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.

The Federal War Against Your Lifestyle

June 06, 2023/ Francis Menton  @ Manhattan Contrarian

Just a week ago I had a post featuring some recent federal bureaucratic assaults against the well-being and prosperity of the population. The title was “Bureaucrats Completely Incapable Of Making Reasonable Trade-Offs.” The post featured two new rules from different corners of the federal bureaucracy, both announced on May 5: one from EPA effectively mandating electric automobiles by about 2032, and the other from the Department of Energy once again lowering the amounts of energy and water that dishwashers are allowed to use.

I stated in that post that these two new rules were just examples of a much broader federal war against our comfortable and convenient lifestyles. But to get a feel for the big picture, you need a more comprehensive list of the things the feds are trying to restrict and/or eliminate from your life. Now Noah Rothman comes along in the current issue of National Review with a much longer list, in a piece titled “The War on Things That Work.” (Although National Review has a paywall, you should get a free article or two per month, if you want to read the whole piece.)

One thing that Rothman’s list makes clear is that, although the regulations are principally rationalized as part of the fight against “climate change,” there are many respects in which the new restrictions have nothing whatsoever to do with the “climate” issue, even if you believe that greenhouse gases like CO2 are some kind of existential threat to humanity. For example, several of the restrictions in question relate to use of water, rather than energy. Other restrictions relate to the use of energy in the form of electricity, which in other contexts (like automobiles) the climate warriors call “zero emissions.” In the real world electricity is not “zero emissions” at all (because most of it comes from fossil fuels), but the climate warriors claim to believe that it is (because they think fossil fuels can be easily eliminated from the generation process), and if so, reducing the electricity use of various gadgets and appliances is also not a “climate” issue at all.

To underscore the point that most of these regulations have little to nothing to do with the climate issue, Rothman leads off his article with the well-known quote from one-time Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti:

“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” It was, in fact, “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

So here, gathered from Rothman’s piece, is the list he has put together of some of the “things that work” that the government has currently gone to war against, or is considering going to war against: all appliances using natural gas (furnaces, stoves, hot water heaters, clothes dryers); hydrofluorocarbon refrigerants for air conditioners; dishwashers; lawn mowers and leaf blowers powered by gasoline or other fossil fuels; washing machines; incandescent light bulbs; and plastic bags and straws.

Consider some history of a few of these things:

Gas stoves.

The idea of banning gas stoves had largely proceeded at the local level until early this year. (The first U.S. municipality to ban new gas stoves was Berkeley, CA, in 2019. In April 2023 the federal Ninth Circuit threw out Berkeley’s ban on the grounds that it is pre-empted by federal law. Meanwhile New York has its own ban, put in place earlier this year as part of the state budget and taking effect in 2026.)

But the feds could not resist getting into the act. In January 2023, Richard Trumka, one of the commissioners of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, floated the idea of banning gas stoves on the ground that they are a “hidden hazard” because they cause indoor air pollution. (This despite decades of indoor burning of natural gas without any noted health effects.). That remark caused immediate pushback, including from Senators Cruz and Manchin, who proposed legislation to stop any such regulation. Chuck Schumer got into the act, issuing a statement on February 3 saying “you have to laugh at the ‘gas stove ban’ narrative being cooked up by the MAGA GOP.” Sure, Chuck. It took all the way to March 2, 2023 for the CPSC to follow up with a Request for Information, seeking public input on the supposed “chronic hazards associated with gas stoves.” The correct answer is “none,” but you can be sure that the CPSC is being flooded with input from environmental activists demanding that gas stoves be banned. As of now, they say that they have no plans on the table to ban gas stoves; but if you think that that isn’t coming, you are ridiculously naive.

Hydrofluorocarbons refrigerants in air conditioners.

EPA issued its proposed rule on this subject on December 9, 2022. According to the press release, the rule will “Advance Transition to Safer, More Efficient Heating and Cooling Technologies,” and will also save consumers “billions in costs.” Perhaps you are wondering, if the proposed replacement(s) for hydrofluorocarbons are really “safer,” “more efficient,” and will also save consumers big money, how could we be so stupid not to already have adopted these things? Rothman:

Put simply, the rule increases the cost of refrigerants, and those costs are passed on to the consumer. Even the anticipation of that increase has already made it more expensive to install new climate-control units.

Incandescent light bulbs.

Incandescent bulbs are much cheaper to buy than the newer and trendier LED bulbs, but they cost more to operate, and burn out more frequently. That’s a trade-off that different consumers might make differently. It turns out that there is a clear preference among low-income consumers for the incandescent bulbs, undoubtedly because of the cheaper up-front cost. Rothman:

[The] clear preferences of consumers, particularly low-income Americans [is for incandescent bulbs]. In 2018, University of Michigan researchers found that high-efficiency LED light bulbs “are more expensive and less available in high-poverty urban areas than in more affluent locations” and that the cost to upgrade “was twice as high in the highest-poverty areas.”

But the federal regulators are the place where elite preferences get imposed on everyone else, whether they can afford it or not. Rothman provides the following history of the light bulb regulations:

In 2007, George W. Bush signed a law designed to gradually phase out inefficient incandescent light bulbs. Barack Obama accelerated the phase-out by tightening efficiency standards via regulatory mechanisms. In 2019, however, the Trump administration rolled those requirements back, giving incandescent bulbs a new lease on life. But in 2022, Joe Biden’s Department of Energy reimposed Obama-era lumens-per-watt standards designed to finally bury the filament bulb.

Under the current regulations from the Department of Energy, the last date on which sale of incandescent bulbs will be permitted in in August 2023.

CPSC, EPA, Department of Energy. It’s the same thing for all of them: that indescribable thrill of exercising the vast federal power and showing who’s boss and making everybody’s life just a little bit worse by imposing your version of virtue by force. After all, you didn’t go to Washington and dedicate your life and career to writing regulations only to say that everything is already just fine as is. You need to prove that you are a big shot. You need to do something big. Maybe you could impose a lockdown. Failing that, banning some appliances that are cheap and work great would be one hell of a day’s work.