Crossroads Podcast: Democrats Courting Men Amid New ‘Culture Wars’ Era

In his classic 1992 book “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” sociologist James Davison Hunter described the ongoing conflicts in public life between “progressives” and the “orthodox.”

In a 1998 “On Religion” column about the national impact of that book, I summed up his description of the two worldviews: “The orthodox believe it's possible to follow transcendent, revealed truths. Progressives disagree and put their trust in personal experience, even if that requires them to ‘resymbolize historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life.’”

In other words, there are two sides in these “culture wars.” 

However, anyone who scans the nearly 3.5 million hits in a Google search for this term will learn that — in mainstream media discourse — “culture wars” are caused by religious conservatives attacking what they believe are hellish trends in American life. Progressives are strangely absent in this drama.

Nevertheless, the word “culture” played a crucial role in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, which focused on a recent New York Times feature with this headline: “Six Months Later, Democrats Are Still Searching for the Path Forward.” Here is the overture:

One longtime Democratic researcher has a technique she leans on when nudging voters to share their deepest, darkest feelings about politics. She asks them to compare America's two major parties to animals.

After around 250 focus groups of swing voters, a few patterns have emerged, said the researcher, Anat Shenker-Osorio. Republicans are seen as "apex predators," like lions, tigers and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs or sloths: slow, plodding, passive. …

Six months after President Trump swept the battleground states, the Democratic Party is still sifting through the wreckage. Its standing has plunged to startling new lows — 27 percent approval in a recent NBC News poll, the weakest in surveys dating to 1990 — after a defeat that felt like both a political and cultural rejection.

Communities that Democrats had come to count on for a generation or more — young people, Black voters, Latinos — all veered toward the right in 2024, some of them sharply. 

At this point, Democrats appear to be focusing on this question: Why are so many men rejecting their party?

Does this gap have anything to do with religion? Apparently not, according to the political-desk professionals in the world’s most influential newsroom.

No, the key term appears to be “culture.”

So, what are Democrats doing to get their act together?

… Democratic donors and strategists have been gathering at luxury hotels to discuss how to win back working-class voters, commissioning new projects that can read like anthropological studies of people from faraway places.

The prospectus for one new $20 million effort, obtained by The Times, aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic support among young men, especially online. It is code-named SAM — short for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — and promises investment to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.” It recommends buying advertisements in video games, among other things.

Are we talking about “working class” men who frequent bars or church pews or both?

Are Democrats losing religious Latino and Black men in larger numbers than secular men in those complex communities? Are young men who embrace religion more likely to align with the GOP than their secular counterparts?

While questions about religion are nowhere to be found, it’s important to pay close attention to this Times material, in which Democratic pollster Zac McCrary discusses his party’s optimism about its short-term fortunes:

… Mr. McCrary, who lives in an Alabama congressional district that is often ranked the nation’s most conservative, cautioned against taking the wrong lessons from any successes in 2026 because, he said, the party’s brand is repellent in so much of the country.

“The 2022 midterms masked the Biden problem,” he said of the former president’s age. “A good 2026 midterm — we should not let that mask a deeper problem.” He added that Democrats had “lost credibility by being seen as alien on cultural issues.”

Ah, but what are these “cultural issues”? 

Are the Democrats still wrestling with what Barack Obama once described as “God, guns and gays”? Or is this research limited to issues of money, country music, girl bosses, manly sports, podcasting and woke beers?

During the podcast, I noted that some key battle lines have been blurred or even erased in recent elections. 

Apparently, American culture has evolved to the point that many old-school liberals no longer view themselves as self-avowed Democrats. At this point, the “culture wars” have moved past the moral questions at the heart of the “God, guns and gays” era.

Consider this passage in an essay — “How the Democrats Lost Men Like Me” — by River Page in The Free Press:

As Rod Dreher put it in The Free Press earlier this week, “Think what it must be like to be a white boy growing up in a culture that tells you that you are what’s wrong with the world. You are not only demonized by cultural elites and institutions — not because of anything you believe or have done — but because of who you are.”

The second, and related reason, has to do with the Democratic Party’s embrace of an extreme version of identity politics. General respect for minorities is one thing; deification is quite another. People will tolerate many things, but secondhand embarrassment is not one of them, which is what most men (and many women, I suspect) feel when they hear a land acknowledgment, a “fat activist” screaming about privilege, or any of the other corny displays we’ve been subject to over past years.

More concretely, the Democratic Party’s embrace of the most extreme goals of the trans movement, such as allowing children to transition or for transwomen to participate in women’s sports, strikes many men — even a lot of gay ones, including me — as insane.

In other words, the moral battle lines at the heart of America’s “culture wars” continue to shift and evolve. Maybe the editors at the Times should assign a religion-beat professional to the team that is covering these trends?

Enjoy the podcast and, please, pass it along to others.