A False Peace

AMAGANSETT, N.Y. —  In case you haven’t heard, the culture wars that so enlivened the 1980s and ‘90s are over. Or at least that’s what some commentators are feeling these days. The savage fight that raged full-scale as recently as two years ago over gay rights, abortion, gun control, environmental protection and general permissiveness, and that culminated in the Antietam of culture battles, Bill Clinton’s impeachment and trial, seems to have just petered out. These pundits say that the combatants, exhausted from all the verbal shelling, have accepted compromise rather than press on for total victory, and it has led to a new spirit of accommodation. As one observer put it, the “crackle of cultural gunfire is now increasingly distant.”

It makes you wonder what country they’re living in. If we don’t hear the crackle of gunfire anymore, it may be because the bombs detonating overhead drown it out. Look around and you will see that abortion, gun control, environmental protection, gay rights and, lately, campaign-finance reform are still the hot-button issues, and neither side seems especially willing to lay down arms. If anything, they seem emboldened after an election that showed the citizenry to be evenly divided. No one wants to give ground for fear the tide of battle will turn.

But while the political war over social issues rages on, what these observers may have really sensed is an increasing tolerance in the popular culture for things once considered unacceptably outside the mainstream. Just a decade ago, there were no gays on television situation comedies. Now NBC’s “Will & Grace,” one of television’s most popular sitcoms, celebrates gay characters, and no one seems particularly lathered about it. A decade ago, television commercials barely hinted at sex, lest they offend potential consumers. Now they hurl sexual innuendo, and no one bats an eye. More than a decade ago, Madonna scandalized polite society with the suggestion that a new romance made her feel like a virgin. Now radio plays the most sexually explicit music, and no one notices. Britney Spears and former Sen. Bob Dole share the same Pepsi ad, and it seems natural. One might be excused, then, for assuming that there has been a truce and that a new era of cultural coexistence has dawned.

But, in truth, this is hardly a new state of affairs. The popular culture has always been more tolerant than the political culture, and the tension between the two has accounted, in part, for the launching of the culture wars. Though it is a chicken-and-egg question, cultural conservatives raise a taboo and purveyors of popular culture violate it. Then the conservatives rail against the violation, and the purveyors of popular culture rise to the challenge and push the envelope. Then the conservatives howl over the latest transgression, and the popular culture transgresses once again. And so it goes. It is a dynamic and continuous process--a symbiosis not only between the so-called conservatives and liberals but also between both of these cohorts and American society generally. Without it, the culture would be directionless, which is not only why culture wars will continue but also why we need them to continue. How dull the culture would be without them.

Considering that American popular culture is a growth industry, the combatants are hardly equal. Conservatives may be ascendant in politics, setting the agenda since at least the days of Ronald Reagan, but they are always the beleaguered ones in the war over the popular culture. Still, that discrepancy between political power and cultural power is something to which they have never quite been able to reconcile themselves. Militant conservatives simply cannot fathom how one can vote Republican, profess to embrace conservative values and yet buy Eminem CDs or watch NBC’s “The West Wing” or go see R-rated movies. To them, it is both inconsistent and a betrayal. The barrier, as they see it, isn’t between politics and culture but between conservative values and liberal values. They won the political war, so how come their troops aren’t carrying the cultural one, too?

Much to their dismay, the answer is that there are two different sets of armies in these two theaters of combat. In the political theater, you have the familiar forces of liberalism and conservatism. In the cultural one, you have a variegated group of pop-culture consumers including political right-wingers, on the one side, and a bellicose band of religious and moral conservatives, on the other. As conservative commentator David Brooks explained it in his recent book, “Bobos in Paradise,” the old bourgeoisie, which was rock-ribbed Republican, and the old bohemians, who were hippies in an earlier incarnation, have, over the last generation, morphed into what he calls “Bobos”--bourgeois bohemians. The longhaired, tie-dye-shirted, sandal-shod free spirit is now in the corporate boardroom, and the things that seemed to divide the counterculture from the business culture have largely disappeared as a result. These Bobos are obviously far less inclined than their Rotarian predecessors to fight the prudish battles against popular culture, because they are products of that culture, and they like it. They certainly don’t feel that America is endangered by its movies, TV shows and CDs, and that the nation is being sucked into a sinkhole of liberal depravity.

Moreover, if one reason cultural conservatives are losing the war is that they haven’t successfully enlisted grass-roots political conservatives in the cause, another reason is that, despite their heated rhetoric and noise, they just don’t have the numbers. When the culture wars first began in this country some 150 years ago, it was because American elites and aristocrats, a tiny faction, feared and detested the rise of a genuinely democratic culture of almanacs, crime pamphlets, dime novels, penny press newspapers, theatrical melodramas, popular music, circuses--anything that seemed to challenge the elites’ own cultural supremacy. As they saw it, this new culture, appealing to the masses, threatened the country by degrading both its standards and its morals. It was a culture of the proverbial lowest common denominator.

As the 19th century progressed, the elites gradually gave way to middle-class moralists and reformers, but the moralists’ arguments were essentially the same as the aristocrats’. Popular culture undermined American values. It promoted sex, violence, vulgarity and disrespect for authority. This was the argument when cultural conservatives were attacking saloon shows at the end of the 19th century; it was the argument when they attacked silent films, including the films of Charlie Chaplin, early in the 20th century, and when they attacked sexual comedies in the 1920s and gangster pictures in the 1930s; and it is still the argument now when they attack movie blockbusters, cutting-edge TV programs and rock CDs. Nothing changes but the targets themselves.

If the arguments have remained the same, so have the motives. Though one certainly can’t impugn the conservatives’ sincerity, in professing to save America from the toxin of popular culture, they were also saving themselves. Popular culture promoted the sort of values that further marginalized the critics and made them seem even more old-fashioned and irrelevant to a modern society. It is a war they cannot afford to lose without immolating, so they have to keep soldiering on no matter how inexorably the popular culture seems to advance.

But as they do so, they don’t seem to realize that the popular culture may not be a form of cultural illiteracy, which has long been the traditionalists’ way of accounting for the success of low-grade entertainment. It may actually be a form of rebellion for people who deliberately choose what is likely to infuriate the cultural commissars who are so intent on telling them what is good for them. Since the days of Andrew Jackson, one embraced the “trashy” in direct proportion to the critics’ hatred of it, thus asserting one’s cultural independence and power. It is one of the reasons the popular culture often goes to extremes. At the extremes lies the greatest irritation value.

So the culture wars may ebb and flow, but they will never, never end because both sides have too much at stake. Conservatives cannot concede defeat since to do so would end the hope of their world-view ever prevailing. Instead, they take each new assault as a mortal threat to the nation and regird for battle. For their part, consumers of popular culture need that opposition to give them a mark to shoot for--a boundary to transgress. They know that without conservatives to excoriate it, the popular culture would lose its subversive subtext and the sneaky thrill of violation that fuels it. That is why, however distant the crackle of gunfire, the hostilities will continue, and why they will continue to chart our cultural course.

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Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at USC Annenberg, is the author of “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.”