As Wingnuts Lose the Culture War, ‘Their Rhetoric…Is Absolutely Awash In Delusional Nostalgia’

by Tom Johnson

Edmund Burke wrote that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” To American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, “change” for conservatives means living to fight another day by conceding battle after battle to liberals.
“Much of the history of the United States,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post, “is a slow but inexorable movement in a progressive direction, as one issue after another is eventually settled in favor of the position liberals had been advocating, from slavery to women's suffrage to Jim Crow to the legalization of contraception to sex discrimination and up to gay rights today. You can find exceptions…but the fundamental trend in social relations moves in only one direction.”
Waldman stated that right-wing “rhetoric…is absolutely awash in nostalgia” but added that some conservatives seem to be making their peace with an America no longer ruled by older men of northern European ancestry. For example, the Marco Rubio presidential boomlet: “To some Republicans, [Rubio is] attractive not so much because he's what they would want in a president in their perfect world, but because they think he might be attractive to other people. It's an acknowledgement of and accommodation to the fact that America has indeed changed, and their party needs to change in response. And if the conservative Republican with the best chance of winning the White House is a 43-year-old Latino, well so be it.”
From Waldman’s post (bolding added):

If you take a broad view, much of the history of the United States is a slow but inexorable movement in a progressive direction, as one issue after another is eventually settled in favor of the position liberals had been advocating, from slavery to women's suffrage to Jim Crow to the legalization of contraception to sex discrimination and up to gay rights today. You can find exceptions, some of which are extremely consequential, but the fundamental trend in social relations moves in only one direction…
As long as society is changing—i.e., forever—conservatism will find its purpose in resisting that change, because that's what it means to be a conservative. Conservatism seeks to conserve, and in many cases return to a previous order. And like liberalism, it adapts. For instance, conservatives lost the argument on most of the things that made up the culture war of the 1960s and 1970s—Vietnam, the sexual revolution, the principle (if not the reality) of equality for women—so they approached those issues in ways that accommodated the new reality, or moved on to other issues entirely. The culture war is infinitely renewable…
…[L]iberals were so excited about Barack Obama in [2008] because he embodied a certain kind of cultural change. He was the person they wanted to be, or at least be friends with: multiracial, educated, cosmopolitan, urban, and urbane. Conservatives' rage against Obama comes from the same place: he represents a change in American society that they find intolerable.
If you spend any time listening to conservatives, you quickly realize that their rhetoric, whether it's coming from politicians or media figures like Bill O'Reilly, is absolutely awash in nostalgia, a yearning for the supposedly simpler time of their youth, when, among other things, everything they saw was theirs. It was their kind of people who ran things, their kind of music that came from the radio, their priorities and values that were accepted as right and true. They look around now and see so much of American culture shifting away from them, and it's profoundly unsettling, few things more so than the fact that the president of the United States is a liberal black guy with a foreign-sounding name.
But what about Marco Rubio? I think that to some Republicans, he's attractive not so much because he's what they would want in a president in their perfect world, but because they think he might be attractive to other people. It's an acknowledgement of and accommodation to the fact that America has indeed changed, and their party needs to change in response. And if the conservative Republican with the best chance of winning the White House is a 43-year-old Latino, well so be it.
This could be a fascinating dynamic within the primaries, the tension between voters like…the older white guy who grudgingly acknowledges that "the day of the older white guy is kind of out," and the many other Republicans who want to stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop.'