On Winning the Culture and Losing the Country

On his website, Democracy Americana, the historian Thomas Zimmer wrote earlier this week:

[W]e could be, as dangerous as this situation is, on the brink of proving, perhaps for the first time ever, that a truly democratic society under conditions of multiracial, multi-religious, gender-egalitarian pluralism is indeed possible.

Zimmer argues that the anti-democratic radicalization taking place throughout the United States is a reaction based on its own weakness. The U.S. has grown “more pluralistic, less white, less overwhelmingly Christian,” so the seeming collapse of liberal democracy is actually the collapse of “white Christian patriarchal dominance,” and what we’re witnessing is not its rebirth, but its final release. Reality, in the form of a stable majority, has moved away from those who claim America = Dominance, and because of that, Zimmer wants us to see the glass as half full.

I made this same argument — at least in part — in 2023 in Standing Up for LGBTQIA+ Rights: A Personal & National History. I traced the line from Brown v. Board through civil rights, through women’s rights in the workplace and over their own bodies, through the rights of gay people in the bedroom and at the altar, through the protections extended to religious minorities and to people with no religion at all. I wrote that despite capturing the legislative agenda of the Republican party, the religious right had been losing in federal court for nearly fifty years, and that progressives like me could be forgiven for calling the late century rise of the evangelical movement was merely the death rattle of conservative America.

After all, demography equals destiny, and more and more children seem to be coming of age in a secular America with a fundamental belief and constitutionally defended notion of equal rights for all.

Unfortunately, as Monty Python tried to warn us: no one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m not a paying subscriber to Zimmer’s newsletter, so I don’t have the statistics he marshals to make his case for the half-full glass. But I know enough. In a society where the highest court in the land protects the notions that “money = speech” and “corporations = persons,” anyone who chooses to see the glass as half full needs their eyes examined.

Let’s assume Zimmer is correct about the statistics. Let’s assume he’s correct that the backlash comes from weakness and not strength, and that a durable majority reject what the reactionaries are selling.

That doesn’t change the fact that demographics and institutional control are two different clocks running at two different speeds. The anti-democratic ultra-right did not win a majority at the ballot box, but it won the Supreme Court, and the Senate’s structural protections for small, white, rural states, and a fifty-year stealth campaign to seed the judiciary branch with people who would rule the right way regardless of what the majority wants.

They can lose the culture and still hold the institutions. That doesn’t contradict Zimmer’s statistics. But it is the mechanism by which they don’t matter.

That’s why, instead of seeing the glass half full, we ought to see it as a glass with enough room left in it to hide the poison in.

Pluralism, demography, progressive values, these are all great when the ruling class is committed to the principles of democracy. But when they’re not, the tree of liberty begins to look awfully thirsty.