Return to Culture Wars and the Politics of Culture

Abstract

The last century ended in a decade of relative prosperity, a generally strong economy, and the ability of the working classes (indeed most people) to mask the fact that real wages had remained more or less stagnant for almost 30 years through access to seemingly unlimited credit sustaining ever growing levels of consumption. Consumption is important in a capitalist economy because, to put it in perhaps simple terms, capitalists cannot realize profits from the production process without the sale of goods and services. Or so we all imagined. The latter half of the 20 Century also brought us the ascendance of finance over other forms of capital as cost accounting, stock values and bottom lines replaced long term investments in R&D and corporate strategic planning. By the time this new century was well on its way we discovered that credit had its limits, finance could do little but sustain the profits of financial institutions, and over the more recent period a realization that the increase in labor productivity now sustains profits for sectors like manufacturing even as workforces are cut drastically and unemployment has reached levels unprecedented since the end of the depression of the 1930s. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 marked the first time a Democrat held the White House (with the brief one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter elected in 1976) since the Vietnam War era beginning with Richard Nixon elected in 1968. Throughout this period the Democratic Party controlled the House of Representatives and in 1994 Republicans under the leadership of Newt Gingrich presented the public with a Contract With America, a document that laid out a set of Conservative principles and was a clarion call for the all out culture war that was waged up to that point as a guerilla war. The “infamous” 60s came to represent unfettered personal freedom (one might assume in retrospect the main freedom that was threatening to Conservatives was the sexual revolution) and a liberal agenda of Civil Rights, Student Rights, Worker Rights, Gay Rights, Women’s Rights and many other manifestations of personal and social change in this country. With the issuance of this so-called contract Conservatives looked to channel the “silent majority” of Americans whose way of life was threatened by waves of challenges to a status quo of compliance and control. One’s position on abortion became a litmus test for the Right, and with it came all manner of initiatives designed to hold the line or even reverse many of the changes wrought in the preceding two decades. We might argue that these earlier Culture Wars reached its peak during the 2000 national election when hysteria over gay rights (in this case the rights of gays to marry) mobilized a conservative religious base to come out and vote for George W. Bush to defeat the Clinton years and the Editorial