Optimism about America?!
If i had started by blog before Xmas 2004 I would have definitely put this article on it. The US elections were depressing for anyone who has not got a ticket for The Rapture (then again, who would want to share Heaven with a bunch of sanctimonious self-righteous God botherers?); however, it was a damn close thing. The only thing you have to remember as a non-American is that the Republicans are Reds- oh the irony.
Is that red-state vote really so red? By Frank Rich The New York Times Saturday, November 13, 2004
Farewell to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the story of the U.S. election: it's the culture, stupid.
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the United States swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into the 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide.
Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the chardonnay. The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats.
Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out. If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corp., and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing talk show hosts. Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").
None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings.
The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians.
But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools.
It's in the Republicans' interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.
Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" [In England published as "What's the Matter With America"?]- by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes.
Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing CEO of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican CEO of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing CEO of General Electric (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It is they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the American cultural agenda.
But it's not only the Republicans' fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples.
When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on.
The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All support gay rights and are opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only McCain calls himself pro-life, and he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research.
If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red?
According to some, the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical "Bush votes come to life," apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by "moral absolutes," support a ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Cary Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three children into the ranks of what he calls the "working poor." Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn't even met.
Is that red-state vote really so red? By Frank Rich The New York Times Saturday, November 13, 2004
Farewell to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the story of the U.S. election: it's the culture, stupid.
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the United States swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into the 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide.
Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the chardonnay. The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats.
Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out. If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corp., and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing talk show hosts. Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").
None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings.
The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians.
But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools.
It's in the Republicans' interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.
Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" [In England published as "What's the Matter With America"?]- by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes.
Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing CEO of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican CEO of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing CEO of General Electric (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It is they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the American cultural agenda.
But it's not only the Republicans' fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples.
When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on.
The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All support gay rights and are opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only McCain calls himself pro-life, and he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research.
If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red?
According to some, the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical "Bush votes come to life," apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by "moral absolutes," support a ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Cary Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three children into the ranks of what he calls the "working poor." Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn't even met.
posted by Anglonoel | 3:16 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home