A new nonprofit group called Citizens for Sanity will pour millions of dollars into congressional races in hope of focusing voter attention on the worst left-wing lunacies, such as that men can have babies and that our streets will be safer if criminals aren’t prosecuted.
This is strategically astute, for although the Democrats’ agenda of cultural corrosion is widely disliked, popular revulsion can be brought into sharper focus if the hazy pseudo-intellectual babble that surrounds it is stripped away with well-crafted messaging that depicts it in all its ugliness.
As the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood
explained
, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in Virginia over former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe last year demonstrated the power of cultural issues. His triumph came after he paid rhetorical attention, for example, to the racist anti-racist rubbish being taught in grade school, which is nothing more than raw ideological indoctrination and enrages parents.
But it is important for Republicans to bear in mind that too exclusive a focus on cultural matters would be dangerous. This is not because Democrats will portray resistance to their radical agenda as fascist; they’ve been doing that at least since chortling that Pat Buchanan’s 1992 culture war speech “probably sounded better in the original German.” Sloppy contempt of that sort is losing its salience. Such rhetoric is no longer striking but is, rather, the background noise of much political debate.
The danger is, rather, that seeing a good thing, Republicans will lean too heavily on cultural issues and ignore others. What Youngkin’s victory demonstrated was, more than anything, the powerful appeal of a candidate who comes over as reasonable and grounded, and that is achieved by a sensible balance of attention to both cultural issues and local economic ones, such as taxes.
Republicans are right when they calculate that cultural issues could help them connect powerfully with voters’ visceral concerns. But they must remember that it is possible to offer too much of a good thing. It’s easy to go too far, to overstep, to gild the lily, and create the impression of obsessiveness, which is distinctly unappealing to voters.
I
wrote recently
that Republicans may have dented their midterm appeal by overreaching in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which rightly overturned the atrocious Roe v. Wade invention of a constitutional right to abortion.
If Republicans were to focus too narrowly on cultural issues, it would look plain odd, for there are battalions of non-cultural issues on which they have the upper hand. Economic ones stand out. GOP candidates enter election season with unbeatable arguments that President Joe Biden and the Democrats are responsible for the pain of inflation and the erosion of real wages, for rising interest rates and a sharp reverse in the residential housing market, and for the nation cantering toward recession.
Republicans can draw a bright line between themselves as the party that cut taxes in 2017 and the Democrats who are raising them five years later. They should remember that it is still the economy, stupid! They’d better not blow it.
