Two Parties, One Culture

It’s almost cliché to say that America is more divided than ever. Countless columns, books, and news segments draw attention to the issue. It fuels the Right’s National Divorce meme. The Left blames social media for fanning the flames of division and fears we’re heading to civil war. Ironically, polarization may be the one political issue everyone agrees on.

While backed by clear evidence, our political divisions pale in comparison to our broader, shared monoculture.

The political divisions are obvious. Polarization leads some, particularly on the Right, to conclude that America is undergoing cultural balkanization. These voices insist Red America and Blue America are completely different nations with their own respective norms and values.

But reality paints a different picture. While the two political parties may be at each other’s throats, there’s one overarching culture that encompasses them both. America is arguably the most culturally homogenous it’s ever been.

That homogeneity gives the left a significant advantage in the culture war, as only one side has the power to impose itself on the general population.

We all know that America’s universities, media outlets, and government bureaucracies are dominated by liberals. But the Left also holds a monopoly over the majority’s values and norms.

Mass media have been producing a more homogenous national culture, in place of regional cultures for a century. They'd gotten pretty far by the 1950s, but people still had grown up in those older regional, local, and ethnic communities. One result was you had protests by minority groups against the emerging mass culture. Another was the culture war between the mass media and people with a more traditional orientation.

By this point, though, almost everyone has grown up in the mass media culture. The mass media has bought off racial minorities with diversity, equity, inclusion. Traditionalists still dissent, but when it comes to entertainment they can't compete with the established media.

The popular TV series Yellowstone is a particularly telling example. Conservatives absolutely love the show. It features alpha male cowboys defending their land with a minimal amount of wokeness. But the show’s creator Taylor Sheridan says the show’s message subverts conservative values. “The show’s talking about the displacement of Native Americans and the way Native American women were treated, and about corporate greed and the gentrification of the West, and land-grabbing. That’s a red-state show?” Sheridan told one interviewer. One TV critic found the Yellowstone spinoff 1923 as the embodiment of critical race theory, while the liberal outlet Slate says the show universe is “an ongoing critique of structural racism, misogyny, and the economic status quo.”

That's true, and it's hard not to spot, but viewers still tend to root for the Duttons, maybe because they have some claim to be traditional and to be the underdogs while the more modern characters are also just in it for themselves. It's hard to take Thomas Rainwater's complaints about the whites very seriously since he's as hungry for wealth and power as anyone else, if not more so, and hard to be find much fault with misogyny with Beth around.

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