entry for culture wars, which describes conservative activists, not liberals, using the term.)Professor Tushnet doesn't bother to put in links. I found the Wikipedia entry for "culture wars," and it traced the term to "Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America" by the sociologist James Davison Hunter. That was published in 1991, 5 years before Scalia, in Romer, wrote of the "Kulturkampf" ("culture war").
Does the war metaphor matter? Is there some idea that whoever called it a "war" first is — after the war ends — properly treated like a conquered enemy?
Tushnet continues:
And they had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy. The earth that was scorched, though, was their own. (No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections. Only now that they’ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central – seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they’ve already lost the war.). For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.Tushnet is getting flak for that Germany-and-Japan reference:
Well, that certainly provoked people (or rather, one parenthetical comment did). Does "taking a hard line" mean, as (you can't understand how hard it is to avoid snark here) various online sources put it (Google "tushnet nazis" -- I can't figure out who said it first), that I want to treat conservative Christians like Nazis (with war crimes trials, presumably, or legal disqualification from office, or something -- when Godwin's Law kicks in, there's no telling what's being implied).Again, Tushnet won't provide links, but I can understand not wanting to boost the websites that are hating on you. But hate begets hate, and leaning into the war metaphor has consequences. I remember blogging — the day after the Court decided Obergefell — that it was a time for love and saying "Better get on the love train, people, before it's too late!... You can stand there on the platform and stomp your feet as it leaves without you, but now would be a good time to get on board and show some love." I know some religious people can't do that, but politicians had a chance and a choice to make, and those who chose to keep fighting have provoked the winning side to ask how do they get hold of their victory and to wonder how they would have been treated if they had lost.
And by the way, it seems to me that after what Germany and Japan did in WWII, the way we treated them was extraordinarily benevolent.
ANYWAY: Tushnet declines to say what he means by "hard line" other than that it "will vary with the circumstances" and that he opposes the kind of "religious liberty" laws that I think, ironically, Justice Scalia himself would have opposed.
Posts
219 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 219 of 219Tushnet is an arrogant asshole. He's not smart enough to be so conteptous of those he sees as below him, but it makes him feel smart, it seems. Repeat: Arrogant asshole.
I wonder how many conservatives have family members who died fighting against actual Nazis. Both my grandfathers served in WWII, both fighting Nazis. I really have had it with people on the Left calling me a Nazi. "Bitter clinger" wasn't enough, they have to keep calling me a Nazi. Trump's a Nazi, Mitt's a Nazi, anyone they don't like is a Nazi. Meanwhile those hillbilly regressive old white men the Left constantly derides actually fought and defeated the Nazis.
Balfegor said: "Well it was historically the case that the victor in a war extracted an indemnity, cf. the Franco-Prussian war, which the French lost, after which they had to pay a massive indemnity to the German Empire."
Unless you want to use the French Revolution as an example of what victors do to their fellow "loser" citizens, your comment is wildly off the mark.
but if you really want to go down that road, please consider that the "losers" in the culture war also have several hundred million firearms, which Tushnet, Althouse and other would-be totalitarians should carefully consider when they calculate just how far they can push our noses in the dirt.
There IS a limit.
This has been a great thread with a number of salient points. I'd just like to add that, particularly in her silly comment at 1:19 ("What good do you possibly hope to achieve by continuing to fight against gay people? It's really very stupid at this point."), Althouse is being consistent in her own idiosyncratic illogic regarding matters gay & legal. Whom is she addressing here? Who on this thread is "fight[ing] against gay people"? Notice the escalation of her comments from "I would prefer for everyone to behave kindly toward one another" to "as a political matter, the anti-gay-rights side should completely surrender" to stop fighting gay people, it's stupid.
My, my, my! As a gay man I have always found the phrase "gay rights" a silly non-sequitur, not to say a legal nullity. I don't want no gay rights, but I insist on exercising my civic rights and duties under the Constitution. That, I think, is a agreement most Americans have arrived at under our own steam, and mostly because a number of us followed Harvey Milk's original battle cry, "come out!" When we came out of the closet, our families and friends (and we ourselves, for that matter) had to confront the "othering" that most humans on the planet had universally indulged in when it came to homosexuality. It was the only strategy that could possibly win hearts and minds.
Alas, unfortunately but not surprisingly, too many of us became enthusiastic foot soldiers of the Left, and thus sold our votes for a few pieces of Democrat plantation politics silver. For all the years I was a leader in the Log Cabin Republicans I rarely got any nastiness from Republicans for being gay but I can promise you I got it from the Left all the time for being Republican. (I remember with great fondness being booed all the way down Market Street in the San Francisco Gay Pride parade in the early 90s while riding in our snappy Log Cabin Cadillac convertible.)
So perhaps Althouse might want to consider that many of us fight this shit not because of the specific issue but because of the relentless determination behind the mask of social justice to bend the world to the will of the Correct and Just. Many commenters here point out accurately that the Left will never stop "correcting" the world because we have, like Adam and Eve did at the beginning, failed God and must be hounded out of the Garden and punished forever.
But Christians, at least, know there is more to the story. Perhaps this is why so many on the Left eschew Christianity, for its central narrative is that God (Who set Adam and Eve up in the first place) made up for this wrong by becoming human Himself and dying (the punishment visited upon first humans and their progeny) to restore permanent salvation. Forgiveness, not revenge!
Too bad Althouse--at least when it comes to gays--appears to miss this point. If I am wrong, I ask forgiveness.
Actually, the liberals lost the culture war until a transgender/homosexual judge received religious instruction from gods in the twilight zone (i.e. pro-choice religion) and overrode the Democrat majority following a democratic vote, then liberal bigots ran amuck targeting Mormons for intimidation and retributive change, while the current leader of the pro-choice church, Obama, raised the rainbow flag to celebrate selective exclusion, "=", under the law. Since then, it's been progressive wars, impulsive regime changes, anti-native policies, millions of aborted and cannibalized babies, and trillions of dollars in bribes... I mean, redistributive change.
Shorter Tushnet: "Mission Accomplished"
This, by the way, is why the right has to fight, and the perfect example of how the left is instigating everything. Those Catholic hospitals were just minding their own business, which happens not to include abortion or sterilization. If you want those services, go somewhere else!!
But no, if you aren't serving the SJWs then you need to be punished.
Tell me more about how the right is driving the culture wars.
Comrade Tushnet is a contributor in this book: http://www.constitution2020.org/about, which is their (Sunstein, Tushnet et al) blueprint for tyranny.
A synopsis worth reading here: https://www.nraila.org/articles/20120422/the-movement-to-torch-the-united-states-constitution
Tushnet is a tolatarian thug using fake issues like transgender bathrooms and always framing it as a war on trans people or a war on gays to force changes on society that he can't get through legislatively without waging war. And as such HE is waging the war. It's too bad that Althouse can't see it. But she has a blind spot when it comes to all things GAY.
And is transgenderism gay too? Must the premise that men and women are actually men and women now be deconstructed to be yet another WAR on homosexuals. Because to me it always seemed like commonsensical and neutral. Maybe Althouse disagrees.
Oooh. Another Althousian Blind Spot Post™
Tushnet's a jerk. He's so awful he almost makes me wish that Donny is elected, just to wipe the smirk off Tushnet's face.
I'm not saying it's stupid to follow what you may believe is a religious requirement, but it is stupid to pursue this in the political arena.
"Shut up," she explained.
Scratch a liberal, you'll find a fascist. Every time.
You stupid fuckers still taking the bait on meaningless side issues. Useful idiots.
People are losing family businesses over this shit. It's not meaningless.
Politically, for the time being, there may not be many victories, but that hardly means people should give up - society is always in a state of flux, and if we could go completely 180 in just 50 years on this topic, it is always possible to do the reverse.
I think there will eventually come a pendulum swing the other way sometime within the 21st century for a couple reasons:
- Muslim cultures, unlike Western ones, do not separate the political from the religious. And we just happen to be importing a lot of people from those cultures while also not really caring that they get integrated into Western culture. Sooner or later, I expect they will start raising a stink about public displays of gayness, and I also expect capitulation from many of the same politicians now on the gay marriage bandwagon, in the name of tolerance and understanding of course.
- Victors always go too far and provoke a backlash. The ink on Obergefell was hardly dry before it seemed like the gender, transgender, and bathroom wars got into full swing. That may not be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but the culture wars aren't going to end there. In the midst of all the confusion about gender and identity, the traditional ideas of male and female, with their traditional roles in a traditional family might just start to gain purchase again.
- The government is broke. We are never repaying the trillions we've already borrowed, nor are we going to be able to make good on the trillions more already promised. When that house of cards finally collapses, I think the fury of the masses over all the broken promises by corrupt politicians spells the end of both the Democrats and Republicans. At that point, it may well be useful to be in political exile.
I would advise religious conservatives to find it in their hearts to really, unreservedly, approve of gay people. If you can ask Islam to become peaceful and secular-compatible and not merely pretend to be until they're enough, then at least remove the beam from your own eye. Try affirming the model you favor (penis in fertile-vagina marriage) instead of opposing competitors.
To our crowing liberal triumphalists, this kind of "we conquered the Nazis, now let's persecute them" animus really amps up the hostility+drama, and for what, really? Live out your life with your several cats in love and peace. Let enclaves of 'flyover' people be a little 'I'm not baking that cake - not in OUR public restrooms!' regressive for a change. They're no threat any longer.
Althouse seems to forget that Christians have a persecuted martyr complex ("she didn't renounce her faith even with a gun to her head!") just as Islam has a 72-virgins conquest complex. They don't care if their Jesus-with-the-sword-drawn resistance turns out more opposition "can't lose Roe v Wade! better get hillary in there to protect our pussies!" voters than they rally.
Jonathan Graehl:
Nobody need approve another fully formed human being, in lifestyle or biology or whatever. All one needs to do is remember that one is not above another and should not have authority over them.
One should not "approve" what I do (or do not do). One should simply stay the hell out of my way while I make whatever decisions I make about myself.
The expression of power -- you must approve! -- is a command to which no free person should assent.
They don't care if their Jesus-with-the-sword-drawn resistance turns out more opposition
Yeah sure. That's what we were doing on 9-11. To be fair, Bill Clinton had recently bombed Afghanistan with no declaration of war as if were were some kind of ungoverned territory and free-fire zone. But anyway, it works both ways. I wish I could buy "once written, twice shy" air time to broadcast her Hillbilly insults as a Republican GOTV campaign. Is she shunning me yet? I can't tell.
Post a Comment