Backlash: the Abuse of a Concept

Of all the rich and various ways to make a surprising, counter-intuitive argument, few are as popular, as cheap, or as intellectually impoverished as the concept of 'backlash'. For media types, the beauty--or should we say the crude utility--of penning a 'backlash' story is that it provides the template for the simplest, indeed, the most intuitive kind of contrarian reasoning.

Backlash stories abound in the daily press, the most notable recent example being the coverage of the alleged backlash against Barack Obama's trip to Europe, during which 'presidential' photo-ops supposedly became 'presumptuous' in the popular imagination. Backlash--the journalistic notion that every event that seems moves politics or taste in one direction inevitably triggers a countervailing force in the opposite direction--has an elegant, Newtonian predictability to it. It allows journalists to believe they are being clever and unconventional without actually having to craft a complex thought.

But in addition to its everyday role as a ready-made template for media 'analysis', the notion of backlash also shapes the popular understanding, the 'collective memory' we might say, of the history of post-war liberalism. Although there are many variants on the story, practically every explanation for the flagging fortunes of the Democratic party since 1968 relies on the notion that Democrats started to lose their New Deal white working-class majority when they began to push a liberal social agenda (in succession: civil rights, women's rights, gay rights) at the expense of their left-wing economic agenda. Because there are few commentators who, on the merits, can really bring themselves to speak ill of the civil rights movement and its offspring--is it really possible anymore to oppose desegregation or sexual harassment legislation?--mainstream critics of social liberalism have relied on arguments related to political strategy to explain why, for instance, the democrats need to stop advocating gay rights.

This is where the notion of 'backlash' comes in: liberal elites, especially those on the Supreme Court, have imposed progressive values from their imperial pedestal onto a conservative populace that has responded with anger and resentment. At their most extreme, proponents of the conservative backlash theory actually argue that court decisions like Brown vs. Board of Education or the recent California ruling on gay marriage actually harm liberal causes by provoking a backlash whose negative ramifications exceed whatever good is done by the legal decision.

There is virtually no compelling evidence, though, of a 'backlash' effect against most progressive Supreme Court decisions. Some people are racist, and some people are sexist. Most people, perhaps, hate gays. But did people become more racist after Brown? Are they becoming more homophobic as a result of the gay marriage decisions? The evidence of the last fifty years suggests the opposite--that supreme court decisions have tended to be leading indicators, substantially moving public discourse in a progressive direction. Anecdotally, of course, there may be instances of negative feedback, of minibacklashes where things actually get worse for persecuted minorities as a result of elite-authoritarian policy shifts. The overall effect, though, is clearly one of positive feedback, of front-lash. Not two steps forward, three steps back, but rather three steps forward, and a slight pivot back while the body politic stabilizes itself in its new position.

There is an exception, though, to this general story of the Supreme Court leading and the masses slowly following. The exception is Roe vs. Wade, which arguably really has produced a sustained political backlash among large segments of the American populace. Whereas popular attitudes towards race, gender, and sexuality have changed dramatically in the last fifty years, in an almost seamlessly progressive direction, attitudes toward abortion have been much less predictable, swinging back and forth. The country is not significantly more pro-choice today than it was in 1980.

I support abortion rights. The freedom to choose is one of the most important prerequisites to Women's liberation. Still, Roe vs. Wade is fundamentally different from Brown vs. Board of Education or Lawrence vs. Texas, and the attempt to smuggle the abortion debate--an issue which, on the merits, is unavoidably contentious--into the broader debate about civil rights is one of the political sleights-of-hand that has helped conservatives to dominate American politics for the last thirty years. This lie is best summed up with the bogus term 'culture wars', which seeks above all else to leverage popular opposition to abortion into opposition to every other feature of the liberal social agenda.

These days, when people talk about the 'culture wars' or invoke 'values voters' they are trying mostly to link abortion to the gay rights struggle. It won't work, though. At the end of the day, the California Supreme Court's gay marriage decision is much more like Brown vs. Board than it is like Roe vs. Wade. Thirty years from now, same-sex marriage will be the norm and no one will remember why everyone kicked up such a big fuss (just as it seems incredible today that African-Americans in the south were largely prevented from voting until the 1960s). But abortion will still be argued about, likely with the same amount of vigor as today or as in 1973. In a country as religious as the United States, abortion will never go away--the substance of the issue is too divisive.