The culture war isn’t meant to be won. It’s meant to be continuous. For starters, white liberals will always find new ways to complain so if they’re around, we’re just going to have to deal with their antics. But make no mistake; the culture wars are the fault of liberals and liberals alone. Democrats are the only group of folks who have increasingly become more insane. It’s not that conservatives have become more radical. We want to bar biological males from competing in women’s sports. That isn’t radical, but erasing language regarding to pregnancy because transgender females don’t have uteruses is not just insane, but anti-science. Remember folks, you have to say “birthing people” instead. Even liberal blogger Kevin Drum, formerly of Mother Jones, said that liberals were to blame for the pervasive culture warfare. Granted, he’s personally okay with this shift for the most part, but he’s also rational about its implications (via Jabberwocking):
Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.
This wasn't meant to be a rigorous scholarly analysis. And you can argue about margins of error, question wording, choice of topics, and so forth. Still, the gaps are too big and the trend too consistent to ignore the obvious conclusion that over the past two decades Democrats have moved left far more than Republicans have moved right
I've made this point many times before, and I want to make it again more loudly and more plainly today. It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle. It is liberals. And this shouldn't come as a surprise since progressives have been bragging publicly about pushing the Democratic Party leftward since at least 2004.
Now, I'm personally happy about most of this. But that doesn't blind me to the fact that "personally happy" means nothing in politics. What matters is what the median voter feels, and Democrats have been moving further and further away from the median voter for years.
“Since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.” https://t.co/XfugK3tAhr
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) July 3, 2021
And that’s not a good recipe for winning elections. The ideological shift was explicit in the 2020 exits. White college-educated liberals are swelling the ranks of the Democratic Party and their brand of politics is all ideological which does not mix well with the nonwhite bloc that has made up the backbone of the base for years. Blacks and Hispanics especially are not liberal on a slew of issues, including racial resentment, which is why a lot fled the Democratic Party for the Republicans in 2020. Even notable loudmouths of the Left, like Al Sharpton, have criticized the “latte-sipping liberals” who peddle stuff like defund the police. Being pro-crime isn’t popular, but white liberals don’t care. For those who disagree with them, which is most of the country, liberals merely dismiss them as ignorant, uneducated, racist, or a combination of all three. If reaching out to voters is essential for winning elections and changing public opinion, liberals are in for very rough days ahead, and proper pronouns will be the least of their worries.