We're not in Kansas Anymore

Secure in its control of the material means of production, the American Right has always taken the lead in the exploration of underlying, non-material, cultural factors in public life. By the "cultural," I (and they) usually mean the realm of values and voluntary behavior in day-to-day life as they are mediated through such institutions as family, church, news media, schools, and the creative arts.

Right-wing interest and intervention in the cultural arena goes all the way back to the founding of the robber baron family foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon, et al). In the post-World War II era, the CIA made cultural politics a part of its containment strategy. If the truth were told, over the years the CIA has probably funded more U.S. intellectual and artistic activity than the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities combined.

In the post-Vietnam era, many of the old (apparently unwitting) CIA cultural operatives became founders of the reactionary school of political-cultural thought called Neo-Conservativism. One of the chief Neo-Con institutional shelters was, and is, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank in Washington, D.C.

Meanwhile the American Left has always been hobbled by its inability to speak authoritatively in the cultural realm. The Left did have a strong cultural voice in the 1930s and 1940s. But it was forcibly silenced by the repressions of the Red Scare era in the 1950s. Since then, the Left has often been held back in the cultural realm by a liberal relativist ethos which is unwilling to make value judgments about anything. More recently, the disproportionate influence of various cultural nationalists (ethnic and sexual) has made it difficult for the Left to find a cultural language which can be comprehended by a broad majority of the American people.

Given this history, it was a disappointment, but certainly no surprise, to learn that the AEI was recently the scene of the first concerted political-intellectual effort to define the terms of debate about the emerging post-Cold War global pop culture. Ben Wattenberg (Mr. American Interests on the increasingly neo-con-captive PBS) was the organizer for the AEI conference exhaustively titled "The New Global Popular Culture: Is It American? Is It Good for America? Is It Good for the World?"

This conference, held March 10, like many AEI events was widely publicized in the mainstream news media. I wasn't at the conference. But I did receive and read the discussion papers; they tell an interesting story.

AT THIS CONFERENCE the de facto Americanness of the emerging global popular culture was illustrated by the fact that, from 1985 to 1990, the U.S. movie industry's income from overseas rentals rose by 124 percent. As Todd Gitlin, the token Leftist on the panel, pointed out, entertainment now ranks second only to military hardware among U.S. exports.

But what was heartening in reading papers on U.S. popular culture by the likes of Robert Bork, Irving Kristol, and Walter Berns is the genuine dismay these characters feel when they come face to face with the real democratic culture of the world's only superpower. At last we had a chance to separate the real America-Haters from the True Patriots. AEI sage and Georgetown University professor Walter Berns suggested that, since the misguided populace won't allow censorship, "the rockers, the rappers, and all the Madonnas" should be simply "banished" from U.S. shores.

Irving Kristol (once editor of Public Opinion) insisted that in matters of culture, the American people must be "educated and disciplined." Kristol expressed nostalgia for the days when an "elitist" culture formed the official consensus and "high culture set the tone" for the lower orders. He also bemoaned our provincial loss of connection to the "richer and superior European culture."

Robert Lichter, a former AEI mass communications expert, noted that on American television entertainment shows, bad guys tend frequently to be wealthy older white men who have come by their riches immorally. The good guys, complained Lichter, are rarely "typical representatives of institutions" but are instead "the internal critic, the skeptic, or the whistleblower." Writer Cynthia Grenier added that U.S. films and TV programs promote "contempt for authority and the capitalist principle, and mockery of our institutions."

But it was Robert Bork who emerged from the day as my new favorite cultural analyst. Bork groused that, "Those who seek a radical revision of America's politics, standards of merit, and hierarchies of authority find it useful to attack through the culture." And, he said, "It should not be too surprising that this [cultural subversion] had adverse effects on social morale and discipline and hence on the way popular culture teaches us to look at the world."

The Borker explained this alarming tendency with statistics showing that, among film and TV creative workers, 75 percent consider themselves "'left of center' politically." I couldn't have said it better myself.

Amidst this chorus of rightist America-bashing, it was left to Brother Gitlin to stand up for the good old U.S.A. Actually Gitlin's paper was appropriately balanced and skeptical about both the content of much U.S. entertainment and the corporate strategies for spreading it. But, to me, Gitlin said it all with one anecdote. American historian Paul Buhle, it seems, was visiting East Berlin two years ago, just after the Wall came down, when an East German student came up and told him, "Last night I dreamed of Route 66."

Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.