Besides the Reverend Wright firestorm that currently bores me to tears, Barack Obama has taken a lot of heat from the likes of Sean Hannity and Paul Krugman about his remarks that working class white people are “bitter” and “cling to guns and religion” due to a deep stagnation of economic progress in the working class over the last few decades. This reflects the thesis of Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter With Kansas, which Krugman seems to think is incorrect.
Krugman is correct in saying that people from poor states don’t cling to 2nd Amendment and religious issues because of economic hardship, but he is not correct in his assertion that they don’t vote against their own economic interests in favor of guns and moral values.
This all started with the backlash against the sixties and seventies that made everybody love Reagan.
Conservative voices like Newt Gingrich and Robert Bork have railed on sixties culture, blaming a collusion of the counterculture and the Great society for attempting to bring down western civilization as we know it.
However, the counterculture of the sixties has been co-opted by the power elite and the evangelical right. The religious right has become the new counterculture, and the tenets of old counterculture are now tools of the power elite. The methods and language of the “old” counterculture have turned into a vehicle for trendsetting on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood as well as a vehicle for social change in a right-wing religious revolution.
Frank writes in “What’s the Matter With Kansas,”
Indeed, counterculture has become so commercial and so business-friendly today that a school of urban theorists thrives by instructing municipal authorities on the fine points of luring artists, hipsters, gays, and rock bands to their cities on ground that where these groups go, corporate offices will follow.
Frank argues that the counterculture of the sixties is now the impetus behind what he calls “hip consumerism,” a way in which corporate America has co-opted counterculture values and style in a way that is commercially profitable.
Abbie Hoffman seemed to see this coming. He said in Steal This Book,
Smoking dope and hanging up Che’s picture is no more a commitment than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps. A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power. We are not interested in the greening of Amerika except for the grass that will cover its grave.
This language of revolution is not only more likely to be found in ads for Nike than from leftists in search of an end to the power elite, but also from the mouths of the religious right.
The irony about this state of affairs is the way the right is painting Barack Obama as some kind of 60’s black radical Manchurian Candidate, when they are the true radicals of the day. Tim McVeigh, the Unabomber, and the Operation Rescue bombers aren’t left-wing.
Old left poster boys like Eldridge Cleaver, Jimi Hendrix, and Che Guevara have been replaced by Tim LaHaye, Jerry Falwell, and Jesus Christ, the faces of the new revolution. Operation Rescue has adopted the protest methods of the sixties to get results. Today’s radicals are 180 degrees away from the radicals in the sixties, and yet the tactics and language used by both is terribly similar.
Political scientist Philip Klinkner pointed out that over 2% of President Bush’s gains in the 2004 election over 2000 came from voters who make over $100,000. The Republican party is more the party of the wealthy than ever. It is merely a convenient myth to say that “moral values” and the religious right gave Bush the election in 2004.
The problem with this is that this alignment of the ultra-wealthy and moral populists is a historically new venture. Even Bob Dole has hawked Viagra, and later did a very suggestive ad for Pepsi featuring Britney Spears. If the religious right is against the use of sex to sell merchandise, then they should go after Pfizer. Sexual activity and commerce go hand in hand—it’s no accident that the first image a person has of a man in his midlife crisis is an expensive red sportscar.
While the culture wars may be overblown on an individual level, they play a major role in the “true believers,” and these are the people that change minds and conjure up votes, even if the average person doesn’t necessarily practice what they preach.
Moral populism the likes of which George W. Bush uses has been around since the times of William Jennings Bryan. Karl Rove’s favorite election was 1896, where Bryan lost to William McKinley and is a near carbon-copy of the current blue-state red-state result of the last election—except Bryan lost winning the heartland, and as a democrat. Bryan was a deeply religious man who also had socialist leanings. Jimmy Carter was an evangelical that talked of a “deeply profound religious experience” he had when he was forty, but also spoke in economic populist terms. Historically, moral populism and economic populism have been linked together. However, what we have now is moral populism combined with a belief in unencumbered capitalism. These two entities are clearly at odds with one another. According to Gingrich and Bork, the responsibility for the moral decline they believe exists falls in the hands of the sixties and their combination of counterculture and Great Society politics. However, quite clearly, the counterculture’s revolutionary ideas and rhetoric became the impetus for a new form of consumerism. A Nike copywriter in 1996 said, “Why do this kind of advertising if not to incite people to riot?” Nike featured ads with the Beatles song “Revolution” and others with basketball star Kevin Garnett and the proclamation, “the revolution will not be televised.” Now, if counterculture is indeed the enemy as Gingrich and Bork suggest, then the co-opting of counterculture by corporate America should therefore lead to a backlash by the religious right against those entities that use what they would perceive to be questionable morality to sell products and attract viewers.
But there is no great outcry from the religious right to take down these forces. They themselves have co-opted the counterculture in their victim mentality and tactics for getting what they want—it is one thing that corporate America and the religious right have in common. But, since historically moral populism and economic populism have been so closely linked, why is that not the case now?
The candidacy of Mike Huckabee was a small example of where this is going. In poorer, religious states, Huckabee, whose record on the economy was far more liberal than those in the mainstream of the Republican party, won solid victories. Although it wasn’t enough to fundamentally change the course of the party, it was the first sign in a potential shift.
While the religious right has gone along with the Republican Party for so long, they have achieved little in their battles. Abortion remains legal, television is still filled with sex, there is no prayer in schools, and hip-hop fills the airwaves. The next step is for them to go after the power elite that profit from the questionable morality the right fights against. However, in doing this, they will become a nuisance to the power elite and will be beaten down just like the protesters of the sixties were at the ’68 Democratic convention and Kent State—perhaps not as heavy-handed, but as effective. For now, the religious revolution is a tool for the elite: they pose no threat and they bring out votes that support the very wealthy. But history shows us that moral populism and rampant capitalism do not mix. And when the blinders of the religious revolution are taken off and they see who their real enemy is, they will not have the hip, creative allure the old counterculture had to fall back on. The rebellion against conservatism sells products, but the rebellion against rebellion will not.
Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The power elite understands this and realizes that activist Christianity has lulled a massive group of people into ignoring the injustices perpetrated on them by big business. Instead, the deeply religious focus their attention on essentially unwinnable culture wars that do nothing to challenge the corporate hegemony. Religion, to the power elite, functions perfectly as a Machiavellian method of misdirection.
The ironic thing about the great religious backlash is that it was largely caused by a reaction against the sixties but ended up using the same rhetoric and methods of that era to become widely popular. The great failure of the counterculture was that it merely fragmented society, creating the era of identity politics. There were many positive aspects of this; there was the women’s liberation movement, there was gay pride, chicano pride, black pride. But in reaction to this, religious whites took the same attitude of these disenfranchised, forgotten, and cast away members of society that insisted on their voices being heard, fighting back in the same revolutionary tones.
The other irony is that the residents of LA and New York, who overwhelmingly vote democratic, profit far more from Bush’s policies than exurban and rural right wingers. Thomas Frank should have written a book titled, What’s the Matter With Greenwich Village?
Economic and moral populism are historically one and the same concept and the co-opting of the counterculture by big business suggests that the alliance between the religious revolution and the power elite is tenuous at best. Big business is responsible for much of what is perceived as the moral decline the right fights against, but this alliance is essentially doomed and will result in a forthcoming fracture between big business and the moral right–Huckabee was just a preview.
Importantly, the moral right will not have a commercially viable safety net to maintain their message through co-opting by big business. After their abandonment, they will like fade away, unless they realign the parties in a manner that puts moral and economic populism together once again.