GOP’s cultural retreat: Is the right losing the war?

An old Jewish joke tells of a Romanian peasant trying to protect himself from a nocturnal visit by a vampire. Following the traditional method, the peasant holds up a cross as the grim visitor flies toward him. The vampire looks at the frightened peasant and utters the Yiddish phrase “vet gunichts helfen,” meaning “nothing will help.” The vampire, being Jewish, obviously didn’t respond to the Christian symbol.

This joke came to mind as I read the well-intentioned commentary by Jesse Arm, a Manhattan Institute employee, about how the Republican Party can drive the left backward by repackaging the cultural war. If we can succeed in presenting “today’s cultural conservatism” in an appealing way, then we can show that it’s not JD Vance but Tampon Tim Walz who is the “weird one.”

Twenty years ago, neither of our two national parties would be celebrating gay marriage nor participating in the festivities of Pride month. Now both do.

Arm wants us to know that Donald Trump “has scrapped any condemnation of gay marriage.” Moreover, the platform on which Trump is running “has altered pro-life language to focus opposition on late-term abortion.” Trump has also “removed calls for a federal ban (which Mr. Trump says he opposes) and lends support to ‘policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatment).’”

Most importantly, Arm contends, Trump still “embraces confrontational policies on cultural issues where the party’s position is reflective of public sentiment.” His platform “excoriates ‘Leftwing propaganda’ on gender, sexuality, and race; promises to ‘defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination,’ and harshly condemns illegal immigration and violent crime.”

Arm’s commentary ignores the continued momentum of the hegemonic woke left, which seems to be increasingly radicalizing Western societies, particularly women. Twenty years ago, neither of our two national parties would be celebrating gay marriage nor participating in the festivities of Pride month. Now both do, quite ostentatiously, lest the media expose some politician for not being ecstatic enough about our obligatory nonstop worship of LGBTQ.

Republicans’ attempt to tiptoe around the abortion issue is an even more telling example of woke left ascendancy. Most Western countries have far more restrictive abortion laws than many of our states, yet here the Republican Party must alter its attempt to restrict abortion to all but the last three months. Many leftist European governments routinely limit abortion to the first 15 weeks of gestation. But any attempt in the United States, however minimal, to restrict feticide will bring out the usual feminist crew shrieking about how the patriarchy will turn them into the degraded victims of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

The non-left and other dissenters from the woke state religion will not likely win a cultural war until the other side (yes, I am being provocative) is utterly discredited. The alternative will be more phased withdrawals of the kind that the GOP is now engaged in.

Arm isn’t praising the key to victory but rather another fallback position in a series of tactical withdrawals. I’m not sure how the losers can become the victors, but until that happens, they — and the GOP, the party where the cultural right is now lodged out of necessity — will remain in a weak position outside of red strongholds.

Least of all will the “sisterhood,” a.k.a. the community of college-educated suburban women, be turned around politically because the GOP will smile benignly on their ever-expanding “reproductive rights.” That’s because this demographic is striking back more at men than at the few remaining restrictions on their right to kill their fetuses, which in many places includes fully formed but not yet extracted babies.

These “liberated women” view themselves, despite their unprecedented human comfort, as the victims of male domination, and no matter what countervailing evidence one produces, it may be impossible to change that perception. In any case, victimhood unites these women with other bogus victims and allows their “voices to be heard.”

Interestingly enough, these perpetually hyped-up warriors don’t protest very loudly when politicians like Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz claim the right to take away their children and mutilate their sexual parts in the name of gender fluidity. Nor did they complain very much when feminist governors locked them up for months in their houses in a largely fake war against COVID. But all that may be small beer compared to the joy of fighting the “patriarchy.”

Pretending that we’ve won “the culture war” while our armies are in retreat is not a convincing strategy. It would be more helpful to admit that we’ve been pushed back repeatedly and that new strategies are necessary if we are to stop the woke hegemon from advancing further. Jesse Arm is celebrating an imaginary end to our retreat and nothing more. Whether a comeback is even possible, given the vast and varied difficulties we face — starting with what Trump rightly calls the “fake media” — remains an open question. For now, I’m not betting on our side.