Joe Biden is a reluctant culture warrior. For the first half of his presidency, Biden’s theory of politics was based on the idea that Democrats could best rebuild from their losses of the last decade by winning back white working-class voters. This required focusing on bread-and-butter issues while treating culture war topics as distractions. Before the Dobbs decision last June elevated reproductive freedom to a dominant election issue, Biden was notoriously reluctant to even say the word “abortion.” Writing in The Atlantic in March, Ronald Brownstein observed that at the start of his term Biden was “betting that the non-college-educated workers, especially those who are white, who constitute the principal audience for the Republican cultural offensive will prove less receptive to those divisive messages if they feel more economically secure.”