Culture Friday: The election’s cultural significance

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s the 11th day of November, 2022.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday!

Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast.

Morning, John!

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: John, what a surprise Election Night or maybe I should say “culmination of Election Month.” Everyone’s talking about the congressional races and the lack of the widely expected “red wave,” but I want to dive into some of the ballot initiatives with you and I think you know where I’m headed, that pro-life didn’t fare very well. Pro-abortion amendments, as you know, passed in California, Vermont, no big surprise, but also Michigan. So is it kind of back to the cultural persuasion drawing board?

STONESTREET: Absolutely. I think the primary lesson here is that when there is a lack of support on a cultural level, political changes, political movements, and political progress don’t last: They become unsustainable. If you look at how these ballot initiatives fare, it brings to mind prohibition. There’s clarity in the presentation of the political move we’re going to make, but the culture of the American public is not ready to support it.

The cultural imagination has been shaped more by concepts of individual personal freedom and individualism—what Carl Truman has described in his book as an expressive individualism—and that basically won the day. It was fascinating because right after the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Dobbs decision there was a big spike in the polls, but then later on the polls changed and it became clear that these judicial decisions would not be the determining factor in future policy regarding abortion. In most places, what we saw is that pro-abortion attitudes outperformed the greater progressive platform at the polls. I think that that is something that we will just have to reckon with.

This is the landscape of where we’re at. This isn’t the end, it’s the end of the beginning. And now we’re on to the next chapter. But okay, the celebration is over, and now there’s a lot of work to be done and it’s a lot more work than we will be expecting.

I think when you look at something like, for example, Proposition 3 in Michigan, you can see the most radical pro-abortion policy to date. In the case of that particular ballot measure there is a hidden intent to smuggle in all kinds of other socially progressive things under the label of reproductive freedom. And it tells you that most people don’t have any sort of intellectual worldview foundations right now to where we can communicate our position in a way it can be received. And we’re in a really bad place until we can at least come to agreement when it comes to protecting the unborn and protecting children from mutilation and all the other dangers that are going to come along with a ballot measure like Prop 3 in Michigan: I think that’s going to be a model legislation for other states, and so that’s going to be the reality. I think, if we pretend it’s anything less than that we’re just deluding ourselves. That’s the reality. Face the facts. Let’s get to work.

BROWN: I’ve heard some say the reason it wasn’t a red wave is younger voters, suggesting that forgiveness of student loan debt was a motivator.

Now, you’ve been a critic of higher education, do you see this loan payment giveaway as simply turning a bad situation into a worse and even more-expensive situation?

STONESTREET: I can’t say for sure if a surge of younger voters coming out to the polls in response to the prospect of debt forgiveness was behind the election results. In my observation, the more impactful figure was that of the political loyalties of unmarried women versus those of married men and unmarried men. Essentially, there is now a political allegiance among unmarried women that is bigger than we’ve seen before.

We’ve talked about how the breakdown of the family has such a big cultural and political impact, and I think that’s going to be a an interesting narrative coming out of this. It’s going to be worth looking at, but your question is a little bit different.

Look at how much education costs, and who pays for it, and consider whether it’s a good investment for the state to expend public funds on. This poses a pragmatic question, because the assumption seems to be that the end result of more accessible education would make things better and not worse. I think that a far bigger problem than whether or not the state is going to cover these loans—and I think that is a bad strategy, don’t get me wrong—is that the product that is being produced and that students are being given for free is functionally serving more to extend their adolescence than to shape them into productive members of society. The system as it stands is moving students further away from a moral framework for thinking about life, and it is turning them into more narcissistic individualists and oftentimes introducing them to self-destructive behaviors and certainly self-destructive ideas. But other than that, it’s a great product.

EICHER: Before we go, John, I want to come back around to ballot initiatives. I remember when your home state of Colorado legalized marijuana and it was a big deal when that happened. Going into Election Day, 19 states have so-called recreational marijuana legalization, and two more just approved, so that makes 21. But what surprises me is one of those states is the one I live in, Missouri. Deep red state. That seems culturally significant.

STONESTREET: I think it’s culturally significant. I think it’s another thing that’s pointing to something we said earlier, which is that we are a people defined and shaped by radical individualism. Ross Douthat said something in the New York Times about the sexual freedoms promoted by the progressive left, and then also the fast and loose handling of the truth on an individualistic basis by the right. We’re going to see a study coming out here.

And we’ve seen a Telegraph post on this, specifically calling out the lack of church attendance among the majority of Republican voters. So here you have this party that identifies itself as the Christian option, but they’re not Christians together. There’s a deep seated individualism that strikes at the heart of the American people and takes different forms on both the right and the left. What we saw in Colorado wasn’t that a bunch of progressives suddenly appeared and decided to turn the State Blue. There were a bunch of classical libertarians who supported non-Republican candidates. As one of my friends put it while he was actually in office at the state level, Colorado is kind of like a lesbian couple sitting on their front porch, cleaning their guns while smoking pot. And you put all that together and it’s clear that the political culture there has way more to do with a commitment to individual freedom and each person doing what he wants than it has to do with a coherent ideology.

Conservatism at its best has always acknowledged the mutual dependency that we have on each other as citizens, particularly in local contexts, and that there’s a whole other set of players other than the big state and the isolated individual. I think that the new conservatism has largely lost that significance of what Edmund Burke called “the little platoons of society”, the mediating structures that help us govern ourselves. And, and so I think that’s reflected in some of these laws.

I think we got a taste of that too, in Kentucky, where a pro-life state measure went down. I think we’ll see this trend more and more with ballot measures promoting doctor assisted suicide and recreational marijuana have more states get behind them. Such initiatives are basically passing not on the merits of the behavior itself, but on the promise of individual freedom, and then a whole bunch of money. That tells you right off the bat that these are laws that appeal to the worst in us, not the best in us. And that tells you something more about the voter than about the issue itself, I think.

BROWN: Well, John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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