The culture war is a class war in disguise – IOTW Report

The culture war is a class war in disguise

Spiked: By attacking marriage, family and education, progressive elites are kicking away the ladder from the working class.

The idea that working-class Americans who vote for Republicans are ‘voting against their economic interests’ has become dogma on the progressive left. For the life of them, Democrats can’t understand why their proposals for an expanded welfare state do not appeal to the millions of downwardly mobile blue-collar workers in former union strongholds who turned states like West Virginia red.

In response to the mystification of the left, many on the right have argued that people don’t vote on economic issues as much as they do on cultural ones. The argument is that the left’s cultural battles against traditional gender roles, the nuclear family and gun rights, and for abortion rights, have alienated Christian Americans to such a degree that they would be willing to sacrifice benefits like free pre-childcare, paid sick leave and minimum-wage hikes at the altar of their values.

But something both sides seem to have lost sight of is the fact that a lot of what we call cultural battles are actually economic ones – or at least, they have an economic valence. more

9 Comments on The culture war is a class war in disguise

  1. Exactly.

    Been saying it for years. I have more in common with working class immigrants and Black People than I do my Schoolteacher & Office friends.

    That was the main point of Clint Eastwood’s “GRAN TORINO”

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  2. What’s so galling is the idea of pandering to 3% or 13% of the population. The government and media treat the gays and blacks and those with liberal ideas like they’re majority.

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  3. Partly wrong! Re;peating liberal propaganda in part.

    “The class divide in America is as much a marriage divide as it is an educational one. College-educated, affluent Americans are overwhelmingly likely to be married,…”
    dmy ccity is affluent, college educted. We voted 80% for Ronny in his landlside ’84,./Only 41% voted for the liberal GWB in his crushing defeat (ln Cal – not national) in ’00.

    All educated, affluent folk are not “Limo libs”! When I voted for Ronny on ’84 ‘iRS said my income was above 98% of Americans. Most of my city voted for Don in ’16, GWB’s DOMINION HAD JOE WINNING IN ’20. I NEVER BELIEVED GWB; DO NOT BELIEVE HIS dominion – WHICH BTW IS COUNTING THE “VOTES” IN GA. KEMP WILL, LIKE JO, WIN!

    It is not true that Don voters, like Ronny voters, are all , or even most, lacking “Sheep Skins”! I and most near me have several and we voted Don TWICE and Ronny every time!
    Bush and Joe are rich, “educated” lobs. But Don is just as rich and well educated.

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  4. Fishtown and Belmont. Charles Murray wrote the book a decade ago:

    “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010”

    “America has never been a classless society. From the beginning, rich and poor have usually lived in different parts of town, gone to different churches, and had somewhat different manners and mores. It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.”

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  5. “In 2020 Black Lives Matter had to scrub a page of its website that was a bit too honest. ‘We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children…”

    Yeah, it takes a village to raise a child…just not my village or my child.

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  6. This is a demonic effort to curb population growth while making the ruling classes filthy rich in the process. But, as usual, the architects of the “grand plan” are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. They underestimate how much they rely on the work, ideas, and creativity coming out of the middle class and are way overempowering the kind of demonic scum, communist and urban pavement ape scum, who are incapable of creating or doing anything of value.

    Once all that’s left managing this country are stupid angry dykes, perverted AntiFa faggots, and braindead nigger vermin, the ruling class will lose all sources of income.

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  7. I am currently reading Knight of the Holy Ghost, a short history of GK Chesterton by Dale Ahlquist. GK Chesterton is one of my literary heroes along with CS Lewis. On pg. 73 in a subchapter titled what’s wrong with the world written in 1910 he says there are four things wrong with the world: big govt., big business, feminism and public education. Why are these things wrong (both then and now)”Because they all undermine the family, which is the basic unit of society, the thing that must be stable for society to be stable, the thing that that must be strong for society to be strong, and the thing that is most under attack in our society today” I could go on but GK Chesterton had it right 112 years and still does now. Between reading lately GK Chesterton, Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, the world from the 20’s to the 90’s and CS Lewis’s spiritual auto biography of his conversion to Christianity in Surprised by Joy, all good books which are helping me to learn more about the history of last 100 plus years. I need to read more and keep the idiot box off more than ever these days in order to stay sane and focused on what’s going on in our crazy, upside down world nowadays.

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  8. Geoff: My favorite Chesterton essay is “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family” In it, GKC states in a much more eloquent way what I have always thought about the family, that it is God’s practical joke on us as He seems to scoop up a handful of random and dissimilar personalities and drop them into a unit for His own amusement. But, it is exactly these odd combinations of talents and temperaments that make for strong families and an interesting life.

    Read it here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heretics/14

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