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It’s not the culture, stupid
Interpreting the US election
Ken Hirschkop
Elections first and foremost decide governments, but they are also
conjunctures when political forces are organized and realigned. The very act of
mobilizing activists or energizing groups within the franchise can have
long-term effects, and in the course of a campaign ideologies that have been
kicking around for years may find themselves worked into new shapes and prised
into new constellations. Gramsci pointed to certain elections as defining
moments in the political life of a nation; and, if we believe the hype, the 2004
election should be seen as the most important American political event for
decades. Maybe it was, though now that we know the result we might hope it
wasn’t. But its significance in the longer term will depend not only on the
numbers of the day but also on the way in which the results are understood.
If the initial reaction is anything to go by, the pro-Kerry forces are aiming
to lose the peace as decisively as they lost the war. According to commentary in
the press, the results show us how deeply divided the United States has become.
‘Not since the Civil war’, Simon Schama reported, ‘has the fault line between
[America’s] two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two
cultures so starkly unbridgeable.’1 Close elections can indicate a degree of
popular consensus, but in this case the narrowness of Bush’s margin seems only
to underscore the severity of the split. For the torn halves of the United
States – one secular, cosmopolitan, ‘liberal’; the other evangelical,
chauvinistic, conservative – are so distant from one another in world-view, yet
so evenly balanced numerically, it is hard to see how they can coexist within a
single nation.
That this analysis has penetrated popular consciousness receives confirmation
of sorts in the numerous anecdotes and websites that have sprung up around the
plight of the losers, some of whom have decided that coexistence is really not
possible. Their strategies for escape include unifying the Kerry-voting states
with more social-democratic Canada (see map opposite), emigration (columnists in
the Guardian and the Financial Times claim to have been besieged by US friends
looking for employment in the United States of Europe), and ‘marrying out’ of
the country (see the unholy alliance of sexual ardour, social-democratic
politics and commercial acuity embodied in the Canadian ‘Marry an American’
website). The Sunday following the debacle, the Observer carried an article
describing the fate of New Yorkers, 75 per cent of whom ‘may have never met a
Republican’ (despite having elected two of them as mayor in succession), and now
find themselves trapped in a society that detests the city they live in and
everything they believe it stands for.2
For New York defines one side of this divide, the contours of which are
strictly geographical. Because American citizens vote for members of an
electoral college on a winner-takes-all basis in each state, the results can be
represented as a contrast between the ‘blue states’ that vote Democrat, and the
‘red’ ones that vote Republican. (Is there a more telling instance of American
‘exceptionalism’? Where else would red represent the more conservative party?)
With the deindustrialization of large swathes of America and the movement of
population westwards, the map has acquired a certain consistency in recent
years: the middle and South of the country (a large expanse, but not densely
populated) has been red; the West Coast, the Northeast and the northern,
industrial part of the midwest, blue.
Guns, gays and abortion
In the 1950s and 1960s Middle America was a class; now it appears it is
literally the middle of America. Readers in Britain know that geographical
splits, like the one between North and South, are often ciphers for class
difference. But the now habitual contrast between red-state Middle America and
the blue-tinted East and West coasts is not, on the face of it, about wealth and
poverty, or whether your work is manual or managerial. The inner core of America
defines itself in cultural terms – of its lifestyle, its ‘values’, its religious
conviction and its position on three crucial issues: gay marriage, abortion and
gun control. And its antithesis is therefore not the capitalist class, but a
‘liberal elite’ defined by its contrasting lifestyle, its food and leisure (the
consumption of café latte being a particularly damning marker), its secularism,
and its different position on those same three issues, which, according to
conservative wisdom, displays a unique mixture of moral relativism and belief in
an intrusive state. Of course, the members of this liberal elite do, in fact,
specialize in particular lines of work: in the world of the right-wing
imaginary, they are typically professionals, people who earn their living by
credentialled, and highly resented, expertise. But in the culture wars it is not
work that counts, and it is not economic issues that mark the dividing lines. It
is culture that drives politics.
This ideology has a long, disreputable history: it began, arguably, with
Richard Nixon’s evocation of a ‘silent majority’ of decent citizens supporting
his efforts to slaughter as many Vietnamese citizens as possible. In his
brilliant, funny and shrewd book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How
Conservatives Won the Heart of America, Thomas Frank has shown how US backlash
conservatism systematically promoted ‘culture’ over economics as an area of
political concern, to win support from working- and lower-middle-class
constituencies that were bound to suffer from Republican economic policy. As
Frank points out, ‘leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk
corporate’.3 Their political lines in the sand refer to sources of cultural
anxiety (changes in family structure, sexuality, the mass media) that they know
cannot be dealt with legislatively and which therefore can be relied upon time
and again to motivate voters to defy their class interests:
The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion;
receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong
again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct
college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off
our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to
meatpacking.4
From all the available evidence, the trick worked again in 2004. Although
issues like abortion and gun control motivate only a minority of voters, in a
nation which depends so much on demobilized (and often brutally disenfranchised)
citizens, a minority that turns out to vote can make a big difference. And true
to form, Bush has, despite the campaign rhetoric of moral values and the scenes
of devotion, placed business legislation at the top of his agenda and barely
given gay marriage a second thought (though a new chief justice, with influence
on abortion law, is high on his agenda). What is striking, though, is that now
the anti-Bush brigade and the American centre-Left are also talking about
American society in terms of provincialism versus metropolitanism, faith versus
Enlightenment, a nation split by attitudes and ‘values’.
Given the depth of loathing each side apparently has for the other, it is
surprising that the country is not on the brink of a political crisis, or that
armed conflict has not broken out. Surprising until you realize that all the
talk of cultural abysses and attitudinal chasms masks a striking consensus
of political belief and lifestyle.
Capitalism and religion
If you attended church more than once a week, you were far more likely to
vote Bush than Kerry, but on most political questions you shared a lot of common
ground with your heathen brethren. Both sides believed in a very mild form of
social democracy, focused on universally available programmes like Medicaid,
pensions and public education (although some of the churchgoers have some
interesting educational projects of their own). Both seemed to believe something
called globalization was an inevitable, modernizing behemoth that we all had to
adjust to. Both expected, almost as their right, a wide variety of consumer
goods and a standard of living high by international standards (the important
thing isn’t whether they drive Volvos or pickup trucks: it’s that they all buy
cars, lots of them). Both sides have recourse to the language of rights when
they feel their private lives are being interfered with. Finally, both sides
believe in God.
Do they? Given the prominence of ‘faith’ as a signifier of the Right in both
the campaign and afterwards, it is worth bearing in mind that recent polls show
that around 90 per cent of all Americans (at least all Americans who respond to
polls) profess belief in God. This ought to tell us that ‘belief in God’ is
itself a wide category, with no straight political trade-off or consequence.
It’s worth remembering that the civil rights movement was led in large part by
the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, that churches and church leaders
remain crucial to that movement, that Quakers and Quaker groups were central to
the anti-war movement of the 1960s, and that the states with the highest
Catholic populations (Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and
New York) are, with one exception, the most reliably Democratic.
Too many commentators take professions of faith on faith, as if opposition to
every cultural initiative since the 1960s was motivated by belief in a higher
being. It’s far more likely that what scares the ‘cultural Right’ is the erosion
of the familial-sexual myths that were central to their sense of self and their
notions of fulfilment (and, despite the rhetoric, opposition to abortion is
about sex, not the unborn child), and that ‘God’ provides a symbolic resource in
this struggle. Thirty years ago Habermas suggested that while capitalist states
could possibly steer their societies away from open economic crisis, the
operation of capitalist economies together with formal bureaucratic
administration would gradually destroy the traditional world-views on which
bourgeois society depended. Unable by its very logic to create ‘meaning’, the
state would have to hope that ‘the fiscally siphoned off resource “value”
[could] take the place of the scanty resource “meaning”.’5 In 1973 Habermas
could not have predicted that ‘value’ (in terms of a rising standard of living
powered by higher wages and greater benefits) would itself become a scarce
resource even in the USA, leaving the door open for a renewed attempt to frame a
religion suitable for advanced capitalism.
Habermas’s predictions call attention to a weakness in the strategy
recommended by social-democratic analysts like Thomas Frank. They, quite
reasonably, demand that the Democratic Party re-address its working-class base
and focus on the kinds of economic policy and welfare state provision their
constituency needs and deserves. But not only is there not enough ‘value’ to do
this as effectively as in the period after World War II, there is good reason to
believe the working population wants ‘meaning’ as well. The post-1945 boom was
accompanied by all manner of ideology and narrative bent on ensuring that
working- and middle-class Americans felt not only more prosperous, but fulfilled
as well, deserving of their prosperity, embodying tales of upward mobility with
socio-cultural resonance. Kerry’s social-democratic promises are rather thin by
comparison and, to Americans who are just getting by but are not impoverished,
they may lack the moral lustre of earlier campaigns. (Clinton, although ruthless
in his destruction of welfare provision and in his devotion to capitalist free
trade, understood this intertwining of the moral, the aesthetic and the
economic.)
Promises of prosperity, unmoored from a vision of fulfilment or moral
argument, can seem dangerously close to the hedonism the moral majorities claim
to abhor. Frank notes that the liberalism that haunts the imagination of fevered
conservatives is nothing other than the liberalism of Hollywood and the culture
industry, where glamorous fun-loving youth perpetually defy authority figures
with moral scruples.6 Kerry rarely made his economic case in other than
utilitarian terms, afraid even to evoke the spectre of social justice as
justification for a change in economic policy: tax cuts for the wealthy were
condemned for being unnecessary rather than pernicious. Unwilling to make the
egalitarian case, he more or less ensured moral values would be presented as the
repression of what seemed like hedonism.
Habermas’s case, framed by his polemic with the systems theorist Niklas
Luhmann, implied that the destruction of traditional world-views was part of the
functioning of capitalism itself, a ‘cultural contradiction of capitalism’. This
hyper-systemic view of the matter forgets that cultural systems are often
struggled over, made and destroyed. Were not the social movements of the 1960s
and 1970s bent on the destruction of malevolent traditions and inspired by the
prospect of new systems of meaning? One reason for the success of backlash
conservatism is that it has managed to portray the advance of gay and women’s
rights as the unleashing of hedonism rather than the construction of a new moral
and cultural universe. And, to be honest, the Left has often allowed itself to
be painted into this corner, evoking the language of rights as if what was at
stake was merely self-expression or the opening up of a new market niche.
At the heart of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s (civil
rights, gay and women’s liberation, the Green movement, CND, the various
autonomous Marxisms) lay new understandings of the range of exploitation and the
futures that could lay beyond it. Despite the hard work of many, these were not
synthesized with the concerns and values of the existing labour movement. Since
that time, a succession of defeats have put labour on the back foot and have
often reduced the claims of new movements to an equal share in American
middle-class fantasy (exemplified in television shows Sex and the City and Will
and Grace). The Democratic Party has a lot to answer for in this decline, and
you could say with plenty of justification that, in lacking a new moral vision,
it is reaping the whirlwind. The worst thing it could do now, however, is to buy
into the very culture wars that the Right is anxious to sell. There is plenty of
bitterness abroad, but its source is not really a dispute about marriage. It
stems from a long history of betrayal, and opportunities missed over and over
again. To that extent, the culture warriors are right: it all goes back to the
1960s.
Notes
1.
Simon Schama, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, Guardian, G2, 5 November 2004.
2.
Gaby Wood, ‘Those New York Blues’, Observer, 7 November 2004.
3.
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of
America, Henry Holt, New York, 2004, p. 6.
4.
Ibid., p. 7.
5.
Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Heinemann, London,
1976, p. 73.
6.
Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? pp. 240–41.
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