I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s when although politically speaking “conservatism” was on the rise it was a widely unpopular cultural political stance and disposition in all forms of media.
Ironically, it was the heavy anti- conservative bent within the culture and media that naturally attracted the rebellious teen that I was to the right wing side of the spectrum.
The “Conservative” side of just about every debate was always presented in the most anti-intellectual terms and presented in such a way that one could only agree with it if they wanted to admit they were themselves idiots or moral monsters.
Religion was also much mocked in the culture with priests and ministers being presented as cynical manipulators, cheats, and hypocrites and believer shown as either dumb rubes or morally bankrupt themselves.
“All in the Family”, “MASH”, “Mary Tyler Moore”, “Murphy Brown”, “Maude”, “Taxi”, and just about every show that touched upon anything even slightly political presented the “liberal” viewpoint as the right, proper, and moral position to have while the “conservative” side was a caricature, that made one think of the moron opinions of an Archie Bunker: insular, bigoted, stupid, ignorant, parochial- in a word? Wrong. Every stand up comedian of the age, all popular music, nearly every movie, news broadcasts, magazines- everywhere the “liberal” side was the correct side and the “conservative” side was wrong if not evil.
At best- at best conservatives were presented as stupid and ignorant but essentially good hearted “Archie Bunker” types who could be cajoled into siding with the “correct” side by appealing to their conscious. At worst- drooling evil secret Nazis and racists and fanatical ideologue Gordon Liddy type murderers. The most charitable presentations of “conservatives” in the entertainment industry while I was growing were the characters of Frank Burns on “Mash” and Archie Bunker. One a cowardly warmongering super nationalist moron with a comically simple mind who was also a philandering hypocrite- and the other a knuckle dragging but good hearted blue collar dope.
Typical H-wood "conservative" character
I couldn't stand it. It was suffocating. And it was this almost totalitarian lock step bias in the media and the culture toward the left side that attracted me to the right. It is common now to see left wingers mock reich wingers for their religious insistence that the media is “liberal”. And they are right to mock them but they are dead wrong if they insist that the media in this country wasn’t heavily “liberal” in the 80’s and well into the 90’s. It was. Especially on domestic and cultural issues.
Surrounded by this false presentation of what the “right” stood for and repelled by the setting up of straw men positions that conservatives didn’t hold to then knock down (which was a common tactic) I defended the right side. I thought of myself as a sort of rebel to the ruling paradigm both in the culture and that reigned in Washington even though Reagan held the White House. I would get enraged by utterly false misrepresentations of conservative positions. To me- the “right” side was the anti state side. It was the side of the oppressed minority, of the voiceless. It was the side of the little guy against insulated, arrogant, and lazy elites that wouldn’t fight the real right wing but only a fake right wing they made up out of thin air that was always one step away from reforming the Klan and marching down Pennsylvania Ave in white robes.
The only refuges for young righties like myself were literally two or three magazines with “National Review” being the bible. That bi-weekly was a pure joy that I eagerly devoured the day it arrived in the mail. “We” were an embattled minority fighting the heroic good fight against Leviathan! The odds were greatly against us. Outnumbered, lonely, and most likely destined to lose- but we had each other and the Buckley quote of “standing against the tide of history yelling Stop!” was our call to arms.
That is literally how we thought of ourselves.
Arriving to college in the late 80’s I found other young conservatives who felt exactly as I did. This was the era of the budding “right wing” alternative media movement on campuses all across the country in which many “conservative” college papers were started that took on insane totalitarian college profs like Mary Daly of Boston College or William Cole of Dartmouth. These were daring confrontations for these times on college campuses. Entire batches of these "alternative" papers were routinely stolen. Offices for them were broken into and vandalized. Conservative students were assaulted physically and most of the time the College administrations did nothing to stop this sort of harassment or punish clear acts of criminality even when left wing storm trooper students were caught in the act.
And it is ironic but we saw ourselves as the new campus radicals challenging the status quo. We saw ourselves as the inheritors of the student activism of the 60’s. We were just their opposites politically (or so I thought at the time). We were the cool guys now! We were the rebels!
But I missed something all during this time- or I just didn’t want to see it. Because of the grossly superficial way the ruling “liberal” paradigm within the culture presented the ideas, views, and opinions of conservatives I over compensated in the other direction- assigning the best of motivations to the right and I applied the most intellectual and nuanced arguments of conservatives to their positions and I dismissed as fringe those opinions and views that I thought the left unfairly presented as being the reigning opinion on the right.
I was wrong. Very wrong. Because of the simplistic one dimensional depiction of conservatives in a liberal culture I saw the right as I wanted to see it- not as it was.
And much of it was and is ugly, stupid, mean, anti intellectual, and inclined heavily to the authoritarian personality and the glorification of state sanctioned violence.
Ironically, as a “Conservative” I believed that there actually was some basis to “stereotypical” views of peoples and groups that Liberals pretended didn’t exist- but I refused to apply any sort of stereotype on conservatives. It took me a while to learn but there are more than enough justifications for liberal stereotypes of conservatives. And it took the issue of the Iraq War for me to see the real American right clearly for the first time.
What I didn’t realize, what I failed to take into account- were the real experiences of the 60’s generation- how they saw things- what motivated their outlooks and what was the reason behind the later negative cultural view of the right during the later 70’s and 80’s. What formed the image of the right to the baby boomers was another war- the Viet Nam war.
Being so caught up in the right’s presentation of the antiwar movement of the 60’s – as some sort of commie led conspiracy- I didn’t understand from where the reasons for the vast majority of antiwar opinion came. It came from a disgust with being lied too for a decade. Lies and hypocrisy and morally degenerate behavior and positions that the right backed during that war. From justifying bombing civilians to even rallying around Lt. Cally and defending the slaughtering of civilians at Mai Lai- the right displayed itself as a brutally violent and sick group of nationalistic and militaristic fanatics if not fascists who accepted every lie from the government. They called for mass murder while professing themselves to be “Christians”. It was this hypocrisy and mountains of lies on the Vietnam war that formed a whole generations’ view of the “right” that I wasn’t aware of.
I used to get into arguments about the Vietnam war with my father who was almost sent there. I would argue from a vantage of “right” vs “left” while he simply said the opposition to the war had nothing to do with that stuff for the most part and was about being lied to and disgust at the hypocrisy and the moral squalor that surrounded the war. It took me 20 years and the Iraq War to see that he was right.
People didn’t oppose the Vietnam war because two guys from SNCC met with a KGB agent or were associated by their second cousin to the American Communist Party. The drawing of such tenuous connections became a cottage industry on the right (and still is to this day). They opposed it because it was a war based on lies- lies from the government, lies from the military, lies from the media, lies from religious leaders- all the institutions of American culture were liars. And people were disgusted by it.
It took the Iraq War for me to see the real American right. And it is an ugly portrait that nearly matches how the right was portrayed in popular culture while I was growing up. But frankly it is worse. The right today is more vicious and more hateful than the right of the 60’s. And far more prone to authoritarianism. And they are proud of their ignorance. They wear their anti intellectualism as a badge of pride. In many ways they are almost nihilistic.
Whereas I used to see a character like “Frank Burns” as a joke and not even close to a depiction of a “real” conservative- what can I conclude when the leading “intellectuals” at the flagship conservative journal in this country write such things like?:
I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
Or when these foul chicken hawks (and that is what they are) attend morally disgusting events that hold forth on the “benefits of war”?
This guy is not cool
Or when they run “defense funds” for soldiers accused of massacring civilians in Iraq?
Or when they organize events like “Islamofacism awareness week”? Wasn’t “Awareness” a term conservatives used to mock?
The single most annoying sitcom "liberal" ever
They make the presentation of conservatives in shows like "MASH" or "Maude" look charitable. In his reluctant 2004 endorsement of John kerry Scott McConnell wrote:
Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation’s children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and turn it into administration policy.
It was during the propaganda build up to the Iraq War that the scales from my eyes really started to drop and the real American “Right Wing” exposed itself to me- not the one of my illusions. The right of my illusions was the nuanced upper class sophisticated conservatism of a guy like William Buckley- the real right however- the rank and file “right” is on full horrific display daily at Freerepublic.com. The American right is a street corner ideology of the lower middle class and middle class lumpen proles. And despite this word being vastly overused by the Left- the heart and soul of the modern post World War II American “right” is fascist in nature.
Defenders and spewers of lies, lies and more lies on top of corruption and a complete embrace and defense of increased state power in all things. That is the “real” right in this country. And as far as religion goes- I now see the justification for the negative views of religion that many of the baby boomers had and still possess. The silence of the Catholic Church in regards to this war is deafening. And the complicity and cheer leading and even advocacy for more war by much of Protestant America is stomach churning.
The Rapture Nutting "Reverend" Hagee
I sat by for a year and watched the most absurd propaganda about Iraq sucked up by the real right and I saw dissent squashed.
I am not sure just when “conservatism” officially became “uncool”, but perhaps it goes back to when the New York Times Magazine had a piece on “Hipublicans” as a cover story. When the Times says you are “hip”- you are not hip and haven’t been for a long time.
These geeks would only be "hip" if they were colostomy bags.
My father watching one of the GOP presidential debates remarked to me how he thought the media was being unfair to the Republicans by concentrating on religious questions. He thought they were being biased against the GOP. And I would have agreed with him a few years ago but what I don’t think he realizes as a North East Irish Catholic who is naturally turned off by such public espousal on religion by political figures is that such stuff is indeed the “Real right” in this country. That sickening faux religiosity that he thought the media was casting over the GOP is actually really what is at the core of the GOP- sickening faux religiosity, biblical nitpicking, ignorant parochial naval gazing, xenophobia . . . that is the “Real right” in this country.
It took the Iraq War to expose to me the true nature of what has passed for an American “Right wing” in this country for the past 50 years. It is a movement that is motivated by almost none of the things I though it was about and embraces all the things I thought were just leftist stereotypes of the right- militarism, faux religiosity, hyper nationalism, xenophobia, ignorant parochialism, and comprised of morally degenerate chicken hawks, hypocrites, bullies, and cowards.
The one lasting thing that will come out of the Iraq War and the “WOT” in general is that the term “Conservative” will be synonymous again with deceit, fawning government worship, childish glorification of the military, and hateful ignorance. But I don’t see the other faux side of our two party/ two ideology fraud paradigm coming out of this smelling much better either. Maybe, just maybe- we might emerge from this horrendous amoral squalor with the “left/right” divide assigned to where it should have been a long time ago- the dust bin of history along side communism and fascism.
Where are we now in the swing of cultural opinion? We are in the dark ages of the 1950’s. But even worse. The 1950’s didn’t have shows that were comical apologias for torture and all manner of law breaking by the state and its “cool” agents. Ten years from now shows like “24” and “The Company” will be seen the same way we see those preposterous “Duck and Cover” cartoons of the 50’s.
Super Fed Jack Bauer
It is 1958 right now. Change is in the air. The corpse of conservatism is about to start to reek. Hopefully this time though- what emerges from the moral wreckage of American conservatism won’t be just a “left wing” cultural over reaction, a slide into smug simplicity, and a political movement that actually strengtgens the government it started out opposing.
2 comments:
From the macro perspective, the End of the Cold War, presented a real challenge to those who had achieved positions in the elite. Clinton came out of nowhere (by that I mean a CIA file) to neuter the Democrats permanently, baptized in blood at Waco.
(The two most interesting Democratic figures prior to 1992, Gary Hart taken out by a classic CIA sting, and the more troubling implications of Larry McDonald's demise in Sept 1983.)
There was one more thing to finish off, though, the last vestiges of the brand 'conservatism' that could pose a threat, and Dick Cheney et al had a plan.
Whatever one thinks about Tricky Dick or even George HW Bush, neither trusted 'conservatives' or thought themselves as part of the movement and that was the undoing of the Outter Party conservatives. Their corpse is rotting and even the Inner Party knows their usefulness is just about up.
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