The Republican War On Culture | December 2004
'Utopianism is one of the plagues of our age' (Irving Kristol, Republican pundit)
One of the current right-wing mantras is that there is a "Culture War" going on in the United States. There is. As usual, the Republican spin on this confrontation is the exact opposite of the truth, a complete mis-reading and mis-representation of reality.
The division in the United States that we see now began in the late 1960s. We called it the "Generation Gap." Then and now, the underlying difference of worldview can be summarized as a case of "Synthetic vs. Organic." This ramifies into all of the other issues, like Civil Rights, the environment, and even religion. The visionary and utopian worldview that flowered in the 60s saw a future where the wonders of modern technology could be combined with the higher impulses of the human spirit, where people cooperated to create a society that worked for everybody without exploitation or oppression, and where careful husbandry of the planet's resources would assure generations of clean air and drinking water. This wasn't happening then, and it isn't now.
Now, the negative impulse of exploitation and shameless degradation of people and the landscape is riding high, hiding behind its fig leaf of "Christian Morality" and goaded on by the schoolyard chants of slovenly bullies like Limbaugh and O'Reilly.
The culture clash that began in the 60s was about relevance, and honesty. These were the first years the 'Patriot as Consumer' ideology developed after WWII was ever questioned. It was the biggest division in American Culture since the Civil War, in the 1860's, and more subtle one. This division was about authenticity of life, about 'relevance,' about finding more meaningful answers to spiritual questions. Young white kids suddenly saw through their parents dessicated, suburban world of denial. A critical mass of people realized that there was an elephant in the room that nobody would talk about, and began talking about it.
This elephant is in a word: Direction. Do the powers that be follow a direction of ethics, or do they take the feral path, the direction of the predator? Do the "Commaning Heights" of society work towards optimizing the human experience, or do they behave like greedy spoiled brats and mine humanity like so much Sprawl Mart fodder?
Obviously, the latter. Now, the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse. Riding a wave of religious hysteria mixed with terrorism-anxiety and a dumbed down populace, the Neocons have Trojan-Horsed themselves into ultimate power.
Neo-Conservative gurus Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and Carl Rove clearly state that their strategy is to identify wedge issues, amplify them, and use them to make foundational shifts in the body politic. They create and heighten polarization so it looks like the only alternative to the left they depict is the far-right they peddle. Masters of the soundbite, they have succeeded brilliantly. Liberals have been generous in supplying targets - Gay Marriage, Bill Clinton, Political Correctness, Abortion - and having supplied the targets, now find themselves in the indefensible position of going against "The Bible," at least the Christian mis-interpretation of it.
The 10 year long, systematic, Scaife-funded smear campaign against Bill Clinton did far more than just show how utterly shameless the Neocons are, it finally found pay dirt and bore fruit more luscious than any of them could have hoped for in his gift to them: Monica Lewinsky. It paved the way for Bush II, drastically degraded the standards of ethics in media and reporting, and ultimately discredited Democrat-Progressives in general in the blurred eye of the world. The same weasel masterminds of that ten year drumbeat of made-up and always ultimately retracted (pg. 67b) muckracking and lies about Clinton are now running the country.
Rove says explicitly that his goal is to eliminate the Democratic Party. Grover Norquist says "bipartisanship is date-rape" and that "he doesn't want to eliminate government, he just wants to reduce it to a size where he can drown it in the bathtub." Cute, but chilling. The Neoconservatives are not Conservatives, nor are they Republicans. They are a new and sinister mutation of political theory.
Smug, glib neocon ridicule of nuance, detail, facts or history neutralizes all arguments. The amalgam of "rational thought," "deconstructionism" and "Jerry Springer" makes it possible for someone to say 1+1 makes 270,000, so just shut up. Pointing out that Bush's tax cuts benefited the top 1% of income brackets and is putting us into debt we may never pay off brings shouts of "Clinton got a BJ and lied about it" and that ends the discussion. No matter that equating the lies of George Bush to the lies of Bill Clinton is like comparing the lies of Jeff Dahmer to lies told on "Leave it to Beaver." Credibility is based entirely on whether someone agrees with your Limbaugh-jargon or not.
The backlash against the visionary 60's is now in full force. The Check and Balance system is gone. With control of the media, the Neocon-Corporate's victory is complete. The added spice of Al-Qaeda's next attack, promised to dwarf 911, will provide the perfect pretext to clamp down on United States citizens, with "Patriot Acts" and other deceptively named tools.
Do not pretend that the Neocons "wouldn't turn against the people - they just wouldn't -" they already have, with a vengeance. Thirty years of citizen-driven activism affecting Civil Rights, New Deal social programs, and environmental regulations on corporate interests dumping poison in people's back yards have been systematically dismantled by the Bush administration. Disguising things as their opposites, they have put corporate anti-environmental lobbyists in charge of the very regulatory agencies they once fought against. Putting the pharmaceutical corporations in charge of Health Care is like asking a Gypsy to hold your wallet for a minute while you tie your shoe.
The Bush claim to "values" is marketing, nothing more. Christian values impel the faithful to "protect the weakest among us" - which is the exact opposite of Bush's system. Elected on a razor thin margin (smallest of any incumbent in U.S. history) driven by the vaguely articulated concept of "values," Bush says his first order of business is turning Social Security over to investment sharks. What? That wasn't what we heard about during the campaign!
Stealing from the poor to lavish the rich is not a Moral Value, in any religion. Neither is Intellectual Sloth, in a voter, or a president. How about the values of building a society on cooperation, of caretaking our planet instead of plundering it, of rising above Darwinian dog-eat-dog exploitation? Using power and money to craft a world that is healthy, a world that allows the miracle of the human mind and its creation to flourish, is a value. Bankrupting the country to fund bungled imperialist adventuring in the Middle East is immoral, and not a "value." Blaming the deficits on Medicare when their cause is corporate welfare and tax giveaways to the ultra rich is immoral and not a "value."
Cynically creating division and eliminating the middle class are Republican tactics. Disguising these tactics as "Moral Values" is the ultimate in Orwellian Newspeak, calling something its opposite, or put more simply, lying, the advertiser's creed. Descending into religious fundamentalism is also a negative value that should be avoided, no matter how it's packaged. Pat Robertson saying his religion is the truth and that the Muslims are going to hell is not only immoral and repellent ethically, it shows the blind myopia of absolutist philosophy.
The biggest single threat to peace and prosperity in the world today is George W. Bush. His idiotic claims that "They hate us because of our freedom" insult the intelligence of anyone who has any. They don't hate us "because of our freedom," or because "they are evil." They hate us because of our policies and our actions. Thus, they don't hate US, they hate the Republicans. The culture war is not about "Good vs. Evil," it's about "The Republican Neocons vs. The Rest of the World."
"Sincerity is everything in politics. If you can fake that, you've got it made." unknown
"If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we'll stop telling the truth about them." Adlai Stevenson
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Democracy Disgraced
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Political Correctness is NOT an outgrowth of 60's Radicalism