The Triumph of Culture Over Politics

The Wall Street Journal (Weekend Edition) ^ | 13 September 2008 | LEE SIEGEL

[COBOL2Java]

Liberals always think there's something broken in politics. Conservatives always think there's something wrong with the culture. Why that gives Sarah Palin and the Republicans the edge in November.

Culture war, culture war! In our nation of revivals -- theatrical, cinematic and political -- this one sounds exciting, and promises a riveting new story line in the riveting presidential campaign. But the idea of a resurrected culture war is all sound bites and flurry, and not much else.

A war requires two sides to fight it. Yet the Republicans are clamoring about the culture while the Democrats insist on sticking to the political "issues." It's not war but two parallel monologues. The Republicans are frictionlessly pursuing the same successful strategy that they developed over 25 years ago.

That was when the Reaganites pronounced government irrelevant, even obstructive, to the improvement of social life, thereby shifting the Republicans' center of operations from politics to culture. In short order, the Reagan revolutionaries invited into their cause the Christian right, who set their self-contained cultural universe against secular cultural values that the liberals had never dreamed would be under explicit siege.

Still, the Christian perspective had to be tempered and made more inclusive. Enter Allan Bloom. In 1987, Mr. Bloom published his bestselling "The Closing of the American Mind," an attack on what he perceived as coarse popular culture and a destructive political correctness at the universities. Taking up the Christian right's banner in his cosmopolitan intellectual's hands, Mr. Bloom married the religious right to the mostly secular neo-conservatives. He began the work completed by William Bennett in the latter's sensationally popular "The Book of Virtues." Mr. Bloom redefined culture as "values."

[Senator Goldwater]

This guy has it right:

Culture’s can be fixed.

Governments can only expand or contract.

[marktwain]

“No, there is no culture war. There is only the Republicans’ unilateral mastery of the cultural strategy. The Democrats consider any attention to the practices and prejudices of everyday living a mendacious diversion from the “issues,” ...

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A way over-hyped armchair psychology read on the campaign.

He totally ignores the Lefts obvious assault on the culture and claims that the Republican's attempts to fight back are essentially nothing but politics.

This analysis might work for confused “moderates” who find them-self on the left by osmosis from the media, but in ignoring the far Lefts obvious and intense efforts to win by taking over the “institutions” and changing the culture, it is fatally flawed.

[bioqubit]

A way over-hyped armchair psychology read on the campaign.

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You are right on target. He just grabs a few concepts, twists them and allows himself to be pronounced “brilliant”. Obnoxious.

He reminds me of the line “If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, then baffle them with you bulls**t.”

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

WSJ:"Still, the Christian perspective had to be tempered and made more inclusive. Enter Allan Bloom. In 1987, Mr. Bloom published his bestselling "The Closing of the American Mind," an attack on what he perceived as coarse popular culture and a destructive political correctness at the universities. Taking up the Christian right's banner in his cosmopolitan intellectual's hands, Mr. Bloom married the religious right to the mostly secular neo-conservatives. He began the work completed by William Bennett in the latter's sensationally popular "The Book of Virtues." Mr. Bloom redefined culture as "values."

Mr. Bloom gave the impression that it was hopeless to fight for his beloved Great Books because the Great Books had been driven to extinction by angry left-wing professors and vulgar forms of diversion. High culture was irretrievably lost to the average person. "

It still is. Probably even more so after the dumbing-down of Generation X and Y in the 1990s. What Bloom did in the 1980s was write in a way in which his Straussian Platonism appealed to the intellectual vanity even of some lukewarm liberals who wanted to be associated with cultural sophistication and intellectual superiority, while missing the esoteric part. Buckley's fusionism at National Review had already created an environment for this discussion during the Reagan years.

A lot of the boomers who bought the book missed the real argument and just wanted to clobber students ovder the head, as if they had caused the problem. The situation in the colleges is even worse now, if that is possible. The problem goes much deeper and has to do with estrangement from normal Western Christian culture. But since the deaths of Reagan and Buckley conservatives have not been on the offensive intellectually. The Bush-Cheney years were missed opportunities for conservatives.

[paudio]

If hearing the word "culture" makes you think of Rossini, the latest translation of "Anna Karenina," the Guggenheim Museum or "The Wire," then you're probably a liberal -- or, at least, an unreconstructed "cosmopolitan" conservative. But if the word culture means for you forms of courtship, or sexual preference, or the relationship between parents and children, or the set of rituals that revolve around the ownership and use of a gun, or, most passionately of all, ways of living, and believing, and rejoicing, and suffering, and dying that are hallowed by the religion you practice and embodied in the church you belong to -- if for you, culture does not primarily signify opera or HBO, then you are probably celebrating Sarah Palin's ragged, real-seeming life. In that case, you are what might be called either a heartland or a Bloomian conservative.

The author holds a reductionist view of culture. Conservatives never thought Veemer or Wagner is not part of 'culture'. They consider culture as the whole package. When they listen Handel's Messiah, they found it touching their lives, not simply arousing their 'cultural' experience or feeling.

[Donald Rumsfeld Fan]

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Hank sums it up.

It was actually Jimmy Carter and the disintegration of American society after the 1960s which helped "secular" neocons drift into the Reagan tent with religious conservatives. Along with all the recovering liberals who had been mugged. That had already happened by the time Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. Never seen a breakdown of how many secular humanists joined the conservative cause because of his book. Anyone have anything on that?

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

Conservative History of the American Left

[palomonte]

I agree...way overhyped.

The left continually assaults traditional american culture and condems attempts to fight back as “racist”.

[Salvation]

BTTT!

[bluegirl]

A way over-hyped armchair psychology read on the campaign.

I thought it was a load of crap.

[Dilbert San Diego]

True, the left is assaulting traditional American culture and calls those who oppose them bigoted.

If you are againt homosexual marriage, then you must be a homophobic bigot against homosexuals. That you might have concerns about children or how marriage is defined by society is of no consequence. In their world, you must support same-sex marriage or be a bigoted homphobe.

If you are against affirmative action, you must be a racist. Legitimate concerns about people with lesser qualifications getting jobs or college admission are swept aside. In their world you must support affirmative action.

If you are against abortion on demand, then you must be against women’s rights in other areas, not just with the so-called reproductive rights that the left talks about.

If you are against the sewer of “entertainment” coming out of Hollywood, you must be in favor of censorship. Legitimate concerns about displays of sexual activity, or such activity among people who aren’t married, or even in any type of relationship, are swept aside. In their world, any criticism of content is taken as favoring censorship.

[American in Israel]

Still, the Christian perspective had to be tempered and made more inclusive.

The Christian perspective has not changed one bit. It was always inclusive of all walks of life. If "sinners" were excluded every church would have zero people in them. The "making Christian perspective more inclusive", in reality is the culture war in a nut shell. It was when government became so much a part of defining Christianity and culture instead of serving that culture that we became oppressed by all these thought control laws.

Our government has become a religion, the religion of secular humanism. Christians when they founded this nation knew from history that Governments must never become religious or they become oppressive. So when this nation was formed, it was a Christian nation, but one that was balanced with the freedom of religion. Now it has become a humanistic religion that has the "freedom FROM religion".

We were not as wise as our founding fathers, we have allowed our government to narrowly define what religion is, and become slaves to the deacons of the religion in control, the Judicial Rulers in the Supreme court.