Conservatives, The Language of ‘Culture War,’ and the Lessons of Counterinsurgency Theory

Attendees at the Culture War tour at Antelope Gymnasium at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona. Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

If Conservatives Want to Use the Language of ‘Culture War,’ They Should Apply the Lessons of Counterinsurgency Theory

I do not, as a rule, like the language of ‘culture war.’ I find the language of conflict to be entirely unsuited for politics, because politics ought to be concerned with how to instantiate the conditions for human flourishing that allow human persons — persons who may disagree profoundly on what constitutes human flourishing, and what it means to live well — to achieve their common and individual goods within a given society. I also believe that, while culture can be changed and molded over time, by processes of education and habituation, the attempt to position politics (and therefore violence or force, at least in the form of state coercion) over top of culture is unlikely to meet with meaningful success, any more than politics would be able to change my ice cream flavor preferences or fashion tastes. The problem with conservatism, at least in the currently predominant version of it within American politics is that the obsession with a ‘culture war’ misunderstands both culture (by presuming that policy change or legal action can meaningfully impact culture in the short term) and the nature of healthy political activity (by attempting to introduce the language, and therefore the internal logic, of warfare).

But if American conservatives want to persist in ‘fighting’ a ‘culture war,’ I argue that they should look instead to the lessons learned in counterinsurgency theory over the last several decades of American warfighting. I will present what I see as the flaws of current ‘culture war’ discourse, lay out a brief sketch of counterinsurgency theory (as distinct from theories of conventional warfare), and explain why I believe those lessons are more applicable to thinking about culture and politics.

I. The problems of ‘culture war’ discourse

The identification of war with politics is nothing new, of course. Clausewitz produced the famous aphorism which is often rendered “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” and Foucault inverted the formula. I am not quite cynical enough to fully accept Clausewitz’s maxim, and I reject Foucault’s almost entirely. It seems to me that the aims of war will always be fundamentally lower than the proper aims of politics: war can only control external behavior, or eliminate threats; politics carries at least the potential for the kind of rational persuasion or compromise that allow for different conceptions of human flourishing to operate simultaneously.

Politics is, or at least can be, an extension of human higher-order rationality, and asks us to determine how we can lead happy (in the philosophical sense of eudaimonia, or flourishing) lives, both as individual persons living in and under a society and as social beings operating in and through society. In this way, applying war as a continuation of politics makes no more sense than applying war as a continuation of religion. For a sincere believer in any faith, conversion by the sword is at best an oxymoron: what matters is internal belief, not external acquiescence or behavior. ‘Do this or else’ is always less preferable than ‘do this because it is right and good,’ and in many cases the coercive formulation is entirely useless. Banning Sohrab Ahmari’s preferred cultural bugbear of ‘drag queen story hour’ will not render people suddenly cultural proponents of traditional sexual norms; it will simply prevent differences of opinion from manifesting in public behavior and — crucially — give people like Ahmari a false sense of comfort in a society that, outwardly at least, looks the way they want it to. A culture war cannot actually change culture, at least in the short term, because culture is deeper than external actions, and involves things like beliefs and preferences that can and do exist despite prohibitions on behavior.

Furthermore, adopting the language of conflict leads to other, more dangerous consequences beyond the failure to achieve any meaningful goals. Wars require enemies, and that requires the identification of particular human persons as The Enemy. This psychological move may be deemed useful or necessary in actual warfare, where human persons are required to kill other human persons (and therefore overcome the normal psychological and moral factors that tend to inhibit violence); but it can only have perverse outcomes in a peacetime society, where dialogue and compromise are the order of the day. War inclines us to believe we must win at any cost, because our very survival is at stake. War inclines us to treat the enemy of our enemy as our friend, regardless of how dangerous or evil they may be. War, at least in the all-out, trench-warfare style that seems to animate most culture war discourse, encourages us to believe no cost is too great to gain an inch of territory, or prevent it from being lost. It is worth noting that leading definitions of extremism (which include the belief in an intractable conflict between in-group and out-group, such that the out-group’s very existence present a continuous threat to the survival, freedom, flourishing, or prosperity of the in-group that can only be resolved by violence) position an academic account of extremism uncomfortably close to what I am describing as the internal logic of the language of ‘culture war. This, ultimately, is the conclusion of this section: the language of ‘culture war’ is unsuitable for achieving meaningful progress in culture or in politics, and at the very least bears a striking family resemblance to extremism.

II. The Lessons of Counterinsurgency

The United States has primarily been engaged, since at least the Vietnam War, in fighting what may best be described as a series of counterinsurgency operations in a variety of geopolitical environs and against a variety of groups with differing motivations for insurgent actions. Further, most of the leading literature (I will avoid saying “all,” simply because I am a relative newcomer to the field) suggests that the United States military did not initially find itself equipped, trained, or prepared to fight counterinsurgency actions rather than conventional warfare against organized state actors. Therefore, the last several decades have featured a wealth of study and writing on the lessons that have been learned from various counterinsurgency operations, and recommendations for new tactics for continuing or future operations.

If a singular lesson can be picked out, it will likely be something like this: counterinsurgency operations will fail if they concentrate the majority of their efforts on purely kinetic operations (direct engagements with extremists, etc) rather than on addressing the long-term factors that cause the population group out of which the insurgent group emerges, and upon which it depends for some level of cooperation ranging from grudging or fearful cooperation to enthusiastic support, to engage positively with the insurgent group. Put simply, this is a hydra problem: killing current insurgents does not prevent new insurgents taking their place and may in fact aggravate the problems that drive support for the insurgency. Rather, the literature suggests, the way to address an insurgency is to out-govern it, not out-fight it.

The conceptual shift from out-fighting an insurgency to out-governing it is, perhaps, not immediately intuitive. After all, insurgents are generally unable to compete with the US military in technology, air support, training, equipment, organizational structure, and many other factors. And yet, by developing tactics that allow them to avoid engagements which privilege the many advantages of advanced militaries, insurgents have been able to not only survive, but in some cases succeed in achieving limited objectives against superior militaries. Thus, theorists have been driven to understand insurgencies primarily as competitions of government between the insurgents and the official governments they oppose in their areas of operation.

According to this understanding, insurgents rely on a certain degree of acceptance from the local population, which they gain by providing a variety of services that out-compete those offered by governments. These services may include things like education, basic necessities, financial security, protection, and the administration of justice; and if the insurgency is successful in outcompeting the government, the local population may come to (at least) tolerate the insurgents. The lesson for counterinsurgency personnel, then, is to focus efforts on creating stable systems that incentivize the local population to move away from the insurgent group, depriving them of the base of sympathy and support they need to operate from.

III. Counterinsurgency Lessons for ‘Culture War’

Much like the US military in the beginning of its counterinsurgency operations, conservatives interested in engaging in a ‘culture war’ have primarily focused on what we might well term ‘kinetic engagements’ against their opponents. The language of insurgency is conceptually useful here because conservatives generally understand themselves as the defenders of some traditional order, norms, and mores against those who seek to replace or undermine the tradition – that is, to replace one social order with another. And, as conservatives have attempted to fight what they see as a cultural insurgency (although they do not use this conceptual framework), their kinetic operations have taken the form of rhetorically ‘owning the libs,’ fierce policy battles, or attempting to use the coercive force of the state to impose their vision and values. Much like an actual counterinsurgency, this strategy has failed to produce the kind of cultural stability they seek, because it ignores the factors that cause people to become ‘insurgents,’ and cause other people to tolerate, accept, or support the ‘insurgents.’

If conservatives are to defend their beliefs, they need to out-govern their opponents. Put another way, conservatives need to analyze and triage the factors that are causing alternative belief systems to out-compete theirs for sympathy and support, or at least acceptance, among ‘non-combatants’ – those who are not firmly or irrevocably politically aligned. Let us take an example: despite the success of free market economics, at least in purely economic and statistical terms, conservatives often lament what they see as the growing appeal of anti-free-market ideologies – socialism, Marxism, and the like. Their primary response has been kinetic: debate socialism vs. capitalism! Deploy the GDP statistics! Prove that the libs are WRONG! And yet, these arguments are not outcompeting their opponents. Why? Not because the arguments are false, necessarily, any more than we would likely say that the Taliban would be a better or more just government than a US-backed local regime that would guarantee things like religious freedom, rights for women, etc. Rather, the experiences of counterinsurgency operations show us that many people choose not to (or do not have the luxury to) consider competing systems from an abstract, theoretical perspective. Much like a local tribal leader who works with the Taliban while they represent the best competing system for his community, even if he does not like or agree with the Taliban’s ideology, people will be tempted by systems that they believe will be better for them, or for the people they care about, in the immediate to short term. Redistributionist economics is popular, not because everyone who supports them believes that they represent the best path to long-term overall prosperity or GDP growth, but rather because many people are simply not thinking in these terms (and are unlikely to choose to think in these terms). A system that tells them that it sees their problems, and that is willing to address those problems, is more likely to garner support than a system that denies those problems or argues clinically that those problems are simply collateral damage for the health of the overall system.

It is common for students of social and political structures to note that existing systems have a certain advantage over revolutionary attempts: inertia. In short, people are more likely to stick with an existing system rather than take the effort and risk of building something new, provided that the old system does not become too intolerable. Yet, existing systems also have a certain disadvantage, at least when it comes to rhetoric and political support, and that disadvantage is magnified in representative democracies where people can vote for a policy that they do not have the responsibility of implementing. That disadvantage is: all systems have failure cases, or instances where the system will lead to bad (or at least less-good) results for certain people; additionally, the flaws of an existing system will be immediately evident for people in ways that the potential/future flaws of alternative systems will not be. Therefore, when competing systems arise that explicitly recognize the failure cases, the injustices, or the individuals slipping through the cracks of the existing system, they are likely to have a comparative persuasive advantage over the existing system. That persuasive advantage will be especially prevalent for two groups of people: those who the existing system is, or at least appears to be, disadvantaging; and those who the existing system is not disadvantaging but who care about those failure cases or about the people involved in them. By contrast, the persuasive advantage will generally not exist for those people who are advantaged by the existing system, those people who do not care about those failure cases or the people involved in them, or those who may care but nevertheless privilege the benefits of the overall system in their evaluation.

Today, American conservatives find themselves in the position of defending a system in which they, by and large, fail to recognize the persuasive advantage of competing systems. Because they fail to recognize this, they believe they can achieve victory using the intellectual equivalent of kinetic operations: debates and arguments that attempt to address the issue on the level of objective theory, or on the level of coercion and legal force. They have, as a generalization, not made the effort to examine what kinds of persuasive advantages competing theories might have, or how to counterbalance them. If this analysis is correct, then conservatives ought to expect similar rates of success to actual counterinsurgency operations that focus almost exclusively on kinetic operations: very low. Adapting away from this will require a certain measure of humility, as it presumably did for some who realized that “the Taliban are the bad guys, so when we go in and kick their teeth in, everyone will automatically just cheer and love us forever” wasn’t going to be a particularly successful strategy.

Closing Suggestions

No paper patterned loosely on counterinsurgency literature would be complete without a few hastily sketched policy proposals coupled with an exhortation to further research and refinement, so here are my thoughts on what the application of this analysis ought to look like for American conservatives:

1. Less focus on debate and ‘kinetic’ argumentation, and more focus on refining conservative ideas and policies in a way that preserves the benefits of the overall system while also trying to mitigate failure cases and protect individuals who inevitably suffer in some way (as they will in any system). Making your own system maximally appealing is more effective than arguing that your current, unimproved system is *somewhat better* than the competing system.
2. Recognition that ideological or systemic purity is less important than the actual, real flourishing of human persons. Free markets with minimal economic regulation might be an excellent theory, for example, but if market failures (or even a sufficiently sluggish market solution) is leading to substantial human suffering – and this ought to include non-quantifiable, non-economic factors of human flourishing – then interventionist solutions ought to be seriously considered and tailored to have minimal negative economic input.
3. Reorientation of the language of politics away from hostile, all-or-nothing paradigms and towards the understanding of the common goods being aimed at – including the ideal of human persons with different understandings of the good life living together in a peaceful society.
4. Reject the idea that persons with different understandings of the good life are your enemy, or that they intend to hurt you, or that you can only succeed at their expense. In other words, reject the thought processes of extremism.
   Understand and accept that, as politics is one of the most important, nuanced, complicated, and difficult of human pursuits, intelligent and well-intentioned people can and will frequently disagree, and that neither side is likely to be entirely correct at all times.
5. Understand that healthy and stable political societies are not guaranteed (arguably are even the historical exception to the rule), and that creating and maintaining them takes a great deal of intentional effort to display understanding, charity, and intellectual humility. Developing these virtues should be a prerequisite to political engagement, and are vastly more important than jumping into any ‘culture war’ battle.

If these suggestions are taken, I believe that American conservatism may yet reform itself into an authentically healthy and beneficial part of our political landscape. If they are not, then the goals of our common political life will have sunk far lower than they ought, and Clausewitz may prove to be right after all.