Who Actually Wins the Culture Wars?

My entire life, I have stood apart politically from my social groups. That was especially true in 2024, which was the first year I could vote in a presidential election.  

I grew up in a predominately white and conservative part of Louisiana, a dynamic that is also true of my social circles, and Donald Trump captured the attention and votes of many of the people in my friend groups, along with many other young men like them all around the country.

I remember the sinking feeling I had on election night watching the results with those same friends. It wasn’t the man I was worried about, it was what that moment represented. Those around me voted the way they did primarily because of economic dissatisfaction. They weren’t happy with the inflation that occurred under the Biden administration. The Trump campaign capitalized, arguing that their economic dissatisfaction was a result of the Biden administration not prioritizing people like them. 

That year I felt increasingly disconnected as I struggled to convince those around me to vote against Trump. What I ignored then was the appeal of his argument. We all wanted to feel that the system was working for us, and in a rapidly changing world it’s easy to feel like it isn’t, especially as young men. 

However, the Trump campaign’s argument is nothing new. Its core is evident in my hometown, which was racially and economically divided by a set of train tracks that were built on an uncomfortable foundation. 

Bossier Parish, where I grew up, was one of the most violent places in the country following the Reconstruction Era. Prior to Louisiana voting on a new constitution enshrining Black voting rights in 1868, a group of “whites in Bossier, including some leading planters, systematically hunted down and slew impersonally and indiscriminately 162 blacks, ignoring the plea of a United States marshal to be permitted to go out with a few troops to arrest any suspected Negro criminals.” 

That history shaped the community I grew up in more than most people there would like to acknowledge. The Bossier Banner, a prominent local newspaper at the time, urged readers to vote against the 1868 constitution. In one of their publications they argued, “If you don't want negro equality forced upon you, go to the polls and vote against the proposed constitution framed by social banditi, domestic bastards, entamites, scallawags, slubbergullions, cow thieves, and jayhawkers…” 

The leading planters knew that directing realized or unrealized economic anger towards African-Americans, who held no political or economic power in the state, would preserve their riches, to the detriment of everyone else. 

The end result of slavery and subsequent Jim Crow laws excluded one group from our political systems and communities. The wealthiest individuals benefitted most from this system, not working-class whites. In fact, these decisions resulted in a state that was significantly poorer, less well-educated, and less healthy as a whole. 

Donald Trump’s campaign did not ride on horseback through towns hunting African-Americans seeking a right to vote, or promise to wholly exclude them from the political systems and tax bases of their communities and state. However, his campaign attributed systemic economic blame to groups of people who held little to no systemic power in the country. Many young men in my generation accepted this framing without realizing the cost, a cost evident in the shrinking middle class coinciding with an economy that, on its face, keeps growing.  

That economic inequality takes many shapes and forms. For example, in Louisiana we give out more corporate tax breaks than any other state in the country, by a 10:1 margin. Yet, year after year the legislature debates whether to raise teacher pay, fix crumbling infrastructure, or fully fund early childhood education because of budget concerns, concerns that rarely extend to these tax breaks. 

That's not to say lawmakers don't attempt to address these problems. Just this year, the legislature increased early childhood education funding by $100 million. But that investment, as significant as it was, received more scrutiny across the five stages of the legislative process than the one-stage, secret $2.6 billion deal political leaders crafted with Hyundai for a new steel plant, which included free land and direct cash payments from the state. In 2024, the legislature approved multi-billion dollar tax breaks for new AI data centers as part of another secret economic deal. 

Our leaders claim that secrecy is the key to securing these deals, which will promote economic prosperity for our communities. Of course, this secrecy only applies to the public, not to the insiders involved in these deals. One of the co-authors of the bill that authorized the deal between Meta’s Hyperion data center in Richland Parish had signed an NDA with Entergy, the primary Louisiana energy provider that will profit from building new power plants to power the facility, prior to the law’s passage. After the deal’s approval, the same lawmaker sold 300 acres of land near the data center site to the energy company. This land had grown 10 times in value, from around $5,000 per acre prior to the deal to around $50,000 at the time he sold it. While this is one individual case, it illustrates a wider system of legalized corruption. Lawmakers are using their insider status to profit off the very deals they author, all while shielding the details from the public, supposedly for our own protection and benefit.

The economic impacts of these decisions are kept secret, too, removing the public’s ability to gauge whether the requirements are met, long after the deal is finalized. For example, Act 730 of 2024, the inventory tax break for AI data centers, only requires recipients to create 50 permanent jobs and make a one-time, $200 million investment. Yet, in the same law there are no public reporting requirements, meaning the public has no way to gauge if those standards are met once the deal is signed. And while the legislature and local governments across Louisiana are quickly pouncing on opportunities to build new data centers, ensuring they have all of the necessary resources while avoiding public scrutiny, there is a complete absence of accompanying worker protections. 

The same legislature also declined to fund a $2000 pay stipend for public school teachers during the 2026 legislative session, leaving that money to come out of school operating budgets that are already stretched thin by rising prices. When the legislature annually debates whether the state can afford to support working people, it is not a question about whether those resources exist. 

The same friends I watched the election with in 2024 have grown further dissatisfied with the economy. Inflation is still up, entry level work is becoming even harder to find, and they don’t feel like the government that is supposed to protect them actually cares. Whether that is justified or not, we may objectively become the first generation that is poorer than the one that came before us, despite the country, and our state, being substantially richer. I believe that is a choice. 

We have a choice, too. The evidence is clear. This year it's in the public schools that will face budget shortfalls, while new data centers receive billion-dollar tax breaks. Ten years ago, it was in the doubling of higher education tuition rates due to substantial budget cuts, while the state forfeited $10 billion in property tax revenue with no way of knowing if that investment was paying off. A century and a half ago it was in the pages of the Bossier Banner, urging readers to vote against a constitution that would result in tax money being used to educate all Louisiana children. The greatest lessons our state has to offer are written in its failures. Our choice is whether we are willing to learn from them.