Republican politicians like Ron DeSantis may rail against “woke” corporations. The reality is that when companies like Nike and Disney—no progressive angels themselves—seem to align with the left by promoting anti-racism and LGBTQ causes, they are catering to the tolerant demographic that matters most to the bottom line. It’s understandable why older conservatives would feel business has left them behind, ranting about supposed lefty strongholds like Blackrock and Disney. But there’s no top-down conspiracy of woke corporations as defined by Tucker Carlson. It’s just capitalism.
This is especially true given the Republican Party’s increasing reliance on far-right religious voters, whose cultural power is also waning rapidly despite recent judicial and legislative wins. Americans are becoming rapidly less affiliated with organized religion. Younger people are markedly less religious than their elders. In 2021, membership in religious organizations fell below majority levels for the first time, and “nones”—those who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or nothing specific—now account for around 30 percent of Americans, up from just 9 percent thirty years ago. White evangelical politics is the province of mostly older voters disconnected from the broader culture and economy.
I’m not sure I agree - the change of generations isn’t a new process and our political parties have survived it before. Certain ideas that were controversial for past generations won’t be controversial for future ones, but conservatism and the general phenomenon of the culture war will persist. (I think the Trump phenomenon is in fact conservatism adapting itself to modern conditions.)
It’s not like new culture wars won’t be started and fought just the same. But there was a time when slavery was the topic of a fierce culture war in the US, and it wasn’t resolved until it broke out into a literal war. Now, nearly two hundred years later, it’s still unacceptable to suggest that people who look different are better off as property rather than people. Even Florida’s attempts to whitewash Southern slavery doesn’t go so far as to blame the slaves weren’t people.
They’ve lost this culture war, just as they lost the fight for slavery and later to keep the population segregated. They’ll try again in time, but for the moment, the question of abortion and homosexual rights is largely settled at a cultural level. The conservatives lost, and that’s why they’ve largely moved on to nitpicking the definition of gender and trying (unsuccessfully) to defend their legal victories on women’s reproductive rights.