Culture Warrior in Chief
“We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue,” President Joe Biden implored in his inaugural address, a speech that used the word unity no fewer than 11 times: “Unity is the path forward.”
It’s a familiar tune, one we were hearing from presidents long before it started to feel like the country was coming apart. “A kinder, gentler nation” was George H.W. Bush’s formulation. “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” the rendering of his feckless son. Barack Obama wouldn’t just stop the oceans’ rise; through the sheer power of presidential happy-talk, he’d kumbaya us into “one America,” beyond red and blue. Given the way things have been heading lately, you can’t blame Biden for sounding a bit desperate about it.
Donald Trump, who threw out the old playbook on his path to the presidency, takes a different approach: “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country!” “The seal is now broken.””2024 is our final battle.”
That’s really not helping, but neither would it put us on the glide path to national unity if Trump suddenly mellowed his tone. The former president’s apocalyptic rhetoric and rageaholic antics aren’t what made the presidency itself a central fault line of American polarization. It’s the fact that the president, increasingly, has the power to reshape vast swathes of American life. The modern presidency, by its very nature, is a divider, not a uniter. It has become far too powerful to be anything else.
Over the past several decades, as our politics took on a quasi-religious fervor, we’ve been running a dangerous experiment: concentrating vast new powers in the executive branch, making “the most powerful office in the world” even more powerful. Fundamental questions of governance that used to be left to Congress, the states, or the people are now settled, winner-take-all, by whichever party manages to seize the presidency.
Worse still, recent presidents have deployed their enhanced powers to impose forced settlements on highly contested, morally charged issues on which Americans should be free to disagree. In the age of identity politics, the modern president has become our culture warrior in chief. Unless and until he’s disarmed, we’ll have “uncivil war” and American carnage from here to the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Culture Wars Past
Culture war has become our go-to umbrella term for practically every dispute in American politics that involves deeply held moral values. The phrase came into common currency three decades ago, thanks to an influential 1991 book, Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America, by University of Virginiasociologist James Davison Hunter—and to Pat Buchanan’s infamous”culture war” speech at the Republican National Convention the next year.
But while some of the flashpoint issues of the time still persist today (the abortion fight we will always have with us, it seems), others—”blasphemous” art, “family values,” creationism in the classroom, naughty lyrics from hair-metal bands—now seem almost quaint.
The culture wars of the late 20th century were tied up with the rise of the Christian Right. The battle lines were religious vs. secular—”orthodox” vs. “progressive,” in Hunter’s formulation. Buchanan’s 1992 convention speech shocked the pundit class by describing the struggle as “a religious war going on in this country.”
Yet this particular Thirty Years’ War wasn’t terribly bloody. The stakes often seemed more symbolic than real. A lot of the fights were literallyabout symbols—desecration of sacred objects: burning the American flag, or, in the controversy over Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, dunking a crucifix in urine, calling it art, and getting the federal government to write you a check for it.
Most significantly, it wasn’t fought with the weapons of presidential power. Executive orders and administrative diktat were rarely deployed to settle culture-war fights.
Lip Service Is All You’ll Ever Get from Me
Presidents weighed in, to be sure, but it was largely performative. They—or their lieutenants—used the bully pulpit to signal support for teaching “the biblical account of creation” in public schools or to bang on about lax values in popular culture. In a much-noted 1992 speech, then–Vice President Dan Quayle lit into a sitcom character, Candice Bergen’s Murphy Brown, for “mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice.” But culture-war jawboning rarely cashed out into observable policy change.
Another favorite tactic was backing long-shot constitutional amendments. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to passan amendment protecting “the simple freedom of our citizens to offer prayer in our public schools and institutions,” pronouncing himself “confident that such an amendment will be quickly adopted.” It never came to a vote, and the effort was abandoned after the Democrats took back the Senate in 1986.
Three years later, when the Supreme Court held that flag-burning was protected speech, President George H.W. Bush promptly demanded a constitutional amendment prohibiting flag desecration: “The law books are full of restrictions on free speech. And we ought to have this be one of them.” He got enthusiastic support from the then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden, who drafted a bill carrying penalties of up to a year in prison for defacing or burning the American flag. That too was struck down by the Supreme Court, and Bush’s constitutional amendment never made it across the goal line.
Executive orders played a minor role at best. For instance, at a United Nations conference in Mexico City in 1984, Reagan announced a new rule requiring U.S. foreign aid recipients to certify they wouldn’t perform or promote abortion as a method of family planning. Two days after being sworn in, the next Democratic president, Bill Clinton, overturned the so-called Mexico City Policy via executive order. Subsequent Republican presidents turned it back on and Democrats turned it off again, the requirement winking in and out of existence each time the office changed parties. The issue was important enough to activists that each new president dutifully flipped the switch in their first days on the job, without meaningfully affecting any American’s rights.
But as presidential power has grown, the consequences of a shift in party control of the White House have grown far more sweeping.
The Imperial Administrative Presidency
As a future Supreme Court justice, Elena Kagan, noted in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article, “Presidential Administration,” modern presidents have accrued significant power over regulatory policy, “making the regulatory activity of the executive branch agencies more and more an extension of the President’s own policy and political agenda.” The process began when bright lawyers in the Reagan administration saw increased presidential authority as a way to ride herd on the regulators and lower burdens on business. But what goes down can come back up, and rise to new heights: As Kagan noted, the president’s administrative authority works just as well to push “a distinctly activist and pro-regulatory agenda.”
The original constitutional design required broad consensus for broad policy changes, but as law professors John O. McGinnis and Michael B. Rappaport warned in an important 2021 article in the Ohio State Law Journal,”Presidential Polarization,” presidents now “can adopt such changes unilaterally….Domestically, Congress’s delegation of policy decisions to the executive branch allows the President’s administration to create the most important regulations of our economic and social life. The result is relatively extreme regulations that can shift radically between administrations of different parties.”
Presidents have become our primary policy makers. Whenever the presidency changes parties, McGinnis and Rappaport note, “rules affecting almost every aspect of American life will pivot 180 degrees.” The shift from Obama to Trump, for example, carried with it reversals on net neutrality rules, fuel economy limits on new vehicles, and which immigrants can come to the United States, as well as new rules governing free speech disputes and sexual assault claims on college campuses across the country.
What’s more, legal changes made by presidential decree may be locked in for as long as the president’s party holds the office—eve
Article from Reason.com
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