From the Washington Post: Fight against strip club set Speaker Mike Johnson on his moral crusade

I've fielded a few questions about how and why people get involved in politics.

Here's one story:

- Click here for the article. 

Mike Johnson was an eager young lawyer, four years out of law school, when he stayed up until 5 a.m. one night poring over the details of a controversy roiling his hometown: the opening of a new strip club.

By the morning, he was so worked up about the issue, he said, that he appeared later that day at a Shreveport City Council meeting to implore city leaders to block the Deja Vu club from moving in downtown.

“I have done an exhaustive legal research on this matter, probably more than anyone,” he told municipal lawmakers in April 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. He argued that the arrival of another “sexually oriented business,” or “SOB” as he called it, would spread sexually transmitted diseases and other social ills.

Johnson’s pitch failed, and the club opened early the following year. But the dispute over Deja Vu proved to be a turning point for him. It marked the end of his short-lived career as a general practice lawyer and the beginning of his single-minded focus on the culture wars. The shift put him on the path to elected office, first in the Louisiana legislature and then in Congress, and ultimately last month to the House speakership.

- House Speaker Mike Johnson used faith in campaign against gay rights.

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For more:

What is the culture war?

A culture war is a cultural conflict between different social groups struggle to impose their own virtues, beliefs, and practices over society. The notion of "war" is a metaphor for how to how social groups holding entrenched values and ideologies build adversarial narratives around "hot button" topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization over politics, public policy or consumption issues. Culture wars often delve around wedge issues, often based on values, morality, and lifestyle which often lead to political cleavage.

Are the Culture Wars Over?

Frank Rich thinks so. The economy may have something to do with it. People stopped worrying about prohibition when the Great Depression started. There were more important things to worry about. Same thing today.

Culture Wars

Next week in 2301 we will discuss Federalist #10 and how it accounts for the problems that the interplay of interests pose in a free society. We will try to think of this in terms of the current interests that exist in the U.S, Texas and the local community.

Peter Beinart raises a point worth pondering. Over the past decades, the culture wars have been a divisive force in American politics. In addition to conflicts over the economy and foreign affairs, these have divided the population based on values questions that come to fruition over issues like gay marriage, abortion and civil rights. He suggests that part of Obama's success is that he stays away from these cultural issues. Further, Obama seem to be able to stay away from them because the American public seem to be less interested in them.

This doesn't mean that he is ignoring them, just downplaying them by trying to make concessions, even if they are superficial, to social conservatives who are driven by these issues. Thus the invitation of Rick Warren to speak at his inaugural. He concludes that if he is successful in driving cultural issues down, and expanding his coalition, his brand of liberalism could dominate politics for some time.