VIEWPOINT / THE DYNAMICS OF CULTURAL BACKLASH

By W. Timothy Carrico Weaver, Ph.D.

The worldwide emergence of reactionary ideologies has caught democratic governments by surprise. Not sociologists.

There exists a boundary within which mores, beliefs, and values exist, and within which the means to enforce them are permitted. The boundary is elastic to an extent. We tolerate behaviors today that were illegal and severely punished only a generation or two before. When I was in college, hotels would not rent a room to unmarried couples. That seems remarkably quaint today. Co-habitation was not just frowned upon; it was illegal.

The dynamics of cultural maintenance are largely hidden from view. A complex network of feedback loops operates underground bending the system of cultural checks and balances ever toward equilibrium. If the system lurches out of balance, these dynamics push back.

Systems are ever engaged in a process of overshooting and undershooting. As pressures build to restrain behavior they inevitably exceed the effort necessary. This kind of oscillatory behavior is familiar to those who study system dynamics. A stochastic state follows a perturbation of the system as dynamics drive toward balance.

The boundaries of acceptable behavior once breached require extraordinary efforts to achieve a new state of equilibrium. These forces are in turn met by their opposite—thus the systemic gyrations. Under most circumstances, given time these ups and downs smooth out at a state of equilibrium but one perhaps different than the previous.

The American counterculture spawned a decades-long expansion of the boundaries of tolerable behavior—from the 60s sexual revolution, spurred by the pill, to same-sex marriage in the past decade and the present-day transgender efforts. Born of the post-war baby boom and the youth revolution opposing the Vietnam War, these disruptive ever-escalating movements have pushed the limits of tolerated behavior.

Accompanying these cultural changes was a three-decade period of shifting government priorities to social programs favorable to the middle and working classes—starting with Johnson’s Great Society. The majority party was following a theory of social intervention aimed at breaking the poverty cycle and paving the way to upward mobility through government-funded programs in housing, health, education, job training, and welfare. The post-war focus on social intervention was preceded by a decade of Rooseveltian efforts to “fix” the Depression by government spending.

This cycle of government spending on social interventions in 1980 was met by the Reagan theory of supply-side economics. Dividing the pie into too many pieces shrinks the pie. Too much social spending funded by higher taxes crushes the incentive for “job creators” to invest. Even Reagan’s economic advisor, David Stockman, knew this was wrong. The policy gained momentum resulting in five major Republican tax cuts ending with Ryan and Trump. Rather than jump-starting the economy thus lifting all boats, the tax cuts just lifted the mega yachts of the rich elite.

I’ve written elsewhere about the long-term impact of stagnation and downward mobility among middle and working-class American families. While wealth has flowed upward driven by major productivity gains from technology, the worker share has been negligible. Today, workers per household can barely claim the standard of living their parents enjoyed with only one earner. The social degradation that accompanies economic decline has eaten away at the middle-class dream and left in its wake a cauldron of dissatisfaction, despair, and rage.

Those left behind are spoiling for a fight, to strike out at someone for their plight. It is among this group that cultural change has had the deepest impact. The current GOP strategy is one of bait and switch. Promise the sky in terms of tax cuts producing jobs, and offer the stale bread of cultural reform. Block the hordes of immigrants crossing the border and taking our jobs. Restrict or ban outright the expenditure of tax money on food stamps for people who ought to be working. Put a stop to this insanity about boys not being boys. Get rid of the libs in education and get back to basics.

Delays and unequal distribution of beliefs are an integral part of cultural change. Parts of society may be “enlightened” while other parts are regressive. We observe today that groups in society find transsexual treatments completely acceptable and “normal” in an open society. Others are pushing for government action to restrict, prevent make illegal any such treatments for those under 18. The same with abortion.

The situation today seems best described as a forcefield in which the efforts to push the boundaries of tolerated behaviors are met with an equal force pushing back. Sadly, the pushback will create unequal degrees of tolerance and further destabilize the equilibrium the system seeks. For a society that was very little changed from my grandmother’s youth to mine regarding the most fundamental of mores, those governing sex, there has been a cataclysmic series of disruptive changes since. To this end, a dramatic counter-movement was inevitable. To repeat what I said earlier, the boundary is elastic to an extent but not infinitely so. We seem to have reached temporarily that outer limit.

I address other changes in the same context. Remember that when I was a child in the 1950s black people legally were prohibited from drinking at water fountains, using public restrooms for whites, and going to school with whites, sitting at the same lunch counters, riding on public transit near whites, and imprisoned for daring to marry someone outside their race. By comparison, we live today in a different universe. In 1950 there were only a handful of black millionaires. Today there are 18 black billionaires listed by Forbes. Blacks have become far more integrated into the professions and skilled trades.

Granted, in the Enlightenment Handbook we have a far distance to go, but the change in our lifetime has been profound and has not been missed by reactionary forces. Thus, rapidly metastasizing replacement conspiracies circle the globe. These forces are all an attempt to push the system backward toward status quo ante.

The tools of reaction thus far being deployed are within the polity–many efforts to bend legitimate instruments of government to create perverted outcomes. One example is redistricting to guarantee victories for white voter blocks though they are outnumbered by minority populations. The latest case of this was in Alabama. The list of examples of this type of effort would be long, even if confined to a few states like South Carolina and Alabama.

To date, reactionary counterforces have spilled out of the polity only once: January 6. Here naked violence was deployed. It was part and parcel of the effort to pervert the Electors Act and use it to block a legitimate transfer of power, but it jumped over into physical force, into violence.

Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat at NYU is telling us that reactionary forces are preparing us for more use of force. We need to listen to this expert on authoritarianism. She is warning us that violence unchecked is an invitation to still more violence. If the masterminds and top officers behind the riots are not brought to justice, we can expect more with even worse consequences.

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