What has come to be called the “culture war” in America probably had its origins in World War II. The Depression was over, the evil Axis (the old one) was vanquished, but a new war was already forming adversaries. There was all that fighting to save the world for democracy and preserve the “American way of life,” but not much understanding of what that really meant by those notions. Both a new national order and a “new world order” were already taking shape and we didn’t quite get what either of them were about. Maybe we still don’t get it. But it does seem somewhat clear that we need to reconsider what we mean by notions like democracy, the American way of life, and the place of America in the world. If “globalization” means anything, it means that our domestic concerns are more than ever mingled with our international behavior, economically and politically.
So pulling the two dimensions apart is difficult. It’s a slippery and unwieldy topic, so these thoughts might wander off point because it’s a bit of thinking out loud. So I’ll start with what I think are the origins and outlines of the Culture War, and leave some other aspects to subsequent postings.
First of all, America never was a monoculture, say the way, maybe, Lichtenstein probably is, or some clannish aboriginals in the Amazon rain forest. We were sometimes brought up to think that it was, typified by Norman Rockwell illustrations and Andy Hardy movies. But we weren’t “one-of-a-kind” right from the get-go; just ask a slave. In the 1960s, in graduate school, I was reading books about the American “melting pot,” that America had this homogenizing process that turned us all into . . . what, the Cleavers? But the country was already coming apart at the seams over racial, ethnic, gender and generational identities, interests and differences. We had our North and South, our aristocracies and serfs, rich and poor, gradations of melanin, and a myriad of ethnic groups, languages, cuisines and religions, that we thought got processed into some bouillabaisse of red, white and blue. People liked the myth but secretly hated being homogenized, particularly when that meant having to take on the cultural trappings of the “other.”
WWII set in motion momentous social changes that, in my view, are the prime fuel for our domestic Culture War. Blacks who went off to fight, and women who went off to fight and work in defense industries, and neither cohort were going to be the same after the war, so the Civil Rights and Women’s movements got a major push from the war and the battle lines for a second “civil war” were being drawn.
America may not have had an all out “culture war” before Patrick Buchanan evoked the term a few years back, but it had always had its culture skirmishes—lynchings, gang behavior, ethnic spatial competition in the cities, regionalisms, and such. You don’t have to scratch very deep through the surface of our popular culture to see that our cultural differences are alive and hot.
By the time of the arrival of the Vietnam War all the elements of the culture war were in place. Vietnam gave the combatants a real as well as a surrogate war to fight. Youth, who since the mid fifties had begun to form their own culture around their rock and roll, new forms of dress, new forms of substance abuse, and their shared sexual angst, now refused to fight the “commies” the way their fathers had fought the “fascists.” Women could hold to the Mrs. Cleaver model or burn their bras. Minorities could participate in freedom marches and be arrested or set upon by police dogs, or join the Simbianese liberation army or change their name to “X”. These are oversimplifications, but they stand for more complex and deeper rifts that were sundering the myth of monocultural America. There were not many happy, Norman Rockwell dinner tables in the turbulent 60s.
The Cultural Right never seemed for forgive or forget what they regarded as the Liberal Left’s betrayal of the country, the reason that America lost its first war, that racial minorities had become “uppity,” that women wanted to become the sovereigns of their own bodies, that homosexuals were coming out of the closet, and youth, . . . well, it was descending into a hellish stew of sex, drugs and rock and roll. “America has lost its bearings” was lamented by people who never really had any idea where America was going anyway. What they did know is that its notion of freedom, democracy, and the American way had gone far enough for their liking. Some of those “counter-culture” people and minorities don’t seem to be practicing democracy they way we think it should be practiced.
The course correction that the Cultural Right deemed necessary was just as profound in its ways, but essentially it centered on a “return” to basics, many of which have a familiar ring these days: church, family, love of country, all somewhat wrapped in a patriarchal obeisance. Brown vs the Board of Education in 1954 and The Civil Rights Act a decade later convinced the South that the humiliation of the Civil War was not over and it was time to flip from Democrat to those Republicans who have a penchant for liking things “the old way.” That was what they meant by “conservatism.” In that soil of social reaction sprouted the fundamentalist evangelical churches that would, “praise Jesus!” become the “useful idiots” of a Republican Party that would no longer recognize a Barry Goldwater, a Nelson Rockefeller, and certainly not a Teddy Roosevelt.
To be fair, the Cultural Left didn’t know where things were going either, and to some extent that has been its problem in fashioning its concerns into an apprehensible and politically viable vision. The Cultural Left was, and has been, more of a loose “coalition” of interest groups (sometimes in competition) allied to concerns about freedom and equality. They never were what that the Right characterized them to be, a bunch of commie “pinkos” bent on turning us into the USSA, and they let that great word, liberal , get turned into an epithet by the glib media minions of the Republican Party. The Left believed in the possibility of the melting pot; the Right mouthed it, but operated politically to exploit the politics of division. To them America was a place that could handle different cultures, but the cultures had to stay in their place.
And so the Cultural Left’s dilemma is that it can’t come up with a vision of America that has the simplicity (and myopia) of the Cultural Right. The Right knows that fear is the best motivator; and war is very scary.
[To Be Continued]
___________________________________
©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.30.2005)