Is a culture truce possible?

The day before the Charlottesville incident, one of the local papers ran a Thomas Friedman column urging Democrats to appeal to swing voters on a gut level, on the understanding that "Some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them." Friedman appeared to argue that it was possible to take a populist stand on some cultural issues without going down the slippery slope to white supremacy. He made a distinction between a pro-Trump "white nationalist constituency" that Democrats can't hope to reach and a larger, potentially more decisive group of voters to whom Democrats ought to make some intellectual concessions. Three out of his four recommendations touch on cultural issues. He asks Democrats to acknowledge that "We can't take in every immigrant who wants to come in." He suggests "constructively engaging" Muslims on their problems with pluralism. He proposes easing off on "political correctness" so people feel more "comfortable expressing patriotism and love of country when globalization is erasing national identities." His fourth recommendation is for Democrats to focus on blue-collar job creation while acknowledging the existence of "a trade problem with China" and the even-bigger problem of increased automation. These are Friedman's "gut" issues, "gut"apparently being a euphemism for "culture" at a time when some on the hard left, echoing the legendary words of a Nazi playwright, reach for a rock to throw whenever anyone says "culture." 

Charlottesville is a win for the rock-throwers because it appears to reinforce their argument that white supremacy is the true face of the Trump movement, after the media spent the weekend asking why the President didn't denounce white supremacy specifically (or exclusively) after Saturday's violence. Presumably Trump satisfied most critics with his remarks today, though no doubt it will be claimed that his condemnation of white supremacy was tardy and only made under pressure. After this, there probably will be even less desire on the left for compromise with cultural populists than there was before Friedman wrote his column. Whether or not people honestly believe that Donald Trump is a white supremacist, a desire to spite the actual white supremacists is likely to outweigh either pragmatic or principled considerations for the next little while. Nevertheless, Friedman is right to remind readers of the existence of cultural populists -- one might also call them materialist conservatives, but this isn't the time to explain that one -- who are not rednecks or any sort of hyphenated Nazi. Friedman's is a rare concession that there are Americans with exclusionary views who are not a priori white supremacists, who can't be said to want a "lily-white" America just because they're suspicious of Muslims or Mexicans, but the majority on the left -- the people most likely to dismiss Friedman himself as a neoliberal -- can't imagine any other reason for excluding foreigners. In the face of that skepticism, it was still right for many Republicans to denounce white supremacy after the car attack, because they have a job of persuasion of their own if they hope to calm the nation's turbulent mood. It's in their interest to persuade the skeptics that there is an American culture worth defending against potentially antithetical influences that cannot simply be reduced to "whiteness," and that cultural populism isn't simply a matter of white people dictating to everyone else how to be an American. If the Democrats have to go for the "gut" to regain power, Republicans may need to go for the brain to retain it.