From White Rural Rage (Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman, 2024) pp101-3
UNPACKING THE CULTURE WAR
“Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” These are the arresting first words of a 2022 campaign ad aired by J. D. Vance in his bid to be the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio. Vance became famous for his 2016 book Hillbilly Elegy, which unsparingly chronicles the struggles of his dysfunctional working-class White rural family. In it, he is especially candid about the sufferings of his mother, Bev, who hopscotched from one abusive partner to the next on her eventual path to opioid addiction.
But by 2022, Vance had reinvented himself as a Trump-loving culture warrior, stabbing away at the resentments of downscale voters and blaming their troubles on liberals. “The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall. They censor us, but it doesn’t change the truth,” he went on. “Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country?”
Gone was the tough love of his book; the man who had written “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness”4 was nowhere to be found. Now Vance was acting as though he were seething with bitterness at distant elites who were not just looking down their noses at small-town folk but literally trying to murder them. In one interview with a popular far-right conspiracy theorist, Vance accused President Biden of intentionally flooding rural America with fentanyl to kill conservative voters. “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” he said. “It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him.”5 Rep. Tim Ryan, Vance’s Democratic opponent, tried to portray Vance as a dishonest climber who had abandoned Ohio to pursue a Silicon Valley fortune, but it didn’t work. With Donald Trump’s endorsement in hand, Vance won the election by six points.
As he revised his own history, Vance cast off the critiques he had made of his own people. After mentioning illegal drugs coming across “Joe Biden’s open border,” Vance says in the ad, “This issue is personal: I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border.” But in his book, Vance says his mother was addicted to prescription narcotics, which don’t come over the border. As most of the country now knows, it was domestic drugmakers and distributors who were guilty of addicting millions of people like Vance’s mother. The Connecticut-based drug company Purdue Pharma, owned by the billionaire Sackler family, targeted sales of its OxyContin pain pills to poor, rural White citizens who worked in physically demanding, injury-prone occupations like mining. Perhaps better than most, Vance understands this history, because he worked for a law firm whose lobbying arm was paid to defend Purdue Pharma.” That’s right: Indirectly, Vance profited from the miseries wrought upon rural Americans by the now-bankrupt and discredited drugmaker’8 Commenting on Vance’s transformation, Sen. Mitt Romney told his biographer, “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance.”
In those few words that begin his ad — “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” —Vance encapsulated so much about how the culture war operates. Race is inescapable, not just in liberal accusations of racism but also in conservatives’ insistence that liberals are constantly accusing them of racism, always unfairly. This idea rests inside the larger belief that people in small towns and rural areas are forever demeaned and degraded by snooty liberals seeking to destroy the way of life enjoyed by real Americans.
What distinguishes the culture war from the ordinary contest for political power is the centrality of identity. The culture war is not a competition (let alone a negotiation) between ideas or ideologies, but an existential battle between clearly demarcated groups of people whose worldviews are utterly incompatible. In rural America, the culture war vibrates with a particular intensity, as elite Republicans know well – `and they use it to keep their voters in a state of constant agitation. They use it to divert attention from the places where their agenda is unpopular even among their own supporters. They use it to make sure that those supporters won’t even consider voting for a Democrat ever again.
The more the culture war becomes the focus of GOP politics, the higher the stakes seem— and the more the rural voters who are the linchpin of Republican power come to see democracy itself as a threat. Their inability to affect what comes out of Hollywood or New York makes them only more eager to use their political power to make sure the liberals they despise can’t win elections, no matter what the majority of voters thinks.
The term culture war was popularized by sociologist James Davison Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, but the actual American culture war has existed throughout our nation’s history, not to mention that of many other countries. Sometimes it has been a conflict between religions (the Kulturkampf between Protestants and Catholics in late-nineteenth-century Germany), while at others, it has manifested as a struggle between religiosity and secularism. Different issues may define it at any time-racial integration, the teaching of evolution, access to abortion, equality for women, LGBTQ+ rights – but it’s always about drawing lines of identity that define who is us and who is them.
And in the current American conservative version, it’s also about victimization, both present and future. Conservatives are told over and over that they are encircled by hostile forces bent on subverting their way of life and destroying everything they value. Unfortunately, victim-based anger is ripe for exploitation by conservative Republican politicians. As Thomas Frank argued two decades ago in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, those politicians push victimization themes during the election cycle and then, after they win, promptly turn their attention to what matters most to their rich and corporate benefactors: cutting taxes, deregulating business, and allowing companies to consolidate and monopolize their respective industries.
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