Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

On Aug. 17, 1992, Pat Buchanan and the Republican Party declared a “culture war … for the soul of America.” On Oct. 6, 2014, Republicans surrendered.

Twenty-two years ago at his party’s national convention, Buchanan thundered, “we stand with [President George H. W. Bush] against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.” Last week, nearly every Republican and conservative movement leader stood quietly as the Supreme Court effectively extended equal marriage rights to more than half of the country. Stunned, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee lashed out at his party’s silence, “go ahead and just abdicate on this issue … I’ll become an independent. I’ll start finding people that have guts to stand.” But he doesn’t seem to have many takers.


The surrender followed several capitulations and recalibrations by Republicans on other social issues. In March, Colorado Rep. Cory Gardner, locked in a close Senate race against Democratic incumbent Mark Udall, renounced his support for a state “personhood” amendment that would define human life at the moment of fertilization, but before implantation, and thus establish the constitutional grounds to ban certain forms of birth control. During an Iowa Senate debate late last month, Republican nominee Joni Ernst found herself having to roll back her definition of what “personhood” meant: In May she said it would establish an “inalienable right to life of every person at any stage of development,” but when her rival, Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley, said it “would have banned all forms of abortion [and] certain forms of contraception,” she recharacterized the constitutional amendment as something akin to a nonbinding resolution “simply a statement that I support life”—nothing more, she repeated, than “a statement on life.” Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker recently shifted from proclaiming he’s “100 percent pro-life” to airing an ad, in response to one from Emily’s List advertising his absolute opposition to abortion even in cases of rape and incest, assuring voters his new abortion law “leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”

We’ve come a long way since 2004, when Republicans went 11-0 on anti-gay marriage state ballot initiatives, and since 1996 when Democrats were defensively insisting they wanted abortion to be “rare.” Half of all Americans now live in states that allow same-sex marriage, with more on the way.

How did the party of “the real America” get so utterly thumped in the culture war, a war of its own choosing? People will tell you the defeat is due to the “Rising American Electorate” of African-American, Latino, youth and single women voters, which made up nearly half of the 2012 turnout and voted 2-to-1 for Obama. But it’s not a mere matter of demographics shifting under the Republicans’ feet. The GOP sowed the seeds of its culture war demise with three big strategic blunders.

1. Republicans stopped being savvy on abortion.

When Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, Republicans lost the opening battle in the culture war, at least as defined by Buchanan in the summer of 1992: “In that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side.” But, after the election, social conservatives regrouped and developed a smart abortion strategy that could succeed even if the wind was not at their backs.

Instead of emphasizing their purist positions, which they recognized most Americans did not yet share, conservatives took a pragmatic approach. They pinpointed their opponent’s weak spots. They hammered on abortion scenarios that Democrats would have to uncomfortably explain at length to defend. They crafted legislation to both restrict abortion access and divide Democrats. Medically necessary late-term abortions suddenly became gruesome “partial-birth abortions,” prompting more than 70 House Democrats in 1995 and 1997 to vote for a ban, which Clinton vetoed. Seemingly innocuous “informed consent,” “parental involvement” and “safety” regulations designed to limit abortion access flooded state legislatures, many of which became law.

During the subsequent Bush presidency, conservatives stayed on this path, albeit more aggressively. The federal “Partial Birth Abortion Act” was signed into law and upheld by Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices. The number of states with onerous regulations stifling abortion providers more than doubled to 33. By 2004, Mississippi managed to shut down every abortion clinic within its borders save for one.

A warning sign that anti-abortion activists can push things too far flashed in 2006, when South Dakota voters repealed a state law enacted earlier that year banning all abortions.

Yet when the ideological pendulum swung back to the left with the 2008 election of Barack Obama, Republicans failed to stick with the incremental, sometimes stealthy, approach that allowed social conservatives to make advancements despite a Democratic White House in the 1990s. Conservative state legislators turned “informed consent” into “mandated transvaginal ultrasounds.” Primary voters eagerly elevated candidates opposed to all abortions without exception, including two 2012 Senate nominees who explicitly defended forcing rape victims to carry out their pregnancies. Both proceeded to lose in states that Mitt Romney won.

Anti-abortion forces continue to hold the upper hand in deep-red states, where 20-week abortion bans without exceptions are the latest thing. But in the states that determine who controls Congress, the tables have been turned. Now the Democrats are the ones who can pound their opponent’s weak spots on abortion. Even in reddish North Carolina, Sen. Kay Hagan is holding a gender gap-fueled lead by opposing a 20-week ban and hammering her Republican rival on abortion restrictions he helped clear the state legislature.

Perhaps Republicans were impatient with incremental progress. Perhaps the party lacked a strong leadership figure who could keep fringe players in check. But Republicans made a decision on abortion strategy that they didn’t have to make.

2. Republicans got weird about birth control.

When Mitt Romney couldn’t succinctly answer a 2012 primary debate question about whether states should be able to ban contraception, Republicans blamed the media for raising an irrelevant question. Not only was the question relevant—“personhood” amendments had already been considered at the state level, and more were to come—Romney’s fumble foreshadowed his party’s inexplicable difficulty to handle an issue that had been long put to bed.

Republican squeamishness with birth control is hard to figure. Surveys show that 99 percent of women under 45 who have sex with men will, at least some of the time, use birth control. Any competent politician would try to get in good with the 99 percent, not the 1 percent.

In fact, during the George W. Bush presidency, Republicans were quite comfortable with the idea of requiring insurers to include contraception in their plans. As the Los Angeles Times chronicled, members of both parties worked on such mandates after women’s groups argued it was unfair for plans to include Viagra but not the pill. The Bush administration chose not to scrap a 2000 rule forcing many employers to cover contraception if they also were covering preventative services and prescription drugs. Twenty-two states, including six with Republican governors, enacted laws that required insurance companies to cover birth control.

Then, Obama.

When the Affordable Care Act mandated the same thing, suddenly Republicans concluded the clause was an attack on religious liberty and an example of government handouts run amok. Conservatives celebrated the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby ruling , which has complicated implementation of the mandate. In a January speech to the Republican National Committee, Huckabee said in disgust, “If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or reproductive system without the help of the government, so be it.”

Nine years earlier, Huckabee had been one of those six Republican governors who signed the same mandate into law.

Republicans had been perfectly willing to use the power of government to expand access to birth control.They had done it when Bush was president. But under Obama, they blew a synapse, and let their hatred wreck their political judgment.

3. Republicans bet wrong on gay marriage.

After 2000, Bush political strategist Karl Rove fretted that 4 million Christian conservatives stayed home on Election Day. After 2003, many on the right were in a panic once the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court established equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. In 2004, Republicans responded by spearheading ballot initiatives in 11 states banning same-sex marriage, including the swing states of Ohio and Michigan. Rove may not have masterminded it, but he told the Ohio media he believed the initiative would boost Republican turnout.

Republicans won the battle, but they soon lost the war. All 11 passed handily, and another seven passed in 2006. However, the mean-spirited anti-gay marriage campaign actually failed to increase Republican turnout, while alienating the younger generation of voters. American youth who had grown up treating gays equally soon propelled Barack Obama to the White House and invigorated the marriage cause. Ten years after that first round of anti-gay initiatives, same-sex marriage is on the verge of being legal in 60 percent of the country.

With a little more foresight and a little less bigotry, Republicans could have realized that misguided cultural attitudes toward gays would naturally diminish over time, and divined better ways to rally the conservative troops. There were plenty of signs that Republicans were on the wrong side of history. The vice president’s daughter was openly gay. The TV show “Will & Grace” was in its sixth season. Even Bush sensed that a hateful anti-gay stance could drive away swing voters: One week before Election Day, he expressed support for civil unions.

It was too little too late. Republicans never launched an organized push for civil unions as a way to compete for gay voters without alienating religious conservatives who wanted to cordon off marriage for heterosexuals. Such a stance would have been squarely in the ideological middle at the time: In the 2004 Election Day exit poll, 35 percent of Americans supported civil unions and another 25 percent supported equal marriage. Only 37 percent opposed all forms of legal recognition for same-sex couples. If Republicans hoped to draw a line at marriage, a firm civil-unions position was their best chance.

That way, if Republicans had still lost the marriage fight, they at least would have lost honorably without appearing clueless and homophobic. Instead they chose the William F. Buckley strategy: to stand athwart history yelling “Stop.” It backfired. Support for gay marriage, now a clear majority, has jumped 15 points in five years and will surely continue to rise. Indeed, on issue after cultural issue, Republican positions poll miserably, especially with younger voters.

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Some might argue Republicans lost the culture war because they have been held captive by an increasingly out-of-touch religious right. These examples complicate that narrative. Social conservatives might hinder Republican flexibility on cultural issues to an extent. Yet it was not long ago when Republicans were capable of pursuing incremental abortion restrictions and accepting birth control as part of mainstream society. With more forceful leadership from a Republican president, they may have been able to walk the line on civil unions and hold the line on marriage.

Pat Buchanan was never going to see his dream of an America without abortion or gays. But it was not preordained for Republicans to lose the culture war so completely. Bad strategic choices of their own making boxed them in a corner, leaving them no choice but to surrender at the courthouse steps.