Who’s expanding the Culture War?

I hate the culture war. Yet I have been writing about it for years, spilling tens if not hundreds of thousands of words in post after post. As to how many hundreds of hours of my life this has consumed, I’m probably better off not knowing, because if I did know, I might start wondering if I should seek therapy. (And if I did seek therapy, you can be damned sure that plenty of therapists would see the number of hours spent writing about the culture war issues to be a serious symptom. Of what, I don’t want to know….)
When I get really frustrated I’m tempted to scream something like
“F*ck your damn culture war and stay the hell out of my life!”
But instead, I calm down by writing blog posts, which are a probably a substitute for therapy.
When I say “Culture War,” I don’t mean all arguments and disputes about everything in the culture. Because this is a free country, it’s the kind of place where all sorts of people have all sorts of cultural quirks, personal issues, and ways of living which others find annoying, even threatening. Normally (I hesitate to use the word “traditionally” as it has become politicized), extreme animosity does not erupt over these things, because America is a country built on individualism and free spirit, not communitarianism and subordination to the common good. Add to this the ancient doctrine of “a man’s home is his castle” and the general idea has long been that people should be left alone to live their lives as they see fit as long as they mind their own business and don’t mess with others.
Until the Culture War.
The Culture War I complain of involves a wholesale assault — waged by the left and the right — on the dignity of the individual. There is no right to be left alone, and all facets of an individual’s life are fair game for inquiry.
Politicizing the personal was merely the foot in the door. This began in the 1960s and was modeled on Marxist “class consciousness” and class warfare doctrine. A huge imaginary line was drawn which found expression in the phrase “YOU ARE EITHER PART OF THE SOLUTION, OR YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM!” This was an excuse to subject people’s personal lives and tastes to personal scrutiny in a search for signs of bourgeois class tendencies. Those who exhibited such tendencies were deemed “not cool,” with a deliberate attempt being made to attribute political views to things like personal appearance, and even sexual behavior. Never mind the fact that college age kids simply wanted to have fun (as they always have, and do now), and that most of them had little interest in political activism, much less Marxism. The idea was that they should be herded that way, by politicizing every last trapping of what might in any other era have been another passing fad, then by claiming them as proper citizens and subjects of the left. That identity politics was invented during this same period was no accident. Every effort was made to assign people to one group or another, with every single group being defined as somehow fitting into a giant coalition of groups — all of them being lectured constantly about how they were victims of the white, male, patriarchal racist military industrial “system.”
What was missed is that a lot of people who were “claimed” by the left really weren’t political, and hadn’t the slightest idea that they were political fodder. One of the aggravating factors was of course the military draft. This made virtually every college age male who didn’t want to serve in the military a potential victim, and every such victim had a ready and waiting place in the identity politics machine.
For reasons I’ve tried to explain, the draft avoidance problem was aggravated by still-prevalent male pride, which had not yet been stamped out. Avoiding military service to one’s country in time of war was widely seen as less than manly, and quite naturally, this generated tension — even feelings of shame — among young men who were affected. Because college age men were legally entitled to deferments, this was a perfect opportunity for the left to exploit. Through a psychological process I think is still largely unexamined, the deferment system allowed the left to offer them an opportunity to redeem their manhood. All they had to do was become active against the war, and their natural cowardliness was transformed into bravery. This had enormous appeal. And of course the more “manly” the individual, the more bravely he fought against the system! The self-delusional slogan “BRING THE WAR HOME!” carried this to its ultimate illogical (but psychologically very satisfying) conclusion — that they were real men, every bit as manly as the other young men who were fighting and dying in their place.
That this delusion was wrong — monstrously wrong — has never been examined or acknowledged by the young men who did this. Nothing surprising there. People don’t like to admit they were wrong, and for a man from that generation to admit to dishonesty about something so profoundly self-defining as his sense of manhood, why, it really is asking too much. They’re now a politically very powerful group, and I suspect they will go to their graves believing that they were the real men, and that the soldiers who served (or the apolitical draft avoiders who shut up and stayed in school without whining) were not.
The crazy thing about this analysis is that I am a very forgiving person where it comes to the manhood issue, just as I am forgiving of cowards who wanted to avoid the draft. What I can’t forgive is unrepentant lying about it. And the idea that whining about not wanting to serve is more manly than serving is just too much for me to stomach.
Bear in mind, though, that the identity politics aspect of victimization-by-the-draft was temporary, and was not an issue for baby boomers born after 1953. Which is why it’s so easy for me to shoot off my mouth; I was born in ’54, so I never really had to “suffer.” Sorry about that; it was just the system worked. However, I did notice a certain annoying sanctimoniousness about the draft which plagued the older but not the younger boomers. It was as if they were dishonestly repackaging the emotional sermons of their World War II dads. (“You’re too young to understand what it was like to be on the front lines!”) Even as a young Marxist, I just couldn’t quite see facing the front lines of the Berkeley Police Department in riot gear as being quite the same thing as facing the front lines of the Waffen SS. But I mostly kept my mouth shut around the older boomers in those days, because they took themselves very, very seriously. The problem is, they still do.
But because it had already become an established and growing meme, the culture war did not end with the draft. Quite ironically, what became of great assistance to the politicizers on the activist left was the fact that their opponents often bought into the leftist lie that longhaired men, pot smokers, rock music fans, women who wanted careers (or rejected bras), and various sexually non-conforming types were supposed to be on the left.
What happened was that the activist right simply agreed with the activist left. (That this persists even now is, I think further proof that the more a lie is repeated, the more likely it is to be believed.) Behaviors and lifestyle traits which have nothing to do with politics are nevertheless called leftism, and those sharing the disliked traits — now called “they” — are reflexively consigned to the category of being against the candidacy of John McCain. From a post titled “The Culture War’s Decisive Battle has Begun”:

On the other side of this culture war are the Left-Wing Liberals. They are uncomfortable with our traditions, with the inevitable inequalities of our free-market economy, and with our military power. They dislike our values, our morality, and our unabashed displays of patriotism. At first — back in the 1960s — they were content merely to develop and pursue their own radical culture within ours. They tuned out, turned to drugs, and pushed the level of sexual license to a point our country had never known. They were so distressed by our imperfections that they refused to recognize or celebrate our achievements.

A lot of people got high and had sex in the 60s, and a lot of people didn’t like what the writer defines as “our traditions.” Many of them are ardent supporters of John McCain, too. I can’t help wonder about the logic of calling them “Left-Wing Liberals.”
Because, by that logic I am a “Left-Wing Liberal.” And if we continue with it, I later “tuned in,” and developed an agenda to overthrow the American Revolution itself:

Then they tuned in, and developed a political agenda whose logical outcome would be the overthrow of the American Revolution itself. While we believe that power flows from God to the people, they believe the supreme power is the State, which decides what rights, if any, should be allowed to the people. And because there is no God above the State, there also is no truth; no such thing as right or wrong, good or evil. Since they are working to do good — by their definition of the word — whatever crimes they commit along the way don’t matter. But if we are bent on doing what they define as harm, they will use any legal trick in the book to stop us. In short, the rule of law means whatever they want it to mean at any given moment.
They believe that rights are more important than responsibilities, that groups are more important than individuals, and that one’s stand on public issues is more important than one’s private actions or morality. And while they are careful never to condone the tactics of our country’s foreign enemies, they always see some justification in our enemies’ cause. They don’t actually want us to be defeated by our foreign enemies; they wish merely to see us humbled and humiliated by them.

Anyone who has read this blog with any regularity knows that I don’t believe what the author asserts that I (as part of this Culture War “they”) believe. I don’t think I need to elaborate with examples.
But before anyone jumps to conclusions, hold on! I do not mean to suggest for one second that the above typifies today’s conservative thinking. It does not. Actually, I had to spend a lot of time finding it, and I only stumbled across it because I was wading through countless left-wing attacks on the McCain campaign as being engaged in a Culture War.
One of the things which I have found most infuriating about this election is the constant refrain that it’s all about the Culture War. This (from The Economist) is typical:

Mr McCain and Mr Obama once sold themselves as politicians who could overcome the divisive politics of the likes of George Bush and Hillary Clinton. The sad truth is that they are now fighting a classic culture war that will leave the country more divided over “values” than ever.

Single issue partisans like Andrew Sullivan have been a lot more shrill, repeatedly blaming the McCain camp for re-igniting the Culture War with the nomination of Sarah Palin, who was portrayed as a speaking-in-tongues, homophobic harpy. Yet when her turn came to do a Pat Buchanan and really stick it to the evil homos, she talked about one of her best friends being gay. You’d have never caught Pat Buchanan saying something like that — not even about Justin Raimondo. And while I can’t be certain, it would not surprise me if the author of the Culture War “Decisive Battle” piece felt personally betrayed by Sarah Palin’s admission that she had a gay friend.
But over and over, it is mainly the left that keeps repeating the Culture War mantra that John McCain has made this race all about the Culture War!
True, there are vast differences between McCain and Obama over abortion, but how loudly has that been pushed? Are pro-choice Republicans being run out of the party or even insulted? Rudy Giuliani is pro-choice and he introduced Sarah Palin at the Convention. In every respect, the debate over abortion has been remarkable in its civility. Hardly the sort of venom I associate with the traditional Pat Buchanan-style Culture War. (The venom is coming from the other side. Yet in a remarkable twist, the people being targeted with this venom are being blamed for the very venom that’s being spewed at them!)
As to gay marriage, there is about a dime’s worth of difference between McCain and Obama on that one. Both oppose same sex marriage, both said so, and even at the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden (where you’d expect culture war stuff), when the question came up, sparks failed to fly. The moderator concluded there wasn’t much to debate, then moved on to the next question.
Again, a hell of a way to run a Culture War.
In their relentless search to declare the race a Culture War, there’s been some real scraping by the left, with logic being tortured beyond all recognition.
In the most egregious example I could find, tenured and respectable law professor Paul Campos has had the gall to maintain that raising questions about the despicable Bill Ayers constituted “culture war tactics”:

As the presidential race enters the final month, an increasingly desperate John McCain is turning to the same culture war tactics that have served the Republican Party so well for the past generation.
McCain has attempted to link Barack Obama to former 1960s radical Bill Ayers, who as a member of the Weather Underground set off several bombs that did some serious property damage. None of the bombings Ayers was involved with killed anyone, but several years later other members of the group took part in an armed robbery in which two police officers and a guard were killed.
Ayers has been characterized as an unrepentant terrorist by McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. At a campaign rally last week Palin accused Obama of “launching his campaign inside the living room of a domestic terrorist.”

How attacking Bill Ayers is a culture war tactic, Campos does not say. Remember, Ayers is not about smoking pot, long hair, rock music; he’s a guy with a murderous Communist ideology who literally declared war on America, worked with the enemy in North Vietnam, had plans to murder 25 million Americans, and whose only regret about is that he wasn’t more successful.
You can characterize such a mindset as many things. “Genocidal” might come to mind. But to call an attack on such a dreadful person a “culture war tactic,” that’s so mind-boggling in its manipulativeness and sheer dishonesty that I’m at a loss for words. (Regardless of anyone’s position on abortion, gays, God, or guns, the fact is that support for hard core communists is hardly what ordinary people who are not on the outer fringes would regard as “culture war” in the regular and ordinary sense of the term.)
But in his quest to expand the definition of culture war, Campos does not stop there. Nor was he content to make the moral equivalency comparison between Bill Ayers and G. Gordon Liddy that I’ve seen so many times. Instead, he expands the Ayers moral equivalency as now including Henry Kissinger.
Oh yes. Kissinger, claims Campos, is a much worse terrorist than Bill Ayers, as he’s no honored statesman, but a a war criminal who should be put on trial:

Here’s a name I’m sure Obama, McCain, Palin and everyone interested in politics is very familiar with: Henry Kissinger.
Indeed, Kissinger is honorary co-chair of McCain’s New York campaign, and a foreign policy adviser to McCain himself.

Got that, folks? McCain’s campaign is co-chaired by Kissinger the “war criminal.” And in what must come as quite a surprise to people like Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly, Kissinger now also belongs to the “radical right”:

And here’s a very simple question that almost no one in the media seems to ask: if we’re going to make the crimes of the radical left in the 1960s and 1970s a campaign issue – a time period much of which Barack Obama spent in elementary school – then how about the crimes of the radical right?
And make no mistake: Henry Kissinger has done things that, morally speaking, make Ayers’ actions, deplorable as some of them surely were, look like the equivalent of jaywalking.
An abbreviated list of the events which have made it dangerous for Kissinger to travel overseas, because of the possibility he would be arrested as a war criminal, include: covertly sabotaging Vietnam peace talks in 1968 in order to help get Richard Nixon elected; playing a key role in convincing Nixon to launch illegal wars in Laos and Cambodia (the latter action helped create the conditions that led the Cambodian genocide); helping to plan the overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected government, which included numerous assassinations funded by the CIA (again, all this in direct violation of international law); and helping to facilitate the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which may have killed as many as 200,000 civilians.
Kissinger appears to have had every bit as much contempt for the law as Ayers, with the difference being that his brand of contempt led to millions of deaths.

Every bit as much contempt for the law as Ayers? If your jaw hasn’t dropped all the way to your knees by now, remember that the author of this garbage teaches law at the University of Colorado.
Campos has a problem with the fact that this Secretary of State for three administrations can be respectable.

The other difference is that playing a key role in a radical political movement that manages to take over the United States government is much more likely to get you to continue to be invited to swank dinner parties on the Upper East Side of New York, no matter how much blood may be on your hands.
That social fact doesn’t make Henry Kissinger more respectable than Bill Ayers.

Remember, the above is in a piece titled “Desperate McCain turns to culture war.”
(“Desperate law professor turns to justifying murderous ideology” is how I might title it, but then, I’m not a fan of the people who side with our enemies and who sympathize with people who would have created killing fields in America.)
Of course, it should be remembered that Paul Campos has a long history as a professional clown, so maybe he’d say he was just joking, and that humorless bloggers like me just don’t get his kind of satire. (Hey, I can hope, can’t I?)
And much as I tire of the culture war, with the way it’s being expanded to include things that are not normally thought of as culture war issues, maybe I should see the existence of these overwrought and even nonsensical culture war arguments as a sign of hope.
So, in that regard, and in the interest of keeping hopes alive for the death of the culture war, I thought I should also point out Thomas Friedman’s fascinating attempt — in a piece titled “McCain regresses to culture-war candidate” — to call drilling for oil a “culture war” issue:

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology – fossil fuels – rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology – renewable energy? Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that – with “drill, baby, drill” – why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent”?
I dwell on this issue because it is symbolic of the campaign that John McCain has decided to run. It’s a campaign now built on turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue – including even energy policy, no matter how stupid it makes the voters look and no matter how much it might weaken America.
I respected Mr. McCain’s willingness to support the troop surge in Iraq, even if it was going to cost him the Republican nomination. Now the same guy, who would not sell his soul to win his party’s nomination, is ready to sell every piece of his soul to win the presidency.

Drilling? For oil? Excuse me?
OK, I’ve heard of “NO BLOOD FOR OIL!” but Friedman’s new quantum leap would make a culture warrior out of poor old Uncle Jed!

And why not? (Uncle Jed’s offenses against the bureaucracy would make Joe the Plumber’s offenses look like chickenfeed. ‘Bout time they sicced the bureaucrats on the guy!)
Notice that in all of these instances, it isn’t McCain who’s expanded the definition of the Culture War; it’s his critics. A rather neat trick, really. Calling oil drilling part of the Culture War is the rhetorical expansion, but that is accomplished under the cover of claiming it’s McCain who’s doing the expanding. Incredible. [Well, at least Friedman didn’t say that advocacy of oil drilling is a form of racism.]
What’s next? Will they try to drag John McCain’s pet ferret into this “war”?
I have long considered the Culture War to be a dishonestly expanded political grab-bag. But the current redefined Culture War meme is merely a dishonest expansion of a dishonest expansion, in order to accuse the McCain camp of waging a “war” which is actually being waged against them by their critics.
The only bright side is that at this rate, no one will know what the Culture War is.
But might that make it even more impossible to “end”?