The rabbit holes I've been going down lately have led me to thinking about the cultural aspects of political change. I'm starting to believe that I've underestimated the importance of cultural factors in favor of economic issues, and have been wrong to do so. It's not the economy, stupid.
It's surprising that I should have bought into that line of thinking considering that I myself have a long and distinguished record of voting on cultural issues over economic issues. I have a strong memory of the culture wars of the late '80s and early '90s. They left a big impression on me. Yet somehow when the reasons for George Bush's defeat are enumerated, people talk about Ross Perot and about the recession and not about his attack on the Simpsons or his vice president's attack on Murphy Brown.
Last week's rabbit hole led me to reading about the "Rural Purge" of the early 1970s, and to reconsider George H.W. Bush's Presidency in light of what I learned. See, I thought "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" was a song about the impossibility of the media of representing reality. On one level it is. On another level it is a direct call-out of CBS for favoring programming which marginalized black voices. What I didn't realize is that CBS, as well as the other networks, listened and responded.
The "rural purge" is largely lamented in nostalgia articles when it's noted at all - old folks still salty that they cancelled Petticoat Junction. Overlooked is that the "rural purge" opened the door for most of the great series of the '70s. Petticoat Junction was replaced with the Mary Tyler Moore show. The cancelled shows made way shows like All in the Family and Sanford and Son. Feminist voices, black voices, now had a stronger presence on the networks, in the most popular media of the day.
And "The Waltons", which George H.W. Bush championed over the Simpsons, was part of the wave of counterreaction to that purge. Now, I'm sure the Waltons, which I haven't seen, is a fine show. A lot of the rural shows were not only not racist, but did oppose racism, and I have no wish to judge the shows themselves, but only their broader cultural significance, which is that in the big picture, ruralism is inseparably linked to traditionalism, and traditionalism, in this context, is inseparably linked to racism.
Invoking things like the Waltons and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is a dog whistle. Not even necessarily consciously so - I have no reason to believe that any part of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band are racist, and certainly the Will the Circle Be Unbroken set is justly respected, though when it comes to overviews of this sort of music it doesn't come close to measuring up to the "post-racial" Harry Smith Anthology. But belonging to that culture makes it not just possible, and easy, to say things like that you don't think atheists should be considered American citizens, without even thinking about it.
Thinking about it in these terms is instructive and useful. Ronald Reagan didn't denounce television - he had his wife go on Diff'rent Strokes. George W. Bush, despite his status as a "born-again" Christian, was markedly averse to "culture wars". Indeed, the party running against popular culture in 2000 was the Democratic ticket, featuring Al Gore, husband of Tipper, and Joe Lieberman.
So I believe that this current round of culture wars, the Internet culture wars, are pivotally important. And for me, the telling thing about this round of culture wars is seeing how quickly and easily a certain strain of libertarianism tilts into fascism. This is not a new phenomenon. Heinlein was a libertarian, and he gave us Starship Troopers - Verhoeven's filmed attack on that fascist novel in the guise of an "adaptation" is to me his finest moment as a filmmaker. So, for that matter, was Robespierre a libertarian.
This is not to say that all libertarianism slides, at the moment of crisis, towards fascism. This is demonstrably false. Indeed, libertarianism flourishes most brightly in the absence of crisis or struggle. It is the favored ideology of the favored. For my part, I have a certain distrust of any libertarian who is not also a libertine. A person who claims to want more "freedom" but has no discernible tendencies towards excess is naturally suspect. If they don't want freedom to orgy, what, then, do they want with it? Because freedom, in people's hearts, is never really an end in itself, but only a means to an end.
And that end, in many cases, is power without responsibility. This is the dominant paradigm of the libertarian Internet. God help us if we did not have Spiderman on our side.
