Opinion | Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War. – The New York Times

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 Kileys:

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 arent shifting their views, but their unwillingness to update their assessments of racism in America is essentially leaving them behind as the rest of Americas 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 Trumps 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 Trumps strong, culturally inflected defense of immigration restrictionism, gun rights, and Americas 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.

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Opinion | Lean Into It. Lean Into the Culture War. - The New York Times