Dem strategy for advancing unpopular policies:
1. Change public opinion
2. Misrepresent public opinion
3. Overrule the public with courts & bureaucracy
4. Replace the public
GOP strategy:
1. Give up
1. Change public opinion
2. Misrepresent public opinion
3. Overrule the public with courts & bureaucracy
4. Replace the public
GOP strategy:
1. Give up
Some on the Right advocate surrender in the culture wars because they don't think they can possibly compete with the Left's culture war machine: "news" media, entertainment, academia.
The funny thing is that when the Right does dig in and fight, they tend to do much better than expected. No one is more surprised than GOP Establishment types. That's because of point 2. The Left is now much better at misrepresenting public opinion than changing it.
The Left spends very little time on 1-Change public opinion, in part because it loathes the people who don't agree with its premises and doesn't understand them well enough to persuade them.
Also, persuasion is long, hard, often frustrating work. The "progressive" agenda depends on moving very rapidly, keeping the culture in a constant state of shock, pushing through policies that force the culture into weird new shapes.
Conservatives tend to think in terms of slowly changing the culture until fertile ground exists for sowing its policies. The Left's ability to misrepresent the state of the culture tends to intimidate Republicans out of pursuing conservative policies.
You can see this in microcosm by looking at the media coverage and activist response to Supreme Court rulings. When SCOTUS rules against the Right, the fight's over; when it rules against the Left, the fight's just getting started.
Conservatives tend to dislike "social engineering" because it's contrary to respect for individual liberty, and because Repubs know they'll be excoriated in the media for supporting policies tagged as such. The Left LOVES social engineering, pursues it with almost every policy.
Well, if only one side pursues policies with the express or implicit goal of forcibly reshaping public opinion, guess where you end up? Eventually, you reach a point where you can't effectively resist social engineering. You concede 80% of politics by conceding the culture war.
You also run into a passion deficit that is keenly sensed by younger voters. They get the idea that the Left passionately believes in its ideas and is always on offense, while the Right is timid and defensive. One side shouts through bullhorns while the other clears its throat.
The soft-GOP message of surrender in the culture wars is taken as a signal of insincerity by young voters. It makes support for conservative policies among the young look much softer than it really is. Young people are social, even those who see themselves as iconoclasts.
So if Repubs refuse to fight the culture wars, they end up quibbling about peripheral matters while the political center of gravity moves leftward... and the Dems fool people into thinking it's much further left than it actually is.
It's that envelope of illusory popularity that gives the Left room to ram through policies that reshape, override, or ultimately replace the electorate. They need unchallenged cultural dominance to do it. So challenge them. /end
