A possible new front in the radical right propaganda war: Attack wokeness

That should read, don't be woke

This secular, not Christian

The radical right knows that it needs to at least try to expand its base beyond angry old white men, radical Christian fundamentalists, rich capitalists and enraged far right neo-fascist crackpots. Its propaganda machine has hit on attacking and demagoguing wokeness as an issue. That strategy is drawing a lot of people to the GOP, including Hispanics. If the Democrats do not wake up to how their messaging and some of their policies is being demagogued and perceived, Republicans may not need to subvert elections to win. 

This strategy is family oriented and secular, not radical Christian nationalist. Apparently, the GOP sees the continuing decline in Christian practice and feels a need to look for another voter base to fall back on if Christianity collapses as a core unifying source of voters. That is an astute observation. If nothing else, the GOP is intelligent in protecting its own power and access to wealth.

From a New York Times opinion piece by Nate Hochman at the National Review, a solidly right source:

A new kind of conservatism, represented by right-wing elites like Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo and Tucker Carlson, is making itself known. We are just beginning to see its impact. The anti-critical-race-theory laws, anti-transgender laws and parental rights bills that have swept the country in recent years are the movement’s opening shots. .... this new campaign is also distinctly different from the culture wars of the late 20th century, and it reflects a broad shift in conservatism’s priorities and worldview.

The conservative political project is no longer specifically Christian. .... a reversal of the landmark 1973 ruling would be more of a last gasp than a sign of strength for the religious right. .... Instead of an explicitly biblical focus on issues like school prayer, no-fault divorce and homosexuality, the new coalition is focused on questions of national identity, social integrity and political alienation. Although it enjoys the support of most Republican Christians who formed the electoral backbone of the old Moral Majority, it is a social conservatism rather than a religious one, revolving around race relations, identity politics, immigration and the teaching of American history.

Today’s culture war is being waged not between religion and secularism but between groups that the Catholic writer Matthew Schmitz has described as “the woke and the unwoke.” “Catholic traditionalists, Orthodox Jews, Middle American small-business owners and skeptical liberal atheists may not seem to have much in common,” he wrote in 2020. But all of those demographics are uncomfortable with the progressive social agenda of the post-Obama years.

.... the right’s appeal is a defense of a broader, beleaguered American way of life. For example, the language of parental rights is rarely, if ever, religious, but it speaks to the pervasive sense that American families are fighting back against progressive ideologues over control of the classroom. That framing has been effective: According to a March Politico poll, for example, American voters favored the key provision of Florida’s hotly debated Parental Rights in Education law, known by its critics as the Don’t Say Gay law, by a margin of 16 percentage points. Support for the initiative crosses racial lines. In a May poll of likely general election voters in six Senate battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — the conservative American Principles Project found that Hispanics supported the Florida law by a margin of 11 percentage points and African Americans by a margin of four points.

As the terms of the culture war shift, Barack Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” — the mix of millennials, racial minorities and college-educated white voters whose collective electoral power was supposed to establish a sustainable progressive majority — is fraying, undermining the decades-long conventional wisdom that America’s increasing racial diversity would inevitably push the country left.

That thesis was prominently advanced by the progressive political scientists John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, but both of them have grown alarmed about the rightward movement among nonwhite voters in recent years. “If Hispanic voting trends continue to move steadily against the Democrats, the pro-Democratic effect of nonwhite population growth will be blunted, if not canceled out entirely,” Mr. Teixeira wrote in December. “That could — or should — provoke quite a sea change in Democratic thinking.” In the absence of that sea change, however, it is likely that disaffected people of all races will continue to move into the Republican coalition.

The decline in Republican church membership directly coincides with the rise of Mr. Trump. As Timothy P. Carney found in 2019, the voters who went for Mr. Trump in the 2016 primary were far more secular than the religious right: In the 2016 G.O.P. primaries, Mr. Trump won only about 32 percent of voters who went to church more than once a week. In contrast, he secured about half of those who went “a few times a year,” 55 percent of those who “seldom” attend and 62 percent of Republicans who never go to church. In other words, Mr. Carney wrote, “every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa.”

The right’s new culture war represents the worldview of people the sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American radicals,” or M.A.Rs. This demographic, which makes up the heart of Mr. Trump’s electoral base, is composed primarily of non-college-educated middle- and lower-middle-class white people, and it is characterized by a populist hostility to elite pieties that often converges with the old social conservatism. But M.A.Rs do not share the same religious moral commitments as their devoutly Christian counterparts, both in their political views and in their lifestyles. As Ross Douthat noted, nonchurchgoing Trump voters are “less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced” than those who regularly attend religious services. No coincidence, then, that a 2021 Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Republicans now support gay marriage — up from just 28 percent in 2011.

These voters are more nationalistic and less amenable to multiculturalism than their religious peers, and they profess a skepticism of the cosmopolitan open-society arguments for free trade and mass immigration that have been made by neoliberals and neoconservatives alike. “M.A.Rs feel they are members of an exploited class — excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions,” Matthew Rose wrote in “First Things.” They “unapologetically place citizens over foreigners, majorities over minorities, the native-born over recent immigrants, the normal over the transgressive and fidelity to a homeland over cosmopolitan ideals.”

Some of that seems to be internally inconsistent and/or overstated. Fore example, Hochman's argument that MARs are more intolerant of immigration than Christian nationalism doesn't ring true. And, what are MARs going to do when Whites are no longer the majority? But even if my perceptions of some inconsistency is mostly a mirage, it probably does not make much difference. Republican Party politics does not need to make sense or be rational or fact-based. It needs to appeal to enough voters to stay in power. 

These observations from social scientists Chris Achen and Larry Bartels from 2016 are helpful to be kept in mind. They accurately describe the mental soil that demagogues plant poisoned seeds in and carefully nurture on their way to wealth and power:

“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

But stepping back and considering the broad contours of MARs as a potential new political base, what Hochman argues looks plausible. Christianity is fading and the GOP needs to either (1) look to other base human instincts and emotions to demagogue, or (2) try to play a more fact and reason-based game. Option 2 looks to be impossible because the true goal of Republican elites is wealth and power for authoritarian elites, not for MARs or anyone else. That is generally incompatible with what MARs are likely to want. GOP elites can demagogue, promise and probably give MARs most of what they want without seriously damaging their control over wealth and power. If so, this angle of attack could do in the Democrats, maybe without subverting elections much or at all.