No More Culture Wars!

Note: Sorry for the light content yesterday. My car battery died, and it was a bit of a hassle trying to take care of that. Lots of stuff today, so get ready to read. -- Craig

Frank Rich's column today in the Times is a must-read.

Rich writes the obituary for the culture wars, demonstrating how social issues just don't matter anymore for the majority of Americans like they did even a couple years ago.

What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.

Not only was Obama’s stem-cell decree an anticlimactic blip in the news, but so was his earlier reversal of Bush restrictions on the use of federal money by organizations offering abortions overseas. When the administration tardily ends “don’t ask, don’t tell,” you can bet that this action, too, will be greeted by more yawns than howls.

Once again, both the president and the country are following New Deal-era precedent. In the 1920s boom, the reigning moral crusade was Prohibition, and it packed so much political muscle that F.D.R. didn’t oppose it. The Anti-Saloon League was the Moral Majority of its day, the vanguard of a powerful fundamentalist movement that pushed anti-evolution legislation as vehemently as it did its war on booze. (The Scopes “monkey trial” was in 1925.) But the political standing of this crowd crashed along with the stock market. Roosevelt shrewdly came down on the side of “the wets” in his presidential campaign, leaving Hoover to drown with “the dries.”

[...]

In our own hard times, the former moral “majority” has been downsized to more of a minority than ever. Polling shows that nearly 60 percent of Americans agree with ending Bush restrictions on stem-cell research (a Washington Post/ABC News survey in January); that 55 percent endorse either gay civil unions or same-sex marriage (Newsweek, December 2008); and that 75 percent believe openly gay Americans should serve in the military (Post/ABC, July 2008). Even the old indecency wars have subsided. When a federal court last year struck down the F.C.C. fine against CBS for Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl, few Americans either noticed or cared about the latest twist in what had once been a national cause célèbre.

Being a nut for generational theory, especially as it applies to politics, I liked that Rich reached back to the Great Depression to illustrate the power that the economy has over cultural issues in trying times. Just as many GIs were raised amid a culture of indulgence in the '20s, Millennials shared a similar experience in the 1990s. With the glitz stripped away by the stock market crash in 1929 and this decade's terror attacks, the War in Iraq, and financial meltdown, the issues of prohibition, same-sex marriage, and church and state relationships suddenly take on a new irrelevance.

In Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, we learn why a focus on economics is unfavorable for the GOP:

In fact, [conservative] backlash leaders systematically downplay the politics of economics. The movement's basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern -- that Values Matter Most, as one backlash title has it. On those grounds it rallies citizens who would once have been reliable partisans of the New Deal to the standard of conservatism... Over the last three decades they have smashed the welfare state, reduced the tax burden on corporations and the wealthy, and generally facilitated the country's return to a nineteenth-century pattern of wealth distribution. Thus the primary contradiction of the backlash: it is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people. (p. 6)

In other words, turning the spotlight on economics restricts the Republicans in their efforts to distract voters so that they can rob them of their quality of life.

With all this in mind, we now have the Millennials arriving -- a generation more focused on the common good than any in the last seventy or eighty years -- who think the government has a large role to play in ensuring Americans' economic security. Far from ideological, youth today just want something to work. Squeezed by the economy even before the meltdown, are youth really going to care that gays are serving in the military, especially given their already progressive views?

Perhaps we have a generation that gets engaged every eighty years because there's suddenly an important political dialogue to be had. Not one that's focused on distraction and division, but a conversation that is positive and constructive, one led by young people who are builders by nature, whose meritocratic attitudes push institutions upward. There are no limits on what can be accomplished. The work to be done is so serious that the pettiness of Republican "backlash" politics doesn't even have a place in the discussion anymore.

The hypnotism of America is over. And while there's much work to be done, let's be grateful that we can actually start working.