Writing the Culture Wars

In my writing on current affairs I have tended to favor those issues where it is possible to build an argument on the basis of abundant data, the "harder" the better. The records of particular governments. The performance and structure of economies. The definitions of much-used terms. Here there are formal, concrete actions--like legislation and executive orders we can read for ourselves, and which we can read others' interpretations of. Here we have statistical data regarding such matters as investment, assets, profits, trade, growth, debt and much, much else. Here we have textual evidence--the content of books, articles, essays widely recognized by the participants in a discourse about that idea or tradition as being of relevance to it. Thus arguing over the character of the economic policies of a Tony Blair or Bill Clinton, whether or not there is such a thing as a neoliberal economy and what it may look like, whether the U.S. has "deindustrialized" and "financialized," or what terms like "centrism" may be taken as denoting, there is a basis for some sort of reasoned and evidentiated case. I know full well that these issues are scenes of much cynical propagandizing within a context where emotions and the idiot quotient run high, all as our times are not known for reasonableness or civility in the examination of arguments presenting an understanding of these matters other than our own, but for all that one can make a proper argument for their position, however much the idiot scum who dominate so much of our discourse may fail to accord it the respect due it, as one may hope that at least some of those who will see it will be more evolved persons capable of fair-minded judgment, justifying one's taking the trouble to put it out there.

The culture war is as far away from that as one can get from the chances for this kind of argumentation. The evidence is "softer" and more diffuse, the texts rather more abstruse (especially should we risk the quagmire of trying to connect the often unreadable prose of postmodernist theoreticians with the conduct of the kulturkampfers who have weaponized their theories with as much crudity as ruthlessness to the point of making them household terms--to the frustration of those of us who had hoped never have to deal with them after we left the lecture hall). Still, if all this might very reasonably be thought a cynical distraction from those "hard" issues that really matter in an "It's the Economy, Stupid" world (I admit that this is the way my own prejudices run), those who have been determined to produce that distraction have, to absolutely no one's credit, been exceedingly successful in making them unavoidable--such that however much one despises political hacks' grandstanding about the symbolic to divert the public from what actually affects people's lives and sleazy use of wedge issues to get people at each other's throats in the hopes of their party's coming out ahead in the scrum, they cannot not acknowledge it, if only to say why it does not deserve to be acknowledged, and plead with the public to not fall for it for the umpteenth time, with their efforts unrewarded by any conspicuous success on this score, such that they are forced to make a renewed effort in the hopes of getting people to focus on the real conversation they would much rather be having. And so to absolutely no one's credit (not even my own, I think) I have ended up writing about these things all the same--like the usefulness of Richard Hofstadter's ideas about "status politics" as a way of understanding these conflicts, about their interaction with the content of popular culture in manifold ways, about what the language we have come to use in these clashes really means, and about just how much it all mattered (or didn't) at election time. I personally hope that I will not be at this for very long. But then, when I took up the challenge of trying to discuss neoliberalism in a more rigorous way than people were doing back when certain political hacks were pretending to the world that the concept had no meaning I didn't think I would still be at that particular, exhausting, game in 2025.