Are the Culture Wars Coming to an End?

Peter Beinart thinks so :

When it comes to culture, Obama doesn’t have a public agenda; he has a public anti-agenda. He wants to remove culture from the political debate. He wants to cut our three-sided political game back down to two . . . . culture wars do end. In the 1920s, immigration, Darwinism, and the Ku Klux Klan dominated political debate, but in the 1930s, they receded as Washington turned its attention to the Depression and the specter of war. It is no surprise that the end of the last culture war coincided with a shift from conservative to liberal dominance. If Obama can end this one, liberals may be in power for a very long time.

But Ross Douthat knows what’s actually going on here:

. . . Beinart’s argument is shot through with the characteristic liberal conceit that the culture wars are a one-sided affair, in which right-wing culture warriors start fights and peace-loving liberals try to avoid them. In reality, what makes Obama promising to liberals isn’t his potential to “end” culture-war battles—it’s his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear. So waiting a day to reverse the ban on overseas funding for groups that provide abortions, for instance, isn’t a compromise in the culture wars, or an act of moderation —it’s a way of making a victory for the left seem like an act of moderation to people who aren’t that invested in the issue. And the same will doubtless hold true when the stem-cell debate comes around, or the next Supreme Court vacancy, or any flashpoint you can think of: Liberals will praise Obama for taking steps to defuse the culture war, but what they’ll mean is that he’s taking steps to win it.