The Media's Insistence on the U.S. Presidential Election of 2024 as a Turning Point in the Culture War

The election of November 2024 saw Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump beat Democratic Party candidate Kamala Harris with a 49.8-to-48.3 percent share of the vote according to the official final count from the Federal Election Commission, a mere 1.5 percent margin of victory. If a shock to many it was not a landslide by any means--with all that implies about reading into it some tectonic shift in American electoral politics, or even reason to rethink what is really salable to the broad public (for instance, as compared with New Deal standard-bearer Lyndon Johnson's 61 to 39 percent margin of victory over far-right candidate Barry Goldwater back in 1964). This is all the more the case in that the election was in many respects unusual, with the Democratic Party, on top of facing an anti-incumbent mood inflamed by outrage over the exacerbation of working people's long-worsening troubles by the post-pandemic surge of inflation, coping with a blatantly undemocratic switch of candidates late in the race without the sanction of a proper primary process that put on the ticket a candidate little-known and of uncertain salability to voters; the comparatively bungled handling of the belatedly and hastily organized campaign that followed; and the candidate and the party's refusal to break with the Democratic Party's decades-long display of utter contempt for the working-class voters without which it does not win elections; that all went together to make 2024 a "greatest hits" edition of the campaign failures of the Democratic Party (and even the Republican Party) from the preceding half century.

However, if it was a narrow win over an opponent that was exceptionally vulnerable, and the margin of victory almost certainly a matter of material discontents, the media was and remains insistent that the election was decided on the basis of "the culture war," and indeed marks an historic turning point in them in favor of the right.

Why is that?

Alas, this question, if not asked nearly enough, is easily enough answered. After all, the media gravitates toward politics just as much as it gravitates away from policy, is utterly obsessed with personalities and campaign horse race stupidity, fixated on the very short term as against a long that is beyond its feeble faculties, and in line with its centrism makes a fetish of "consensus," holding that everything which happens in the political arena must somehow represent the sum total of opinion, if only by way of acquiescence, with all that means for its reading of elections. At the same time the "political class," the media included, has devoted itself to playing up the culture wars, consistently exaggerating their importance decade in, decade out down to its recent inversion of the mantra of '92 that "It's the Economy, Stupid" to the point of making "It's Not the Economy, Stupid," a cliché of its reporting on the election of '24--not simply because of its prejudices that have it more comfortable considering politics from the standpoint of culture rather than class, but its cynical eagerness to divert attention from such matters as the economy or foreign policy and the combination of elite agreement and public discontent with them, the more in as such discontents may be harder to ignore. Indeed, the "It's Not the Economy, Stupid" idiocies went hand in hand with their telling the public that their hardships are "all in your mind," simple-minded or irrational reactions to price increases, or manipulation by purveyors of "fake news." At the same time there is perhaps no issue where a supposedly "both sides"-minded media is more likely to "one side" the matter in practice than foreign policy, and especially war. Ergo the victory of Trump was the triumph of the culture war right.

It has not hurt this tendency at all that claiming such a shift in sentiment among the public goes along nicely with the mainstream media's own shift in such a direction. In line with the evolution of the centrism toward which it inclines into its present embrace of neoliberal-neoconservative politics, the culture wars were really the sole point of dissonance between itself and the avowed right, and even that is now coming to an end as, like so many other pretenses of another era, it falls away.