Here Comes the Culture War!

From the New Yorker (by way of facebook, I think):

In recent weeks, the Republican candidates, cognoscenti, and congressional leadership have all made it increasingly plain that the culture wars have not been relegated to the days of the Reverends Falwell and Robertson. Mitt Romney is tweeting furiously about the Administration’s “attacks on religious liberty.” Speaker John Boehner said on the floor of the House that Obama is forcing Catholic hospitals and charities to “provide services they believe are immoral”—i.e., an “attack on religious freedom.” Rick Santorum called Obama “hostile to people of faith, particularly Christians, and specifically Catholics.” Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post that “radicalism and maliciousness” has led the Administration to issue an “edict delivered with a sneer.” Gerson concluded, “The war on religion is now formally declared.”

And

Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum are intent on fanning any ember of cultural anxiety, fear, or resentment that can be found. The more the economy shows signs of life—however slight, however deceptive in many ways—the more the Republicans, and their media champions, are likely to resort to the kind of battles outlined in Bill O’Reilly’s 2006 book, “Culture Warrior,” which posited a country divided between decent, hard-working people of faith and pernicious secular liberals—a small but powerful Soros-funded minority that knows only contempt for “traditional American values” and wants to mold the country into “the image of Western Europe.” (Note how, in the Republican debates, the word “Europe” is made to sound like the embodiment of “Soviet.”)

More here.

It's tempting to say that culture issues are what Republicans resort to when they got nothin'. But that's not true. Since Nixon figured it out back in the early 70s, divisive culture wars are the method by which the GOP gets Americans to vote against their own economic interests. I mean, the Republicans are, in the end, the party of rich people. How the hell do they get regular Joes to vote for candidates who will almost certainly fuck over the people who voted for them? You throw semen-spurting gays at them. You construct mythologies about lazy black people living large on your tax dollars while you toil away in the Spice Mines of Kessel. You turn obscure academics into a fifth column of communists who want to eat your babies. You reconfigure the Mexican immigrant who washes dishes at the restaurant where you dine into a member of a secret conspiracy to take back all the territory seized by the US during the Mexican War back in 1845. You change the capitalist created phrase "happy holidays" into a liberal plot to destroy Santa and Jesus. And on and on and on.

The reality is that the culture wars, if that's what you want to call the retarded demagoguery that is now bedrock Republican rhetoric, never really went away. Conservatives are always fanning the flames. Frankly, I can't see much of a difference between what Republicans are saying today about our culture and what they were saying twenty years ago. It's always here.

The good news, as I see it, is that this shit seems to be losing traction. MTV, and lots of other programming, made a lot of young people sympathetic towards the GLBTQ community. Everybody has premarital sex now. Nobody really gives a fuck about communism anymore because nobody is really communist anymore. People don't give a shit if you smoke pot. And, even though most Americans self-identify as Christians, they don't really feel like preachers, priests, and theologians really speak for them. And, oh yeah, racism and xenophobia are now decidedly cultural niches, thoroughly condemned by the mainstream.

In short, the Republican dumbshit constituency, composed of middle and working class paranoid white people, is getting old and smaller in numbers. In a decade or two, cultural wedge issues won't work anymore.

I hope I live long enough to see it.

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