The cultural and political influence of entertainment

I finally read Jonathan Chait’s August 2012 New York Magazine article “The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy is On Your Screen.” Both John Stonestreet at BreakPoint and Justin Taylor pointed to it. Check out their posts for the broader cultural implications, especially Taylor’s for quotes from Chait’s article on the effects of television on the cultural expectations of families in Brazil and India. Rod Dreher’s response (hat tip: Stonestreet) is probably the best of them.

Here, I’ve excerpted from Chait’s consideration of the effects on entertainment on the political environment:

If you ask Hollywood liberals themselves about the liberalism of their work, the answer generally depends on how you pose the question. If you frame it in terms of social responsibility, they will happily boast about using their platform to raise their audience’s consciousness about racial tolerance or the environment or distrusting government officials. Pose the same question as an accusation of ideological or partisan bias—those are, after all, liberal values—then they will more likely deny it.

The denials generally take the form of a simple economic aphorism. The entertainment business is a business, so if its product leans left, it must reflect what the audience wants. One oddity of the Hollywood-liberalism debate is that it makes liberals posit the existence of a perfect, frictionless market, while conservatives find themselves explaining why a free market is failing to function as it ought to. (Here is the rabidly conservative Shapiro, sounding like Ralph Nader: “The market in television isn’t free … The issue is one of control. The corporations have it. The American people don’t.”)

The market in popular culture is free, but for the liberal defense—no propagandizing here!—to be true, studios would have to be single-minded profit-maximizing machines. Most of them aren’t. Making money is their main goal, but they do blend profit with their artistic sensibility, which is heavily influenced by their ideological perspective.

The history of Hollywood is a long tug-of-war between artistic conscience and the bottom line. Louis Mayer, fearing the backlash from William Randolph Hearst, offered $850,000 to the producer of Citizen Kane to suppress the film and burn the negative. The show Thirtysomething endured a series of advertising boycotts. One scene, with two gay male characters in bed together, cost ABC $1 million in advertising; another, of them kissing, cost an additional half million. Network president Roger Iger cited his “social and creative responsibilities,” and the executive producer noted, “I am grateful that ABC was willing to air the program at a loss.” Even some of the cheesiest and most commercial ventures feel the pull of social conscience. “We’re talking to young people every day, and a lot of responsibility comes with that,” said Doug Herzog, president of MTV. “We believe that through the medium of television we try to make the world a slightly better place.”

The need to appeal to the widest possible audience generally drives film and television to avoid displays of overt partisanship, while still smuggling in a message. Joss Whedon admitted this spring that he had written a scene into The Avengers in which Captain America deplored the “loss of health care and welfare” in America, only to cut it in the editing room. Nicholas Meyer directed a 1983 anti–nuclear war television special, The Day After, and later confessed, “My private, grandiose notion was that this movie would unseat Ronald Reagan when he ran for reelection.” René Balcer, the Law & Order producer, told one interviewer that he has laced his show with references to Bush-era abuses like the Patriot Act, but without naming Bush. “Our best shows,” he said, “make people question what’s going on.”

For the most part, your television is not consciously attempting to alter your political beliefs. It is mainly transmitting an ethos in which greed is not only bad but the main wellspring of evil, authority figures of all kinds are often untrustworthy, sexual freedom is absolute, and social equality of all kinds is paramount. Within the moral universe of this culture, the merits of these values are self-evident. But to the large bloc of America that does not share this ethos, it looks like a smug, self-perpetuating collusion against them.

In the last [2008] presidential campaign, Obama was labeled a “celebrity” by John McCain, and it’s true—he looked the part, from the straight-from-Hollywood narrative arc of his maturation to his familiarity with The Wire and the hip-hop on his iPod. But his campaign also mobilized younger voters by tapping into fears incessantly expressed in movies and television: cultural retrogression (Mad Men), greedy businessmen (The Simpsons), misbegotten wars (Syriana), environmental neglect (Wall-E). The right has no broadcasting device of comparable scope; it tells its stories mainly through avowedly political media like talk radio and Fox News. This makes the fears that torment conservatives today—overweening regulators, welfare layabouts, the government seizing our guns—not so easily recognizable to those not expressly ­familiar with the right-wing creed.

This year, some of Obama’s movie-star luster has worn off, yet the cultural landscape is the same, essentially congenial place. Here is one small but newly relevant example. The website tvtropes.org collects the basic rules of various pop-culture genres—for instance, a character in a horror film who announces that he will “be right back” is about to suffer a grisly fate. One entry notes that “merely possessing a Swiss bank account is proof positive that a person is up to no good” and that “in more recent stories, an account in an offshore tax haven, such as the Cayman Islands, may be substituted.”

In many quarters of the right, though, secretive finances and tax-dodging represent heroic rebellion against tyrannical government. (Reason editor Matt Welch recently defended Swiss bank accounts as a sanctuary for “panicked retirees trying to cope with new tax rules imposed capriciously by a revenue-hungry Congress and president in 2010.”) The automatic imputation of sinister motives to secretive tax avoidance by wealthy businesspeople is exactly the sort of thing the Screen Guide for Americans warned against. Now, of course, the Republican Party has nominated a presidential candidate possessing both a Swiss bank account and money in a Cayman Islands tax haven, and television and film have so deeply ingrained the popular distrust of these things that Democrats need only chant the phrases in order to make him bleed.

I know that there’s not much surprising here for many people, but I thought that the article and responses highlighted some interesting issues.

What’s the path forward for the GOP?

Ross Douthat recently posted a favorable review of Eric Erickson’s argument.

Alan Jacobs on guns

I thought that Jacobs raised some interesting points in this post.

Hat tip: John Fea

Neoconservatives vs. paleoconservatives

From reading the title of this post, you may wonder if you traveled back in time to 2003, 2005, or at the latest 2008. Fair enough. But my last post reminded me of another essay by Patrick Deneen that I read recently, and I wanted to note something from it.

Deneen recently wrote a long essay about the legacy of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind after 25 years, a work that really stirred the pot in the 1980s. Check out the essay for more.

The reason that I wanted to note the essay is that it gave the best quick explanation of the underlying philosophy of neoconservatism that I’ve seen. I had heard of Leo Strauss from reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog regularly years ago but had not gotten a sense of where he fit in with intellectual history, probably because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Anyway, I found this section near the end of Deneen’s essay helpful:

In fact, Bloom’s critique of the “multicultural” left is identical to and drawn from the critique of the “multicultural” right advanced by his teacher, Leo Strauss. In his seminal work Natural Right and History, Strauss identified Burke’s criticisms of the French Revolution as one of the lamentable responses to the “Crisis of Modern Natural Right,” a crisis that arose as a reaction against the social contractarianism of “modern natural right.” Burke’s argument against the revolutionary impulses of social contractarianism constituted a form of conservative “historicism”—that is, in Strauss’s view, the rejection of claims of natural right in favor of a preference for the vagaries of History. While today’s Straussians concentrate their criticisms largely on left historicism (i.e., progressivism), Strauss was just as willing to focus his criticisms on right historicism, that is, the traditionalism of Burke and his progeny.

Ironically, because the left in the 1980s adopted the language (if not the substance) of multiculturalism, Bloom was able to turn those Straussian critiques of Burke against those on the left—though of course they were no Burkeans, even if they used some Burkean language. For this reason, Bloom was assumed by almost everyone to be a “conservative,” a label that he not only explicitly rejected, but a worldview that he philosophically and personally abhorred.

Bloom’s argument became a major touchstone in the development of “neoconservatism,” a label that became associated with many fellow students of Strauss but which, ironically, explicitly rested on rejection of the claims of culture, tradition, and custom—the main impulses of Burkean conservatism. Bloom continuously invoked the natural-rights teachings of the Declaration and Constitution as necessary correctives to the purported dangers of left multiculturalism: rather than endorsing the supposed inheritance of various cultures, he commended the universalistic claims of liberal democracy, which ought to trump any identification with particular culture and creed. The citizen who emerged from the State of Nature, shorn of any specific cultural, religious, or ancestral limitation, was the political analogue for the philosopher who emerged from the Cave. Not everyone could become a philosopher, Bloom insisted, but everyone could be a liberal citizen, and ought rightly to be liberated from the limitations of place and culture—if for no other reason, to make them more tolerant of the radical philosophers in their midst.

Bloom’s was thus not only an early salvo in the culture wars, but an incipient articulation of the neoconservative impulse toward universalistic expansion. Burke’s willingness to acknowledge the basic legitimacy of most cultures—his “multiculturalism”—led him, in the main, to oppose most forms of imperialism. The rejection of multiculturalism, and the valorization of a monolithic liberal project, has inclined historically to a tendency toward expansionism and even imperialism, and neoconservatism is only the latest iteration of this tendency. While many of the claims about Strauss’s influence on the Iraq invasion and the neoconservative insistence upon spreading democracy throughout the world were confused, there was in fact a direct lineage from Bloom’s arguments against the multicultural left and rise of the neo-liberal or neoconservative imperialistic impulse. Bloom explicitly rejected the cautiousness and prudence endorsed by conservatism as a hindrance to philosophy, and thus rejected it as a political matter as a hindrance to the possibility of perfectibility:

Conservatives want young people to know that this tawdry old world cannot respond to their demands for perfection. … But … man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. …. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are.

Christmas as economic savior

Walter Russell Mead has a short critique of this idea.

This of course reflects on the assumptions underlying a consumer economy. I discussed Mead’s ideas about this in this post, and followed up here.

What happened at Little Bighorn?

A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn – the Last Great Battle of the American West by James Donovan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Donovan gave a very thorough description of the leadup to the battle of Little Bighorn and a detailed account of the battle itself. He also got into the blame game afterwards. I came away from the book with a better understanding of how the battle fit in with federal-Indian relations in the 19th century, and Donovan does well in helping the reader to understand the various whites and Indians involved in the story without romanticizing or demonizing either. There’s quite a bit more about U.S. military officers than the Indian leaders, presumably because there’s much more written down about Custer and his colleagues.

I didn’t get into the nuts and bolts of the battle as much as I might have, but Donovan really tries to provide as much detail as possible, supported by a huge number of footnotes. I might go back and re-read that section someday to get a better handle on it.

View all my reviews

Strengths and weaknesses of state-led economic growth

An exchange with a couple of colleagues reminded me of this post by Walter Russell Mead, in which he reacted to the bumps in China’s economic development:

Recent years have seen a bubble in China babble among the global punditocracy’s talking heads. China’s apparent immunity to the 2008 financial crisis led many talking heads and columnists to argue that the Chinese growth model – a cocktail of authoritarian political control and so-called “state capitalism” – represented a new way forward for economies everywhere.

As history, this was simply ignorance speaking: authoritarian states and forms of state capitalism have been achieving rapid bursts of growth since the era of Louis XIV. During the Depression, Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were all widely hailed by clueless western pundits as having found more “modern” and “efficient” methods of promoting growth than the “failed” policies of the liberal capitalist states. It has been well known for centuries that over the short term, concerted state-guided modernization drives can outperform liberal policies; the trouble is — and always has been — that sooner or later the accumulated inefficiencies, distortions, and political shortcomings of non-liberal states lead to prolonged slowdowns at best, revolutions and wars at the worst.

However, those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat the mistaken cliches of past generations as if they were shiny new truths; China babble has reigned among exactly the kinds of people who used to marvel at Hitler’s autobahns, Stalin’s steel mills, and Mussolini’s ability to make the trains run on time.

This seems to be a helpful way to understand why the New Deal model seemed to work so well from the 1930s to the 1960s, but not as well after that. This model of government transformed the landscape of the US, bringing about a national highway system (and the attendant suburbs) and a lot of development of rural areas (like the TVA). But there’s another side of the coin too.

American support for Israel’s Gaza operation

Walter Russell Mead has a thought-provoking interpretation of American support for Israel in its military response in Gaza: Americans don’t really believe in just war theory or proportionality in the conduct of war because of the circumstances of our national development. He links this to the prevalent “Jacksonian” attitude toward foreign policy in the US:

The European just war tradition springs in part from the reality that historically in Europe war was an affair of kings and rulers that hurt the little people without doing anything for them. Peasants really didn’t care whether the Duke of Burgundy or the Count of Anjou was recognized as the rightful overlord of their village, and moralists and theologians worked to limit the violence that the dukes and the counts and their henchmen wreaked on the poor peasants caught up in a quarrel that wasn’t theirs.

With no feudal past in this country, Americans have tended to see wars as wars of peoples rather than wars of elites and in a war of peoples the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets tends to collapse. The German civilian (male or female) making weapons for Hitler’s Wehrmacht was as much a part of the enemy’s warmaking potential as the soldier at the front. Furthermore, in a war of peoples in which civilians are implicated in the conflict, the health and morale of the civilian population is a legitimate target of war. This justified the blockades against the Confederacy and against Germany and German occupied Europe during the world wars, and it also justified the mass terror bombing raids of World War Two in which the destruction of enemy morale was one of the stated aims.

This is the same logic by which someone like Osama bin Laden could justify his attacks on civilians at the World Trade Center, and it is the fundamental logic behind Hamas’ indiscriminate attacks on Israeli civilian targets. Americans don’t like it when their enemies use this kind of logic, but it is a type of warfare they understand and they have fought and won enough of these wars in the past to be ready if necessary to do it again.

From this perspective, in which war is an elemental struggle between peoples rather than a kind of knightly duel between courtly elites, the concept of proportionality seems much less compelling. Certainly if some kind of terrorist organization were to set up missile factories across the frontier in Canada and Mexico and start attacking targets in the United States, the American people would demand that their President use all necessary force without stint or limit until the resistance had been completely, utterly and pitilessly crushed. Those Americans who share this view of war might feel sorrow at the loss of innocent life, of the children and non-combatants killed when overwhelming American power was used to take the terrorists out, but they would feel no moral guilt. The guilt would be on the shoulders of those who started the whole thing by launching the missiles.

In his review of Mead’s Special Providence, Peter Leithart summarizes Mead’s category of “Jacksonian” attitudes: “that government exists for the protection of the governed. Both domestically and in foreign policy, American should use its power to provide physical security and ensure prosperity for American citizens. Honor is a central value for Jacksonian cowboys, and when American honor is assaulted, Jacksonians make war with the fullest fury they can muster.”

Some time ago, Mead also wrote about why Americans support Israel in general, which I blogged about here.

Anti-smoking campaigns, anti-obesity campaigns, and immortality

Sociologist Peter Berger believes that there are similarities between the activism against smoking in public and for the regulation of foods that contribute to obesity. He concludes his post:

Back to the new war against obesity: It is not difficult to predict the trajectory which this project will follow. Very probably it will replicate, step by step, the war against tobacco.  Once again, the basic rationale is the prevention of illness. Heart disease is the illness most closely associated with obesity—not as scary as lung cancer, but scary enough. The scientific validation of the project is clear—obesity is unhealthy. The same interests that supported the anti-smoking crusaders can be mobilized once again—doctors who jump on the prevention bandwagon when their ability to cure is often limited, researchers in need of funding, bureaucrats looking for new behaviors to regulate, activists in search of employment opportunities, and of course, legions of tort lawyers, salivating at the prospect of gargantuan settlements from the food and drinks industry. Pizza Hut and Pepsi Cola may take the place of Philip Morris as public enemies (and defendants in class-action lawsuits). The same arguments will serve to counter libertarian scruples—social costs and innocent bystanders. Children will again be featured in the litany of victims. (Michelle Obama understandably likes to preach in kindergartens and elementary schools.) Finally, class is again involved here: Upper income and higher education is associated with virtuous slimness, while all these fat working-class types waddle from Burger King to the unemployment lines. Just as the Victorian bourgeoisie tried to convert the poor slobs to its table of virtues (alcohol of course was then the most targeted vice), so the new bourgeoisie bombards the lower classes with itstemperance crusade. (One might speak of the eternal return of the Salvation Army—George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara would today be reincarnated as a coach with Weight Watchers). It remains to be seen how far this will go before the Great Unwashed remember that, after all, they are (still) allowed to vote.

[Personal disclosure: I gave up smoking years ago. I have never liked the beverages targeted by Mayor Bloomberg. So, as they say in Texas, I have no dog in this fight. However, I have a fierce commitment to individual freedom, and a keen sense of the slippery slope which opens up when even a seemingly modest exercise of this freedom is arbitrarily taken away by government actions.]

Does this have anything to do with religion? I think it does. The quest of immortality is one of the most ancient religious themes.  The health cult, with its mirage of endless youth if not immortality, is a quasi-religion. Its dogma is the obligation to live healthily. Like all religions, the health cult has a catalogue of virtues and a catalogue of vices, with rituals to affirm the former and ostracize the latter. There is also an equivalent of the Saudi Arabian police force dedicated to “the promotion of virtue and the suppression of vice”—an army of therapists, coaches, educators, advice columnists, dieticians, and other moral entrepreneurs. To date (still) they mainly rely on persuasion rather than coercion. Wait a little.

Another industrial revolution?

Yesterday, I posted about a potential revival in American exports, made possible in part by better manufacturing technology. Walter Russell Mead showed how technology could return manufacturing jobs to America, linking to an article from The Economist by Paul Markillie that looks at 3D printers:

Instead of bashing, bending and cutting material the way it always has been, 3D printers build things by depositing material, layer by layer. That is why the process is more properly described as additive manufacturing. An American firm, 3D Systems, used one of its 3D printers to print a hammer for your correspondent, complete with a natty wood-effect handle and a metallised head….

Everything in the factories of the future will be run by smarter software. Digitisation in manufacturing will have a disruptive effect every bit as big as in other industries that have gone digital, such as office equipment, telecoms, photography, music, publishing and films. And the effects will not be confined to large manufacturers; indeed, they will need to watch out because much of what is coming will empower small and medium-sized firms and individual entrepreneurs. Launching novel products will become easier and cheaper. Communities offering 3D printing and other production services that are a bit like Facebook are already forming online—a new phenomenon which might be called social manufacturing.

The article calls this the “third industrial revolution.”