A lot of pundits have noted that Barack Obama is sending distinctly centrist messages these days, offering up tax cuts with the same zeal that he’s pushing New Deal-style spending.<\/p>\n
But the Inauguration-week festivities have blossomed with a distinct, counter-cultural flavor, with everyone from gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson to Pete Seeger taking the stage.<\/p>\n
(Yes, I know, Rick Warren is also part of the line-up; but even he seems to be trying to play nice with the liberals who crowded the Lincoln Memorial.)<\/p>\n
The take-away message seems clear: With the exception of a few conservative actors and musicians, America’s pop culture is deeply, unabashedly liberal. <\/p>\n
Heck, even Garth Brooks was up there singing 60s hippy songs.<\/p>\n
As conservatives well know, culture is half of politics. And it’s beginning to look as if the center of America’s popular sensibility is damned progressive.<\/p>\n
Obama himself talks comfortably about gay people as if they’re, well, people. And a growing number of mainstream folks seem to think that’s about right.<\/p>\n
Same goes for a lot of the sexual-and-relationship behavior that make conservatives cringe: divorce, pre-marriage sexuality, same-sex marriage, reproductive “choice” and so on.<\/p>\n
Obviously, one big progressive shindig in DC does not mark the death-knell for the James Dobson, family-values movement.<\/p>\n
But it’s hard to imagine where social conservatives go from here. <\/p>\n
Rick Warren himself may represent a new, more appealing brand, but a big part of his appeal seems to be that he soft-pedals the finger-wagging.<\/p>\n
So I’ll pose it as a question: Was 2008 the year that conservatives lost the culture war?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A lot of pundits have noted that Barack Obama is sending distinctly centrist messages these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}