There is nothing merely cultural about the culture wars......
What do battles over abortion, sex work, voting, critical race theory, covid vaccines, transgender health and climate catastrophe have in common?
The past few weeks feel like a Zombie resurgence of the culture wars of the 1970s and 80s. There is the Texas anti-abortion law, raising the specter of the pre-Roe v. Wade era. Then there’s Catharine MacKinnon in the New York Times, attacking OnlyFans’ decision to restore sex workers to their platform by resurrecting the anti-porn and anti-sex work rhetoric of 40 years ago Combine that with a public health emergency that resonates in some ways with the pre-protease inhibitor HIV/AIDS pandemic, and everything new feels so so old.
But the context is actually much older than the 70s and 80s, and also rooted in the specific contingencies of the political present. The “culture wars” in the Americas are as old as Christian European attacks on Native cultures, and as immediate as a strategy for the 2022 midterm elections. The combination of attacks on racialized populations with rigid regulation of hierarchical binary gender and sexuality are long and short-term mainstays of strategies for political and economic domination. Right now we see voter suppression, attacks on so-called critical race theory, withholding of medical care and bathroom access for trans people, firestorms over efforts to decriminalize sex work, and new anti-abortion strategies. These contests mix variously, in terms of constituencies and political valence, with anti-vax/anti-mask rabble rousing, and the climate wars.
On the one hand, in the present moment, these new manifestations of old fights are a part of the chaotic spectacle of decline in US empire and the decay of neoliberal capitalism in its globalist, superficially multicultural guise. Battles from the rise of neoliberalism return at its possible demise, or at least, massive transformation. Some thinkers and organizers will therefore call these battles “merely cultural,” as if they are sideshows and distractions from the real bedrock fight against capitalism and empire. But there is nothing “merely cultural” about the culture wars! The stakes are material. The ability of people to survive, to make a livable life, to have money, social relations and bodily integrity is deeply impacted in all these battles.
The materiality of the culture wars is in many ways the biggest problem for the broad coalition of often conflicting forces we call “the right.” That coalition has held together for decades in part by divisions of scale. The religious and racist right has operated at the local and state level, working in state legislatures and massing at school board meetings. People’s lives are deeply damaged by these efforts, while the corporate funders of conservative and right wing politics at the national level have been able to use them strategically to build a faux “populist” base. This strategy of division by scale was tested and barely maintained during the Trump administration--Steve Bannon was pushed out of the White House by corporate forces represented by the Republican establishment, who were happy to use him in the election campaign but preferred to keep his brand of racist populism at a distance from national policy. And while it was fine for Proud Boys et al to mass at state capitols and threaten governors, the appearance of a mob in DC has created a vexing problem for the orderly execution of corporate interests. At national scale, the material effects of local and state cultural politics become too visible to set aside.
Right now, activism against covid public health policies and anti-abortion strategy in Texas are both pushing hard against division by scale (despite their utterly contradictory rhetoric about bodily autonomy). The Business Roundtable supports the Biden administration’s federal mandates, because large-scale business interests need wide scale regulatory consistency. We can also be sure that the Republican establishment is counting on the Supreme Court to eventually invalidate the Texas anti-abortion law--the material impact at national scale of that kind of law would energize a powerful opposition.
It’s interesting that the way the drafters of the Texas law attempt to evade judicial oversight--by allowing for civil suits by any citizen--expands on the strategy that Catharine MacKinnon tried in the 1980s with municipal ordinances allowing citizens “harmed by pornography” to sue its purveyors. MacKinnon at least tried to hold to the legal requirement that those bringing suit show “harm,” but her definition of both “harm” and “pornography” was so elastic as to create the conditions for a free-for-all--Christian moralists could sue lesbian photographers as easily as survivors of coercion or violence could sue those who commercialize their pain. That ordinance was thrown out by the courts. This new Texas state law started out as a municipal ordinance too. And it removes the requirement that the plaintiff be “harmed” entirely. The law deploys a “populist” strategy very much in keeping with the new right wing version of that term--it instigates and rewards vigilante opportunism, via $10,000 bounties ensured for successful cases.
Thinkers and organizers on the left have been thinking about scale too. Local campaigns have led to some stunning electoral victories for socialists, while climate activists attack corporate greenwashing and lifestyle change as inadequate to manage a crisis of global scale. Neoliberal capitalism’s chaotic decline/transformation has left us with crises at every level, the organizational challenge is overwhelming. But as we will not be lifted up by current global or national institutions, we need to focus on building from the bottom up, one culture war, economic and health crisis at a time--none is a dismissable distraction!--scaling up, globally, as we go.
Finally, someone [thanks, Lisa] is noting the similarity of the Texas strategy to the Dworkin-McKinnon ordinances of the 1980s. No surprise, I guess, that the authors of this law [as recounted in today's NYT] fail to acknowledge their debt to the ladies of the 80s...