The Culture Wars Will Only Get Worse

The Commonwealth of Virginia may be finally making the transition to a "blue state," but there remain many batshit crazy Virginians as demonstrated by Virginia's 5th congressional district. What's disturbing is that the level of craziness and insanity in rural areas of the state are intensifying thanks to a Republican Party increasingly in the grip of Christofascists, white supremacist and conspiracy theory whack jobs. This is leading to not only sharper political divisions - with urban and suburban areas increasing able to out vote the bible thumping, knuckle dragging parts of the state - but also the cultural divide between the diverse educated regions of the state and the hinterland where ignorance is increasingly celebrated and hatred towards the so-called educated elites is growing. In this regard Virginia mirrors what's happening in states as varied as Georgia and Texas where in time the urban and suburban areas will be able to out vote the backward rural areas. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon.  Many other sane Republicans will find the party leaving them. Here are article excerpts:

Denver Riggleman had a rough December. For one thing, he’s about to lose his job: Over the summer, members of the Virginia GOP voted to kick the freshman Republican out of Congress, largely because he publicly officiated a same-sex wedding. Riggleman’s cousin died of COVID-19 the week before Christmas, and his grandmother had to be hospitalized with the virus. Now, as his family gets sick all around him, Riggleman is about to be replaced in Congress by a coronavirus skeptic.

A few years ago, Republicans might have seen a guy like Riggleman as their future. He’s a small-business owner from the rural part of a purple-blue state who cares a lot about national security and keeping taxes low, and not much about policing people’s personal lives. In the infamous 2013 GOP autopsy report diagnosing why Republicans kept losing the popular vote and popular support, party leaders wrote that “young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out” if the GOP does not become more inclusive. The culture wars were over, the report seemed to suggest—standing against same-sex marriage was a way to lose elections, not win them.

But as Riggleman’s saga makes clear, there are many places in the country where issues such as LGBTQ rights are not at all settled. As the 117th Congress convenes this month, voices from those places may be the loudest ones on the right. “I’ve been screaming, ‘We need to become a big-tent party!’ for some time,” Riggleman told me. “But I think they misunderstood me and thought I meant ‘carnival tent.’”

Riggleman has spent the past six months battling the more fringe parts of his party. Shortly after he was effectively fired, he started receiving hate mail, calling him a “fag lover,” a leader of “Bibi Netanyahu’s pedophile ring,” and a “tool of the anti-Christ.” One troll even called his wife “the spawn of Satan”—making the two of them a sort of underworld power couple, Riggleman joked.

The most conservative people within the Republican Party win power more easily when election rules work in their favor. Under Virginia law, party leaders can choose how they nominate candidates—no traditional primary elections required. Disgruntled GOP leaders in Riggleman’s district used that to their advantage, hosting a party convention in Good’s hometown in southern Virginia. This setup was designed to downplay moderate voices: The most active Republicans in the most conservative part of the state selected the candidate for a large and diverse district.

Since winning, Good has indicated that he does not accept the results of the presidential election. . . . Riggleman said he’s gotten frantic phone calls from Republicans in his district who didn’t quite realize who they were voting for. He sees Good as part of a new class of vocal conservative firebrands who just got elected to Congress: Lauren Boebert in Colorado, Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina, Georgia’s Greene. “You’re seeing this massive grift—this conspiratorial grift—that’s working,” Riggleman said.

Toward the end of his campaign, Webb [Good's Democrat opponent] stopped by Riggleman’s whiskey distillery, which has been manufacturing hand sanitizer during the pandemic. The two men chatted about the district, and how integrity is sometimes more important than winning. Webb bought a bottle of Riggleman’s honey rye, and the outgoing congressman wished him well. Although the two men have very different politics, they probably share more views than either does with Good. But this is not a season for moderation. “I didn’t leave the party. The party is leaving me,” Riggleman said.

Riggleman plans to spend his post-political career combatting the rise of conspiracy theories within the GOP. “I think disinformation could destroy our ability to have a working republic,” he said. For Christmas, he gave himself the gift of turning off social media and spending time with his family. He’s not concerned about the keyboard warriors who sit on beanbag chairs in their basement and yell at him online—“I care about as much about what people think on Twitter as I do about a Tupperware sale at Walmart,” he said. But he does worry that America’s culture wars have reached a new and dangerous level, inspiring confused vigilantism, such as the attempted storming of the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in D.C. a few years ago. There are a lot of Rigglemans out there in America. But, for now, they are not the people shaping national politics. As Good heads to Washington, Riggleman will be sipping whiskey and watching the river on his 50-acre property, hoping that the country he loves doesn’t tear itself apart.