The Persistence of the Culture War Before he disappointed his many admirers by declining to seek the Republican nomination, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana told the Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson that the gravity of the economic and fiscal challenges facing America's next president might require calling a temporary "truce on the so-called social issues." On culture war controversies like abortion and same-sex marriage, he suggested, "we're going to just have to agree to get along for a little while." The comments earned Daniels a round of criticism from social conservatives, and they probably would have haunted him on the primary trail. But in a sense his point was understandable - and given his own firm anti-abortion record, he probably thought he had the credibility to deliver it. To everything there is a political season, and in an era of high unemployment and record deficits a president who picked too many fights on non-economic issues would find himself an ex-president soon enough. But Daniels's attempt to frame this reality in the language of a "truce" was at once inapt and naïve, and the last few weeks have reminded us why. The 2012 election is not going to be dominated by social issues, insofar as economic concerns are likely to far outweigh every other issue in determining the winner. But even amid downturns and deficits, the culture wars are still inevitably significant, for the very simple reason that there's no common ground on which to call a truce. You can see this at work in all three of the controversies that have earned headlines recently: The Obama administration's attempt to require religious institutions to pay for contraception, sterilization and the morning-after pill; the brouhaha over the Susan G. Komen foundation's attempt to stop funding for Planned Parenthood; and Tuesday's Ninth Circuit ruling affirming an earlier lower court decision that overturned the results of California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage. What would a truce look like on any of these issues? Well, it depends on the premises that you bring to the debate. Start with the contraception mandate. To many observers, myself included, a mandate that required insurers to cover reproductive interventions while exempting religious employers seemed like the obvious way for a liberal White House to advance its social agenda while preserving social peace. And judging by the signals David Axelrod sent out Tuesday, that may still be where a backtracking Obama administration ends up. But to many on the left, access to free contraception is regarded as a fundamental human right, and "treatments" that pre-empt a potential pregnancy like Plan B and ella are morally indistinguishable from the treatments that combat a stroke or a tumor or H.I.V. Given these premises, the White House policy's exemption for churches already seems like a significant compromise, and an exemption for hospitals and schools would represent surrender to religious conservatives. The two sides, in other words, can't even agree about where the middle ground might be. The same goes for the Komen-Planned Parenthood fracas. It seems obvious to abortion opponents that a breast cancer charity that finances an abortion provider is effectively taking sides in the abortion debate, and that Komen's temporary policy shift was an attempt to return to more neutral ground. But needless to say, this is not the view of Komen's many critics. Because the money didn't directly pay for abortions, they have insisted, the existing grants were already entirely apolitical, and any change amounted to a surrender to what Mother Jones's Kevin Drum called the right's anti-Planned Parenthood jihad. Then we have the Ninth Circuit's same-sex marriage ruling, which most likely will set the stage for an appeal from Proposition 8"s backers to the Supreme Court. There are all sorts of possible compromises one could imagine on the question of same-sex wedlock, ranging from civil unions to domestic partnership provisions to a federalism that respects New York's recent vote legalizing same-sex marriage and the results of Proposition 8 alike. But social conservatives weren't particularly interested in compromise a decade ago, when they had public opinion on their side, and now that the polls have swung the other way same-sex marriage supporters are disinclined to compromise either. One could draw up a truce on paper, in other words, but only the losing side would be inclined to sign it. These uncompromising realities can be exhausting and exasperating to the many Americans who are caught in the middle, or who consider the social issues to be a polarizing distraction from more pressing economic matters. Still, the culture warriors of left and right do understand something that their less ideological fellow countrymen sometimes forget. From election to election, politics is mostly about jobs and the economy and the state of the public purse - which is as it should be. But the arguments that we remember longest, that define what it means to be democratic and American, are often the debates over human life and human rights, public morals and religious freedom - culture war debates, that is, in all their many forms. Thus Plessy v. Ferguson, decided in 1896, is more famous today than, say, the Panic of 1893. The slogan "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" is better remembered than any of Grover Cleveland's economic policies. The debates over Prohibition and women's suffrage loom larger than Warren Harding's early-1920s tax cuts. It may well be the same for our own epoch. Come what may in our culture wars, the economy and the unemployment rate will largely determine whether Barack Obama or his Republican opponent wins the next election. But in the long run, and no matter which side ultimately prevails, the debates that just re-erupted may do more to define how our era is remembered.