I came across an opinion column on the FOX news website today entitled “It’s the Culture, Stupid,” which discussed how the conservatives in the United States will never be able to bring their goals to fruition as long as they don’t understand one thing: America will never become conservative as long as the culture in this nation remains driven by its “default” liberal culture. It this “battle for the culture” that I wish to address today.
According to the article, the left “rules the trifecta of cultural influence: the media, academia, and entertainment.” Fighting merely the issues, such as healthcare, climate change, and taxes, is not enough, because the liberal power structure actually determines the parameters of these debates. The article continues with a look back on a golden age of the post-WWII period when private cultural institutions such as churches provided Americans with meaning and some sense of unified purpose. The solution to this vacuous and narcissistic society in which we live lies in setting a more long-term agenda through a robust and reinvigorated private realm. Think tanks, conservative research institutes, film studios, publishers, and even museums would do much to cure the decadent woes of our social ills.
Now that I’ve offered a brief summary of this article, I would like to point out for the author that she has done a thorough job of describing precisely how the conservative movement functions today. Conservatives rule daytime radio talk shows, are aptly represented by think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation; I will only mention FOX news itself, which, despite its logo of “fair and balanced” clearly represents the source with which more conservatives identify. These and many other institutions which seek conservative solutions to our issues have been the backbone of the GOP since the Reagan years, and in the subsequent decades have only increased their legitimacy among the people. In fact, the term “culture war” is a well-established and favored concept to describe the conservative ordering of our society.
So, we have here an article that is attempting to offer a fresh solution to what’s wrong with “liberal” society and to reorient conservatives towards a strategy that will work better, and yet, this isn’t new at all; it’s business as usual. Still, I do think that the article brings to light a few important points about the great level of miscommunication that currently persists in American political discourse. First, although we perceive a unprecedented divisiveness in twenty-first century politics, people actually persist on a spectrum of beliefs, and a messy one at that. The author of the article, although a self-identified conservative, remains disenchanted with many of the tactics of conservative politics. She feels that the conservative agenda actually strengthens the slide towards materialistic self-indulgence that is destroying the social fabric. Consumerism is clearly not her vision of a healthy America; it must be undergirded with solid values and vibrant community life on the local level. Otherwise, the government will continue to oppressively encroach upon our lives.
Even though she exposes conservative beliefs, however, the author, Andrea Tantaros, paints liberals or progressives as completely uniform, almost monolithic. From the article, the reader would consider all those on the left support a big “welfare state,” follow the “mainstream liberal media” unwaveringly, seek to encourage a free-fall into materialistic self-absorption, and approve wholeheartedly of the ethics of mass entertainment (aka Hollywood). Also, you might have noticed that I left out any reference to academics; there’s a good reason for this: I am a member of academia, a financially-challenged student currently working on my PhD after leaving the corporate world for a vocation more geared towards public service. I am a progressive, and I feel that it’s important that I state how I, and many others in the progressive movement do NOT conform so easily to the picture often ascribed to us.
Now that I have “outed” myself as an academic, I must beckon you, the conservative reader, to not shut down immediately and categorize me as some elitist in an ivory tower, peering down snobbishly at the common folk. Give me a chance to state my case, because this is, after all, what democracy is all about: honest conversation about our problems. I come from a rather blue-collar background, was educated in an urban public school system, flunked out of college my first time, and spent my twenties working in retail management before returning to graduate school. Further, most of us academics do not earn large salaries. In fact, I’m probably the poorest among my lifelong friends. As for my politics, I can state unequivocally that I am not in favor of the government managing our lives from the cradle to the grave; I do not feel that any mainstream media outlet does a good job of informing citizens about issues and encouraging involvement in our democracy; and I agree that most of what Hollywood, television, and advertisers produce is poisonous to healthy civic consciousness; I also believe that Americans have become rather self-centered and disengaged from their obligations from one another. On these things, I think that Ms. Tantaros and I would agree.
I do, however, recognize a few items that she has failed to mention that cause me to feel differently about how to solve the nation’s woes. The golden age of 50 years ago to which she refers is also a time when the government was involved in social and economic planning on a large scale. Most large corporations were heavily regulated, banks were restricted to limited scope, the mentally ill (aka most of the would-be homeless) were cared in government-run and government-subsidized institutions, and strong (though admittedly corrupt) organized labor offered protection for many middle-class workers from exploitation by corporate greed. Thus, while our private institutions might have been functioning, so was our public bureaucracy. Moreover, while I support the efforts of private institutions, studies do demonstrate that in comparison with the effectiveness of large-scale public initiatives, their impact has always been marginal at best.
My point is that despite our different perspectives, we do see many of the same problems: poverty, joblessness, out-of-control multinational corporations which lobby for government influence, a self-indulgent populous of “consumers” who have forgotten that they are also “citizens.” However, as long as we paint those on the other side of the fence as “the enemy,” we will never actually bring back into civic participation those who have shrunk into their consumerist lifestyles, and thus, the lynchpin of our democracy, the civic-minded individual, will continue to erode. So, instead of painting our current struggle as a culture war, we might want to realize that most of us who are invested in serving our democracy are actually trying to attack the same difficulties. Then, we might remember that in order to protect our individual liberty, we need citizens who care about each other (yes, even the occasional freeloader) and not just our own little universes.
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