Cultural Liberalism Vs. Cultural SocialismBy Rod Dreher
January 25, 2022
Here’s a really interesting report by the prominent UK political scientist Eric Kauffman, analyzing wokeness and its future prospects. It starts like this:
Western societies are in the midst of a growing “culture war” between cultural socialism and cultural liberalism. The two sides in this conflict only partly overlap with the country’s partisan political divide: the culture war divides Democrats while largely uniting Republicans and independents. It presents, therefore, a risk for Democrats and an opportunity for Republicans.
In a controversy dominated by anecdotes and headlines, it is vital to systematically gather and analyze survey data on public experiences and attitudes toward culture-war issues. While this has been done for universities, this report—based principally on a new survey conducted on the Qualtrics platform—is the first comprehensive analysis of the wider American experience with, and opinion of, cancel culture, political correctness, and Critical Race Theory.
Cultural liberalism is the belief that individuals and groups should have the freedom to express themselves, should not be compelled to endorse beliefs that they oppose, and should be treated equally by social norms and the law.
Cultural socialism is the idea that public policy should be used to redistribute wealth, power, and self-esteem from the privileged groups in society to disadvantaged groups, especially racial and sexual minorities, and women. This justifies restrictions on the freedom and equal treatment of members of advantaged groups.
For some Democratic voters, a commitment to cultural socialism overrides their historical defense of free speech. Most Republicans disagree with that position. They also oppose what they perceive to be the denigration of white Americans and the nation’s past, which underlie their support for a new politics of civil rights in schools and workplaces.
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What to make of these findings? I have a few thoughts.
First, we must do away with the thought that wokeness is a passing fad. It’s here to stay, not only for the reasons N.S. Lyons identified the other day, but also because, as Prof. Kaufmann demonstrates, it is popular with a majority of young Americans. You would be foolish to think that they will grow out of it. We have to have a long-term plan to deal with it.
Second, we aren’t going to be able to vote this away, but politics can be useful in fighting it. Because of the demographic shifts, Republicans and moderate Democrats will never have a better opportunity to roll back wokeness and all its pomps and works than they do now. It is imperative that GOP voters push, and push hard, on Republican elected officials to go after cancel culture, CRT, and other forms of wokeness. If they don’t do it now, they never will.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/wokeness-cultural-liberalism-vs-cultural-socialism/
