My party has been overtaken by "cancel culture" trolls

Rather than focusing on such substantive debates, the entertainment wing of the conservative movement is banking that the culture war will pay off both in terms of ratings and electorally. And that might be a valid assumption. One could imagine that Republican voters will be happy to get free money (like everyone else)—even if they don’t punish their GOP heroes for voting against it. Or maybe they will simply forget about it come 2022. Simultaneously, one could imagine even some minority voters might be turned off by left-wing cultural revolution). The point being that Dr. Seuss could be on the ballot in 2022, and that would benefit the GOP.

But what good is it to win short-term elections if your fundamental beliefs are lost? The whole premise of fighting against these culture war issues is that they are prior to, and thus more important than, elections. Future electoral results are predicated on winning past culture war battles. The whole point is to win the argument so you can later win the vote. What Republicans are doing right now is more akin to switching arguments (or, at least, emphasizing one while abandoning the other). As recently as a decade ago, conservatives acutely understood that spending was inextricably tied to the culture wars.

Remember the Tea Party? Remember Glenn Beck’s show? Thanks to Donald Trump’s presidency, conservatives have seemingly surrendered an entire front of the culture war—approximately one-third of the territory occupied by the Reagan Revolution—and we barely noticed. The era of small government is over.