The Democratic Culture Wars (again)

For a few weeks I thought this issue had finally gone away. Then Dan Gerstein in the Wall Street Journal (which typically requires a subscription to read) starts it all up again. Now we weary warriors shall pick up our spears and march reluctantly to battle. Sigh.

Let's just summarize the two sides:

On one side of the battlefield stands Gerstein, Amy Sullivan (here and here), Norm Scheiber, and Mike Gecan. Their basic argument is that liberals, by being insufficiently respectful of religious beliefs and committing a massive strategic blunder. Why don't liberals bash Hollywood the way they bash Exxon?

On the other side are Matt Yglesias (here and here), , and a very animated Digby (here, here, and here). They believe that regulating TV/etc. for "cultural"reasons amounts to censorship. Democrats would be better off defending personal liberties than becoming socially traditionalist.

New Donkey and Pandagon, in their own ways, stand somewhere in the middle. They lean towards one side or the other, but believe that the cultural issues can be subsumed within the greater issue of child-rearing.

Where am I on this issue? Well, if the issue is ceding ground to cultural traditionalism as such, then count me in the Yglesias camp. I don't think cultural traditionalism is an intellectually defensible position, since it is essentially other-regarding. You can practice your own belief system, but just because mine bothers you doesn't mean you can make me practice yours Politically I think this civil liberties grounding (I hesitate to call it libertarian) is also the right position to take. My inspiration here is JFK's speech to the Baptists ministers: by making his Catholicism a matter of tolerance, he made the issue go away.

However, on the specifics of how we raise kids, I think that New Donkey and Pandagon are on th money. The core Democratic constituency is (or should be) working class/middle class folks struggling with economic anxiety. These people don't feel in control, which makes them angry. The Republicans have been much more skilled in directing this anger (inappropriately, of course) than Democrats have. One of the places they don't feel in control is in how they raise their children. Now this is a very tricky issue, since I don't think parents have an absolute right to indoctrinate their children any way they please. But when it comes to protecting children from bad TV or bad food, I don't think that regulating behavior is necessarily the same as censorship. We let cigarette companies advertise, but not to kids.

The key element (for me) in this debate is whether we are talking about children or adults. We accept the importance of controlling what influences children are exposed to precisely because they are vulnerable. But once someone is an adult, you have to let them make their own decisions. I don't see why drawing this distinction should really be so hard, either from a philosophical or rhetorical point of view.