Whither The Culture War?

A lot of the people who have either looked at the column or gave my ideas a hearing seem to come back with the same question. I wrote:

If the Democrats...can transform church/state separation and pluralistic tolerance into indispensable tenets of patriotic loyalty, the cultural battle so skewed in the Republicans' favor will be half-won.

Inevitably I'm told: Well yes, that's true, but how could it be done?

My gut reaction is to say that this is the sort of problem that think-tanks are founded and books are written to solve. Let's be Kantians for the sake of argument: Isn't it self-evidently true that this is the crucial question? Mustn't we, therefore, devote our energy to answering it?

I do have (don't worry) my own preliminary proposal. The way to establish secularism as a secure cultural value is to include it alongside a package and a platform that unerringly appeals to other cultural values of that enormous red swathe. In the same way that the Republicans have made homosexuality and gay rights into tokens of everything the culturally conservative voter hates, we have to make secularism an associated token of a worldview that the center-right leaning voter at the very least doesn't immediately find suspicious, sinister, or un-American. In other words, make secularism palatable to the middle by including it in a platform that is in specific and concrete ways friendly to their values. The neat thing about secularism is that wherever tolerated, it necessarily becomes regnant.