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Here’s a presentation I gave as part of a 2018 Day panel on “Cultural Politics, Corporate Power, and Public Policy in the Age of Trump.” If I were giving the same talk today, I would discuss the campaigns against critical race theory led by Christopher Rufo, the legislation targeting the teaching of civil rights and social justice issues in Florida, Texas, and other states, and other culture war issues that have arisen since 2020. But it is still useful to remember the previous American culture wars that were largely won by those on the left. The other presenters were faculty and students at Morehead State University, including Royal Berglee, Cory Clark, Austin Curnutte, and Michael Hail with much of the discussion centering around corporate power and diversity issues.

I’m going to talk about what’s left of the culture war. What do I mean by “culture war” and what do I mean by “what’s left of the culture war?” The culture war was originally a set of liberal vs conservative battles over pre-marital sex, abortion, school prayer, and gays in the military but morphed into struggles over fundamental things like American national identity, the status of science, the male-female binary, and the relative value of religion. To make a long story short, the left won on pretty much all counts. Following up on the monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964, official discourses emphasize the equal value of black people, women, gay people, religious diversity, and the whole range of national origins. Gay marriage is now accepted by significant majorities. Values like individual uniqueness and pioneering spirit are represented by fictional figures like the adolescent Moana and gay marriage is supported by a large majority. Because of black and feminist critics, the struggle against white supremacy is now viewed as a central drama of American history while sexual violence is now at the forefront of American understandings of gender. The left used to be understood in terms of white liberals and the labor movement but is now more accurately portrayed as the multicultural left.

Enter Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson is a white conservative from a wealthy background who has been a media figure for almost 20 years. Starting out on CNN debate shows, Carlson co-founded the right-wing “Daily Caller” and now has a highly rated 8:00pm show of his own on Fox News. About a week ago, Carlson started a controversy over cultural values by asking a simple question. “How precisely is diversity our strength?” According to Carlson, “diversity is our strength” has become our “new national motto” and needs to be questioned. Carlson initially seems to direct his comments at immigrants when he further asks “Do you get along better with your neighbors, your co-workers if you can’t understand each other or share no values.” But as Tucker Carlson moves forward with his train of questioning, the more important target becomes obvious. It’s the marginalization of white conservatives themselves. “If diversity is our strength, why is it okay for the rest of us to surrender one of our central rights, freedom of speech, to just a handful of tech monopolies.” Of course, Nazis like Richard Spencer and conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones from twitter, facebook, and other large-scale online outlets and Carlson seems to be referring to them when he says “the rest of us.” If anything though, Carlson is more outraged that even people who question ideas of diversity “need to be shamed, silenced, and fired” and seems to believe that white conservatives in general are under enormous pressure to accept the official values associated with diversity.

Carlson objects in particular to immigrants, but “diversity” includes a dazzling array of racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and disability identities. The latest Nike commercial featuring Colin Kaepernick is an excellent example of how “diversity” as an all-encompassing value being promoted by corporate elites. There are legless wrestlers, triathletes recovering from brain cancer, and women kicking butt in soccer, boxing, and high school football. Speaking of football, there were several one-handed football players, also refugee soccer players scoring for the Canadian national teams and LeBron James transcending sports altogether. The current “Just Do It” commercial not only values diversity, it celebrates diversity as a path to the highest kind of individual and group accomplishment. The enormous range of accomplishment makes the world a better place and celebrating that diversity is something in which everyone can and should share. Nike tops off this brilliant commercial by anchoring it in the figure of Colin Kaepernick who best embodies the ethic of sacrificing everything for what he believes. For Nike, Kaepernick is the living embodiment of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the civil rights legacy that also serves as the anchor point for feminism, gay rights, disability advocacy, immigrant rights groups and other movements associated with virtue and decency from the diversity point of view.

Conservatives have criticisms of the Nike commercial and alternative values of their own. But all of these pale in the face of the historical, entertainment, and moral power of the diversity ethic. Indeed, conservatives would do much better if they developed more of a critique of corporate power. For example, Nike is a $100 bill global corporation with 34 bill in annual revenue. According to Market Realist, Nike outsources all of its manufacturing to third-party manufacturers with locations in Vietnam, China, Indonesia, and 39 other countries. Although not as immersed in sweatshop exploitation as it was in the 1980’s and 1990’s, Nike contractors are still involved in abuses even though they now pay minimum wages. But minimum wage is not the standard by which Nike measures the world and by the “Let’s Do It” standard of the current ad, Nike fails miserable. Nike does nothing to celebrate the diversity of the people making their shoes and clothes, do not seem to encourage their employees to go to college, start their own businesses, or even, you know, become athletes. The people who make Nike products can’t rise within the company because they never work for Nike. Making women stand outside for two hours in the Vietnamese heat as punishment for not meeting their quota of 60 dozen pairs of shoes may not be standard practice anymore, but Nike does nothing to encourage the extraordinary accomplishments of their ads among their overseas employees.

As far as I can tell, Nike has no manufacturing facilities in the United States. And it’s easy to know why. My step-grandfather Wayne West made $15-20/hr as a union bricklayer in Northern New York through the early 80’s. Nike doesn’t want to pay $15/ hour or even $5/hr to the people making its products. That’s the way it’s been with capitalism since at least the time when Karl Marx associated capitalism exploitation of the European working class with that “single unconscionable freedom—free trade.” If white conservatives want to fight the now official values of diversity, they should do so by condemning the connection between the official values, the brutal exploitation of manufacturing workers in places like Vietnam, and the declining standard of living and health among working people in the United States. THAT would be progress.

Introduction. Thanks to Professor Mock for inviting me to speak at this Constitution Day forum. I’m going to address the potential impact of the 2024 presidential election on the Constitution and Supreme Court, and I’m going to speak about the consequences of both a Trump and a Harris win

1. If Trump Wins. If Trump wins, 236 years of constitutional order will come to an end on inauguration day. The massive concentration of power in Trump’s White House will start that day with immigration roundups to begin the process of deporting 15-20 million undocumented immigrants without benefit of due process. That’s most of what Trump meant when he said he would be a “dictator” on day one. Trump has also promised to engage in a large-scale campaign to investigate, prosecute, imprison, and silence his critics and opponents, including much of the Biden administration, large segments of the media, major Democratic figures like Nancy Pelosi, conservative critics like Liz Cheney, and state elections officials and workers. Pretty much anybody who has been prominent in opposing Trump would be subject to prosecution. Even without considering Project 2025, that would be the end of the Constitutional order.

If Trump wins, it’s the end of the Constitution as we know it, but that doesn’t mean that a Harris victory would stabilize the Constitutional Order

• If Kamala Harris wins. If Harris wins, there’s a decent chance of the Democrats holding the Senate and a somewhat higher chance of Democrats changing the rules surrounding the Supreme Court. Biden has already proposed Court reforms including term limits of 18 years but that’s highly unlikely because Article III provides justification for the corrupt and increasingly lawless Court to overturn them. The result would be that Harris would be under considerable pressure to expand the Court from 9 members to 13 with all the new members being 40 year old lib/left types. Democratic constituencies want to see the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, overturning of Roe v Wade, the Trump immunity decision, expansion of gun rights, and other major decisions by the current Court reversed, and are almost as eager to see the Senate filibuster overturned to facilitate Supreme Court expansion. Generally speaking, Democrats have become much more of a “do something” party since 2016 and it’s about 60-40 that President Harris would seek Court expansion. I would argue that expanding the Court is not a radical a departure in itself but the outcome of a liberal court majority would also be that the same MAGA pressure currently on electoral systems, education, and the military would be extended to the Supreme Court and we would end up in a situation in which a Supreme Court’s understanding of the constitutional order would be more liberal and mainstream but would further stimulate right-wing determination to overturn the Constitutional Republic altogether.

• My curve ball is public opinion. Diving further into the topic. Since the early 2000’s, polling has shown a dramatic change in American values. That’s most notably seen in relation to gay marriage with support for gay marriage now at 69% in a 2024 Gallup poll where only 12% supported gay marriage in 1989 compared to 84% who opposed. The same can be seen for other social issues. Support for abortion rights is 64% according to a recent poll with 35% in opposition. Support for banning assault weapons is at 69% and support for equal rights for transgender people at 83%.  Free community college, paid family leave, and universal preschool all polled in the 70’s and 80’s when they were part of Biden’s initial BuildBackBetter proposal in 2021. With support for most of these issues around 2-1, the U.S. is evolving into a supermajority multicultural/socially liberal society. It’s also clear that living in a multiracial society where civil rights, feminism, LGBT rights, climate activism, and immigrant inclusion are mainstream and traditional-minded opposition is marginal is intolerable to American conservatives. As a result, the idea of abandoning the constitutional model for an American Republic and instituting the kind of authoritarian rule outlined by the Trump campaign and Project 2025 isn’t just a Trump oddity. It’s something that’s become an imperative for white conservative cultural and political leadership. Of course, those same numbers also create pressure to reform and reshape the interpretation of the Constitution to mirror the multicultural liberalism of a highly diverse mainstream America. The Supreme Court has been conservative dominated since the 70’s or 80’s and a lot of work would need to be done to reinterpret what David Waldstreicher calls “Slavery’s Constitution” in ways that mirror multicultural social liberalism, but it’s time for the judicial left to exercise the same kind of judicial creativity that can be seen in conservative figures like the late Antonin Scalia and Mitch McConnell.

• Final Thought. My final point is that the consequence of a Harris victory without a Senate majority would be the continuation of the long-time stasis in American government and society which itself is subversive of the Constitutional order. But going further into that thought will have to wait for another time.

There was an interesting story in Monday’s Washington Post about the construction contractor who took down all the statues of Confederate generals that had stood on Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA since at least 1890. After the far right and Nazi Charlottesville demostrations of 2017 and the George Floyd demonstrations of 2020, the Democratic administraiton of Virginia governor Ralph Northem decided to take down the Confederate statues in Richmond and called black contractor Devon Henry about taking on the job after white contractors rejected inquiries with overtly racist responses. Henry was reluctant to involve his company in the project at first because of the explosive racial politics of removing Confederate monuments but was gradually convinced with the Stonewall Jackson being removed first, followed by 13 other monuments and ending with the dismantling and removal of the monument to the most prominent Confederate general, Robert E. Lee. As pioneering civil rights activist and newspaper editor John Mitchell, Jr. wrote in 1890 when the Lee statue was initially completed, “The Negro … put up the Lee monument … and should the time come, will be there to take it down.”

The removal of the Confederate statues is a much bigger deal for the understanding of American culture and history than has been acknowledged. The Jackson, Lee, and other statues not only loomed over Richmond as a representations of white domination over the black population and reminder of the white racial violence that kept that domination in place throughout the century segregation from 1877 to the Civil Rights acts of the 1960’s. Confederate statues also represented the national mythology of the Confederates as outstanding and broadly triumhant generals who only lost the Civil War because of the larger population and dynamic manufacturing economies of the North. When I was growing up in rural NY during the 1960’s, it was the Confederates who were the “cool” generals not the Union commanders, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson who were seen as “great” not Grant, Sherman, and Meade. The Civil War narrative was about how the Confederates “almost won” and how the the defeat of the Confederacy was the “tragedy of the South” rather than the victory of the Union. There was a sense in which the “American idea” was better represented by the daring and determination of the Confederates than what was seen as the blundering armies of the Union.

But the situation has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Even when Confederates aren’t derided as “traitors,” “losers,” and “bigots,” their cause is now seen almost exclusively in terms of advancing the “slave power” rather than “defending states rights” and other pro-Confederate excuses for secession. Far from being represented as quintessentially American, the Confederates are more often portrayed as the “other” to the ideal of a diverse, democratic nation that’s taken hold in mainstream culture since the 90’s. Lee’s reputation has especially suffered in light of the new stress on his failures at Gettysburg, arguments about Grant’s stratetic acumen, and revelations that Lee whipped his slaves. In many ways, Lee had already been taken down from his symbolic pedestal when the Richmond monument was removed by Devon Henry’s company.

But who’s rising as the Confederacy falls into slaveholding and treasonous otherness? That’s an interesting, important, and inevitable question. The Civil War Era was a crucial part of American history and it seems that the whole story of the Civil War Era would change given that the “Tragedy of the South” and valor of the Confederates are no longer part of the plot. If the Confederates are seen more as villains than tragic heroes of the Civil War, has anything risen to take their place as lynchpins of the Civil War part of the “American Story.” To a certain extent, the narrative void has been filled by a revaluation of Grant, Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass. The renewed stress on Grant’s strategic skills, his support for black troops in the Union Army, and post-Civil War role as Reconstruction president have not only increased Grant’s prestige but also served to make the the experiences and action of black people more central to the story of the Civil War era. That change can also be seen of Frederick Douglass’ increased prominence and condemnation of slavery in his 1852 Fourth of July speech is now a standard reference during observances of the 4th and there’s much more discussion of his abolitionist writings and Civil War activism as well as the figure he cut in American culture as the most photographed figure of his time. In many ways, the “story of black people”–black people leaving plantations, black soldiers, blacks in Confederate territory, black political figures like Douglass, the initial formation of black leadership, etc.– has emerged as the fulcrum the Civil War story without there being (at least to my knowledge) any general narrative of the Civil War period with black people at the center. With the decline of the Confederates from tragic heroes of the Civil War era to bigoted “other,” the story of the Civil War needs to be changed and the story of American black people needs to be portrayed as central to the Civil War dynamic.