Cultural Change Versus Political Change

Looking to politicians to "fix" our culture is a fool's errand.

Years ago, there was a longtime reader of this website who regularly engaged in often heated comment-section discussions with me on the topic of conservatism. For the sake of this piece, I’ll refer to him as Larry (which isn’t his real name).

Larry was an ardent social conservative who, during the Obama era, routinely railed against things like homosexuality, gay marriage, sexual permissiveness, drugs, pornography, atheism, and abortion… all of which he largely laid at the feet of the Democratic Party. He believed, after all, that they were the purveyors of such “behavior.”

I’m a small-government, fiscal, and constitutional conservative who has long considered himself more of a moderate on social issues. And on one occasion, when I described myself as such, Larry (who I had previously gotten along with fairly well) absolutely flew off the handle. The mere concept of social moderation absolutely enraged him (seriously, you would have thought that I had just set fire to the Baby Jesus’s manger). He accused me of adding to the decay of society, and it didn’t even matter to him that I was a fellow pro-lifer. He viewed any alignment, with what he believed amounted to social contagion cultivated by the Democratic Party, to be a moral atrocity. The guy was a real hard-liner, more so than I had realized… or so it seemed.

But then, in 2016, something rather interesting happened. Donald Trump became president. And after years of preached sanctimony over his collection of social grievances, item after item began to mysteriously drop out of Larry’s sermons.

Only it wasn’t really a mystery. It was a demonstration of the power of partisan politics. The 45th president of the United States, a former longtime Democrat but now a Republican, was nothing resembling a social conservative. In fact, he espoused much of what Larry claimed to despise. Trump was a serial adulterer whose many extramarital hook-ups included porn-stars. He was a chronically dishonest vulgarian who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals. He mocked the disabled, attributed a female journalist’s debate questions to her menstrual cycle, and showed no firsthand knowledge nor understanding of religious faith, despite claiming to be a Christian. He was also, unlike most Republicans at the time, perfectly fine with gay marriage (I believe to his credit).

In other words, the political portion of Larry’s doctrine had been pulled right out from under him, leaving him little wiggle-room from which to continue preaching the moral corrosion of the Democratic party. Still, Larry continued to insist that the Democrats were America’s villains, and like many on the political Right, he went all-in in his support of their new arch-nemesis, Donald Trump. Larry rationalized that support by doubling and tripling down on a single issue that was still at his disposal: abortion.

Even through Trump had once famously described himself as “very pro-choice,” he had campaigned in 2016 (albeit very awkwardly) as a pro-lifer. I doubt many people believed at the time that his conversion was sincere (lots of folks probably figured that a celebrity-playboy, who’d casually cheated on all three of his wives, had probably even paid for a few abortions himself). But someone on Trump’s campaign-team was savvy enough to advocate for a list of conservative, Federalist Society-approved Supreme Court candidates that Trump would publicly vow to choose from if elected. These judges were the types of people who would likely help to overturn Roe v. Wade if the opportunity one day arose. This created a permission structure and at least a coherent “transactional” argument for social conservatives pulling the lever for Trump in the general election.

It was the one plank Larry clung too, as tightly as he could, throughout the Trump presidency. He used it to rationalize his abandonment of just about every other principle and standard he had once moralized (and he hated when I would point that out). The protection of the unborn, which he tied directly to his hope of Roe being overturned, was his justification for defending Donald Trump on literally every other matter… including Trump’s efforts to overturn U.S. democracy after the 2020 election, his “Stop the Steal” lies, and his provocation of the January 6 attack (during which Larry was on this website, in real-time as Capitol cops were being beaten to a pulp, blaming the violence on — you guessed it — the Democrats).

Of course, there was no pragmatic reason for Larry’s unconditional loyalty to one man for four years. Trump’s Supreme Court picks weren’t contingent on what random people in internet comment-sections were saying about him. That’s not how “transactional” relationships in politics work, anyway. Plus, Trump had already delivered on his Supreme Court promise, having taken advantage of an unexpected three vacancies in a single term. Trump was on his way out, and was widely believed at the time (though I was never sold on it) to have no political future.

But for Larry (and millions of others), defending Trump had just become second nature — a type of religion, even, in which even legitimate criticism of the man was akin to blasphemy. And for Larry, even the mere possibility of babies being saved justified every syllable.

Larry, of course, got his wish… at least as far as the law was concerned. Roe was overturned the following year, and abortion laws and restrictions, after several decades, fell back to the states.

“It was all worth it,” Larry gloated to me, acknowledging his four-year capitulation to Donald Trump.

Larry had also resurrected his old list of social grievances now that a Democrat was back in the White House. But shortly after the overturning of Roe, Larry disappeared from the site. Maybe he felt his mission had been accomplished.. or perhaps he just got tired of me drawing attention to his hypocrisy.

Either way, like Larry, I welcomed the court’s ruling. As I’ve written numerous times over the years, I believed Roe vs. Wade was bad law and an extraordinary federal overreach (even progressive icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed on that). But unlike Larry, my opposition to Roe didn’t have much to do with reducing the number of abortions in this country. If it did, I would have certainly welcomed the development. But I was quite skeptical, and as it turns out, I was right to be.

As you can see above, the number of abortions in this country began to steady decline around 1990, less than 20 years after Roe had been decided. The trend continued on for decades (through Republican and Democratic administrations alike), amounting to undeniable gains for the pro-life movement, despite abortion’s national legalization. I pointed this out to Larry a number times in our discussions, but for whatever reason he didn’t find the progress particularly hopeful. He had convinced himself that overturning Roe would be the only meaningful measure of success on the issue.

You may have noticed something else illustrated in the chart above. It was in 2017, shortly after Donald Trump had taken office, that the annual number of abortions suddenly began to rise again. And to the surprise of many, it has continued its rise in the post-Roe era.

To be clear, I don’t think Trump, or later Joe Biden, did anything to inspire more women to get abortions. What I think the numbers suggest instead is that a point I often made to Larry may have just been correct: abortion is more of a cultural issue than it is a political or legal one.

The most effective way of promoting a culture of life is to win over the hearts and minds of the people — something the pro-life movement made significant progress on, often through positive messaging, education, and support, for almost 30 years (while the law largely worked against their plight). Those who believed the reversal of Roe v. Wade would be the be-all and end-all in (or at least the catalyst for) achieving the culture they envisioned are learning right now how wrong they were. In fact, the public backlash from the repeal of Roe has driven pro-choice sentiment to its highest level in decades.

Donald Trump, who was never a particularly strong advocate for the pro-life position, was so concerned with that public shift that he reversed his position on the issue, returning to his pro-choice roots for his 2024 presidential run. One would think that pro-life groups, who had helped move the needle on hearts and minds since the 90s, and who’d endorsed his candidacy in the past, would have been devastated by that reversal. But lo and behold, they largely accommodated it… which doesn’t bode well for pro-life sentiment down the road. Neither does how poorly a number of state governments have handled the post-Roe era over the last two and a half years.

I think a broad lesson here, that I have no reason to believe political enthusiasts will actually take to heart, is that it’s foolish to rely on politicians to settle our country’s cultural differences. And it’s certainly not worth selling your soul to them under the belief that they will.

Can a U.S. president affect and facilitate cultural change? Yes, but since the civil rights movement, it’s typically only been at the margins. Far more often than not, politicians find themselves chasing after cultural movements to catch up with them. For example, even the very liberal “hope and change” president, Barack Obama, was late to the game on gay marriage. He campaigned during his first presidential run as a marriage traditionalist, and only reversed himself (to the celebration of many) once public sentiment shifted far enough to make it politically safe for him to do so. Heck, Dick Cheney was more of a pioneer on the issue than Obama.

Similarly, the MAGA crowd views Donald Trump as a strong anti-woke leader, despite wokeness having shot through the roof when he was president, on everything from gender-identity movements to antiracism.

Conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote shortly after Trump left office (in a piece titled “Did Trump Make Everything Progressive?”) that Trump may have actually fueled wokeness:

… [the Trump administration’s] mix of haplessness and menace was a great gift to progressivism, inspiring an anti-conservative reaction that extended through every walk of elite life, turning centrists into liberals and remaking liberalism into exactly the kind of progressive orthodoxy that conservatives most fear. Republicans got control of the Supreme Court out of the bargain, but in almost every other institution that matters, from Langley to the corporate boardroom, their position got much worse.

Whether or not one buys that theory, it seems, as also acknowledged by Douthat, that wokenees peaked and began its decline… under the Biden administration (perhaps for the inverse reason). There’s a reason, after all, why Kamala Harris dumped so many of her 2019 positions, and yanked hard to the right, when she took over the nomination reins from Biden.

If that’s not a testament to the power of citizens over the power of politicians and public policy, I don’t know what is.