Outgoing US Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up the ethos that his party has all but abandoned. “America is the world’s pre-eminent superpower – economically and militarily – but our influence and prosperity are facilitated by a network of partnerships,” he said last week, shortly after announcing his decision to give up his position. “The strength of these alliances rests on the credibility of the commitments we make to our friends.”
“Give up” is the best way to describe McConnell and other party traditionalists who believed that government should not interfere with business or our personal lives, that meritocracy and decorum were ideals, and that strong global alliances were essential.
Now that the party is more aligned than ever with Moscow and Beijing in a push for populist ideological purity, Ukraine and possibly Taiwan won’t matter. As the isolationist fervour grows, the only fight left for Republicans is on the culture front.
So let’s look closer at this battlefield to gauge their prospects.
On the judicial and legislative front, Republicans have notched up significant victories that might have seemed impossible a decade ago. A sustained effort to push the US Supreme Court to the right – secured by former president Donald Trump’s appointment of three justices during his term – led to the loss of the federal right to an abortion.
On the state level, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed what is often called the “don’t say gay” law to restrict classroom discussions about sexual orientation or gender identity. He’s also signed another law to defund diversity, equity and inclusion programmes at all state universities.
Tennessee’s House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would all but ban pride flags in its schools, but not Nazi flags. This bill may not make it to the state’s governor for passage into law, but the fact that such a regressive measure sailed through one of the state’s legislative chambers shows that Republicans wield a significant amount of political strength.
People attend Miami Beach Pride on April 10, 2022, while protesting against the Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly known as the “don’t say gay” bill, signed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Photo: EPA-EFE
There’s another phenomenon playing out in America’s pop culture scene – an important component of the overall cultural environment, and particularly reflective of younger demographics – that runs counter to Republican efforts and is equally unprecedented.
When country music star Luke Combs appeared at the 66th Grammy Awards last month with Tracy Chapman to perform her 1988 hit “Fast Car”, Republicans would have been relishing the chance to end Combs’ career for daring to show solidarity with someone who in many ways represents the enemy- a Black woman from the urban North who lives in San Francisco. After all, the country music industry managed to marginalise The Dixie Chicks, as they were then known, for criticising the war in Iraq.
Whatever hatred the party’s culture warriors might have tried to ignite against Combs was drowned out by the popularity of the performance, which helped keep a remake of the song he released in 2023 high on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.
The hopeless circumstances of the person Chapman wrote about is one that millions of Americans have faced, owing to many factors, including the migration of manufacturing jobs overseas. The song had staying power because this inequality accelerated dramatically throughout the 1990s and 2000s, under Democratic and Republican administrations.
Musicians Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs perform “Fast Car” at the 66th Grammy Awards on February 4. Photo: AP
Republicans have since moved to blame much of the damage sustained by working-class America, what Trump called “American carnage”, on their Democratic rivals. This tactic gave Republicans the momentum they needed for the culture war they have waged so successfully.
With the gift of a Democratic Party that is too flat-footed to counter right-wing narratives, Trump and his base managed to blame the greed of multinational executives and shareholders on his opponents. Thus, the Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTQ community and immigrants became part of some globalist elite that sought to replace white people.
The popularity of the Chapman-Combs performance shows how many young people in the US reject this twisted explanation and realise that forces beyond the control of ordinary folks, including a globalised economy, deprived people of all stripes, colours and orientations of what Chapman’s character was longing for: “A feeling I could be someone.”
An opinion piece in The Arizona Republic – a voice from a state that has produced quite a few right-wing conspiracy theories – called the Chapman-Combs performance “a small, though not inconsequential, beginning of the kind of racial healing that must happen if the US is to ever recover from its present clash of ideologies”.
Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief
