The Woke Culture War is Making Americans Socially Conservative

Daniel Greenfield June 15, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Wokeness rules America. In the last three years every element of public life from governments to corporations has been conditioned to impose a radical social agenda on the nation. Women have ceased to exist and the government is forcing schools to sexually indoctrinate children.

A new Gallup poll suggests that this culture war has backfired. Badly. This year the largest number of Americans has come out of the closet as social conservatives since 2012.

Biden has taken us back to Obama’s first term in more ways than one.

That’s all the more remarkable because even last year the country was nearly tied between social conservatives and the socially liberal. This year the number of socially conservative Americans shot up from 33% to 38% while the socially liberal fell from 34% to 29%.

That’s a massive inversion from 2021 when 34% claimed to be socially liberal and only 30% were socially conservative, and the end of American values seemed to be here.

The shift is driven by Republicans. By 2021, only 60% of Republicans described themselves as socially conservative while a third identified as moderate. This matched declines in religious belief and values recorded in other polls: some of which showed barely half of Republicans describing religion as being important to them. But what a faltering religiosity in a nation losing its values could not accomplish, the woke culture war did.

74% of Republicans now identify as socially conservative. What drove a 14% increase in a few years? Perhaps seeing the alternative socially leftist dystopia made up their minds.

Democrats met declining religiosity and values with a kulturkampf that was not satisfied with adult sexual license but became perversely obsessed with sexualizing children. The electoral consequences of that toppled Democrat rule in a number of statues. And as the Biden administration doubles down on sexualizing children, threatening to investigate schools that don’t serve pornographic materials to children, Republicans are realizing what they believe.

The growth among independents, a majority of whom identify as social moderates has been marked, but limited, with social conservatives rising from 24% to 29%. Equally importantly, the number of social liberals among independents has fallen from 27% to 23%.

More independents, by a narrow margin, are now socially conservative than socially liberal.

This has not only significant cultural, but political consequences. Democrats and Republicans attributed their performance in the midterms to blowback over abortion. It’s become accepted wisdom that the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision was an electoral disaster that turned the country against Republicans. And yet there’s no sign of that in the Gallup poll numbers.

If the Dobbs decision had led to any significant shift then more people would be identifying as socially liberal and fewer as socially conservative. Instead the country has gone the other way.

There is a passionate ‘Abortion Uber Alles’ demographic and its impact shouldn’t be discounted, but the nation as a whole is trending more socially conservative and, even among Democrats, there’s been no growth in the socially liberal and a slight growth among the socially moderate and even a tiny bit among socially conservative. Abortion has not radicalized the Democrats.

And if it hasn’t radicalized the rank-and-file Democrats, it certainly hasn’t radicalized Americans.

The abortion obsessives have not been able to persuade anyone outside their ranks of the importance of their cause. The country is not revolting against social conservatism, on the contrary it is drifting toward social conservatism.

Democrats embraced sexual identity politics in order to shift voter demographics, but even among young adults, the majority group likely to identify as LGBTQ, Gallup is forced to admit, have instead benefited from a “modest increase in conservative social ideology”.

The Gallup poll is one of a series of blows to the vision of a demographic leftist majority. First, Latinos have shown that they cannot be counted on as a stable Dem bloc. That has forced Democrats to double down on black nationalism after having alienated virtually every other class of voters except the all-important drag queen base they hope to ride to victory in 2024.

Generational demographic change is also faltering. Democrats were promised that the younger generations were going to give them a permanent majority. But that isn’t happening either.

Nate Cohn, the New York Times‘ chief political analyst, delivered the bad news to its readers in an article headlined, “Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right.”

The new millennial era, Cohn found, was based on misleading numbers that grouped millennials together. Like every previous generation, older millennials are becoming more conservative while younger millennials are still leftist. If this pattern holds up, older voters will still be conservative, no matter what generation they belong to. The question is how we define conservatism? The Gallup poll shows that conservatism can be profoundly defined and redefined when conservatives and ordinary people fight back against leftists on key issues.

The backlash against the culture war is not a permanent solution, but it is an opening.

Republican history has been marked by episodes of squishy elected officials and electorates ceding massive amounts of cultural, institutional and economic territory to leftists only for a conservative resurgence to push back and revive the movement, the party and the nation.

Over the generations, Republicans ceded to socialism, big government, illegal migration, Communism and social liberalism only to be dragged back by a reaction to leftist extremism.

Had the American Left been willing to settle for a gradual modus vivendi that hollowed out the nation and put it on a leftist trajectory, the nation would have been lost long ago. Instead, leftists treated Republican fecklessness as a weakness, trampled more sensible liberals, and overreached the national tolerance level for their insanity and their totalitarian abuses.

Never before has the Left been as arrogant, as confident and as certain of total victory as it is now. And in the face of victory it has once again badly overreached, stirring up an uprising.

The resistance is not just manifest at school board meetings or in elections, but in a larger invisible shift of worldviews.

The wokes believe that they’re the only ones who are truly ‘awake’, but more and more Americans are waking up. Against wokeness, a moral awakening is rising.

And once awake, the truly woke will not easily go to sleep again. 

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.