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Chapter 6

The Culture War and the Myth of the New Class
Every now and then there really is a smoking gun. During the 1984 Reagan reelection campaign, Republican strategist Lee Atwater set forth the culture-war strategy of today's Republican right: "Populists have always been liberal on economics. So long as the crucial issues were generally confined to economics--as during the New Deal--the liberal candidate would expect to get most of the populist vote. But populists are conservatives on most social issues.... When social and cultural issues died down, the populists were left with no compelling reason to vote Republican...." Atwater's recommendation to the Republican party: change the subject from economics to "culture." The culture war was not original with Atwater. The goal of Republican strategists from the Nixon administration onward has been to replace the New Deal alignment based on economic class and region with a new alignment based on subcultures. Spiro Agnew called an early version of the conservative culture war "positive polarization," saying, "It is time to rip away the rhetoric and to divide on authentic lines." Patrick J. Buchanan, when he was working as an aide in the Nixon White House, outlined the strategy in a memo about the benefits of nominating a southern segregationist to the Supreme Court: "[I]t is a bitterly divisive issue for Democratic candidates.... Either they kick their black friends in the teeth, or they kick the South in the teeth. De facto ... divisive." Buchanan, who has since used the culture war to his own benefit in two runs for the Republican presidential nomination that have made him the leading conservative spokesman along with Pat Robertson, urged Nixon to adopt a political strategy that would "cut the Democratic Party and country in half. My view is that we would have far the larger half." For some time, the Nixon-Agnew-Buchanan strategy of "positive polarization" has been succeeding in tearing the country in half and giving the GOP the larger half. A Republican majority based on the exploitation of racial and cultural rather than economic divisions in the population would not be unprecedented. Culture-war politics in the United States is nothing new--one need only recall how the debate over prohibition between European immigrant "wets" and southern and western Protestant "drys" divided the Democratic party for generations between the Civil War and the New Deal, to the benefit of the dominant Republicans. The most important model for the culture-war politics of the American right, as I observed earlier, is found in the one-party politics of the segregated Democratic South. The details of conservative culture-war rhetoric show the influence of the two traditions that have the greatest influence on modern conservative ideology: the Jacksonian populism purveyed by the likes of Pat Robertson and Patrick Buchanan, and the inverted Marxism of ex-leftist neoconservatives. Populism has its roots in seventeenth century English Puritan radicalism: neoconservative ideology, in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Marxism, especially Leon Trotsky's Marxist faction. It would be difficult, one might think, to synthesize two such unlike traditions. In fact, however, populism and inverted Marxism are similar, in their apocalyptic vision of the present and future, and their claim to represent the masses against sinister elites. It is much easier, in fact, to synthesize populist radicalism and ex-Marxist radicalism in a portmanteau radicalism of the right, than it is to reconcile either populist radicalism or ex-Marxist radicalism with traditional conservatism or moderate liberalism. Both populist conspiracy theory and inverted Marxist class analysis come together in the conservative culture war.

Most societies have some version of the Golden Age myth. (The term itself comes from the ancient Greek poet and moral philosopher Hesiod, who traced the degeneration of mankind from an age of gold through ages of silver, bronze, and iron.) Once, it is said, there was a time when disorder and sin were nonexistent or far less prevalent than today. Children respected their elders; husbands and wives were faithful to one another; young men and women were virgins until marriage; people drank in moderation, and knew only dignified entertainments. Popular literature was highly intellectual, and tended to promote good character. Incorruptible statesmen served the public interest, not special interests. Everyone was learned, arid a great number were wise. There were no commercials. The myth of the Golden Age tends to be accompanied, in most human communities, by the Devil Theory--the American historian Charles Beard's term for the idea that adverse trends in society or economics can always be blamed, not on economic changes or the unintended consequences of institutional designs, but on the machinations of sinister (and often hidden) conspirators. If sickness sweeps the village, the cause must be sorcerers and witches. If the divorce rate goes up, then Hollywood producers and university professors must be to blame. In recent years the intellectuals arid publicists of the American right, drawing on both Jefferson - Jackson populism and Marxism, have developed a unique synthesis of the Golden Age and devil myths. The Golden Age in the United States, the right has decided, ended in the 1960s, when long-haired campus radicals took over the culture, or, at the earliest, in the 1930s, when FDR's New Deal liberals took over the country. (Some reactionary conservatives think the decline began with the Union victory in the Civil War, or the Reformation, or the Renaissance, or the thirteenth century, but they tend not to have much influence.) The agent of the fall from grace, the serpent in the American garden, was "the new class," a tiny group of professors, journalists, social workers, and Hollywood producers, of the sort once jumped together by the McCarthyite founders of modern conservatism as "parlor pinks." Despite their small numbers, these "new class" intellectuals and processionals, by virtue of their control of the mass media, have been able to brainwash substantial portions of the American population into going against their own sounder instincts and embracing a relativistic and hedonist anti-morality. If this sounds like a caricature of the conservative position, consider a recent authoritative statement of the new orthodoxy in the Republican magazine Rising Tide by the eminent neoconservative scholar Michael Novak. "From this country's founding until well into the 1940s, the three words 'moral,' 'character,' and 'virtue' were like newly polished silver--as shown in the expression, 'a sterling character,' " Novak writes. "And then, as in a three-act play, such terms were devalued." We should be suspicious of any melodramatic interpretation of history that compares it to a three-act play--but let us read on. "The novels and detective stories of the 1920s and thirties," Novak writes, "were a warning. Good guys began to be cynical. Ladies began to smoke, drink and swear" (he is talking about fictional ladies, without whose example, it seems, real-life ladies would not have thought of smoking, drinking, and swearing). At least Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne's rugged romantics only "tried to seem hard-boiled." Bogie and the Duke were pusillanimous altar boys, compared to the anti-heroes who followed in the 1950s, the dreadful Beats. Sounding rather like Dragnet's Sergeant Joe Friday, Novak writes: "Deviance was the song of the Beats. Gunning their motorcycles and taking 'trips' on drugs, they abandoned words like 'virtue.' When they encountered men of character, they called them square, stiff, unbending and hopelessly out of date." In some way--Novak never explains how--the Beats, who were anti-rational, anti-scientific, and anti-bureaucratic (and of whom there were at most five in the entire United States) were comrades in arms with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his welfare-state mandarins: "Millions of scientifically trained personnel." With the help of "the national media," this sinister nomenclature shoved aside local elites: "The old ways lost luster. The new ways that drove them out shown as brightly as chrome." The Silver Age of the hard-boiled but good-hearted 1920S and 1930s, which had followed a previous American Golden Age of soft-boiled virtue, was being succeeded in the fifties and sixties by an Age of Chrome. "In these three acts"--Act One being the pre-W.W.I era, Act Two being the interwar period, and Act Three being the 1940s to the present--"a healthy ecology of liberty--the moral atmosphere, the inner world of images and guiding narratives that had shaped this nation since the Mayflower Compact--blew apart.... In its place arose a mutant, a new morality filled with noise and pride and the excitement of rotating strobe lights." Disco had arrived. Novak's contrast between the old morality of virtuous Christian Rotarians and the new morality of bongo drum pounding Beat poets and paper-pushing government technocrats deserves to be quoted at length: From about 1830 onwards, until well into the 20th century, about two-thirds of young people in America had attended Sunday school. There they learned such stories as that of the Good Samaritan: On the road to Jericho a man was set upon by highway robbers, beaten, robbed and left for dead. A mail of a different tribe came along, found him, bound up his wounds, put him in a local inn to recuperate and paid for his lodging.... In the new moral ecology ... under the guidance of experts in social science, the story of the Good Samaritan needed to be told in a new way: Two social workers covering their assigned territory come upon a poor fellow, beaten and robbed, on the road to Jericho. They look at his wounds and feel sorry. "These men who beat and robbed you," they ask, "how can we help them?" "Until the mid-1960s," Newt Gingrich claims, in accordance with Novak, "there was an explicit long-term commitment to creating character." But then came the "counterculture" of the 1960s, which "is extraordinarily tolerant of violence, with a situation-ethics morality, in which your immediate concern about your personal needs outweighs any obligation to others." If Gingrich's and Novak's accounts of the degeneration of America were even halfway accurate, then any thoughtful American today would be doing his best to emigrate. Fortunately, Novak's "three-act drama" of American history is historical fiction. If you believe conservatives, public school teachers since the 1960s, or even since World War 11, have been the shock troops of the "new class," endowing vulnerable American children with what Novak calls " a morality for amoral robots." In what school district have teachers been doing this? Certainly not in mine. I attended public schools throughout, from the first grade to the twelfth. If there had been courses in amorality, cultural relativism, and godless humanism, I think I would have noticed. The moral propaganda that I and my fellow students received from our unionized public school teachers was entirely conventional--Be on Time, Finish Your Homework, Count to Ten When You Are Angry. I suppose that some hard-shell conservatives might see a dangerous instance of "relativism" in the occasional lecture, in my lily-white and almost exclusively gentile suburban elementary school, about the need to be nice to people of other races and religions--but the banalities routinely expressed by conservative politicians trying to sound ecumenical can hardly be corrupting of youth when enunciated by teachers. What is the alternative, anyway--teaching racial pride and intolerance for heresy? The picture Novak and other conservatives paint of an America that turned into an orgiastic Sybaris after the 1960s, then, seems utterly unreal to those of us who grew up in mainstream America between the 1960s and the present. How could conservative intellectuals be so wrong? How could they exaggerate the liberalism, and underestimate the social conservatism, of American society so absurdly? Demagogy plays a role, but many of the elite conservatives I know appear to be sincerely confused. They think that their fellow Americans are much wilder than they really are. There are two answers, I think. The first, and most important, is that many of the intellectuals of the right have spent much of their lives either on elite college campuses or in big cities. Academics and journalists living in Cambridge, Massachusetts or Manhattan tend to grossly overestimate the strength of radicalism in the country. (Conservatives seldom note that this illusion tends to hurt the left, whose intellectuals are recurrently stunned by the lack of popular support for their positions in the continent outside of their coastal, metropolitan bohemias.) Another reason for the often hysterical exaggeration of the influence of cultural radicalism in the United States has to do with the relaxation of censorship in books, movies, television, and music since the 1960s. The most thorough studies of American sexual behavior reveal a population in which the overwhelming majority have few partners in their lifetimes and quite conservative tastes. There is far more sex in mass entertainment, it appears, than there is among the masses themselves. The moralistic conservatives think this is a problem. Perhaps it is. But it is a problem to which leading conservatives themselves have contributed. In his successful spy novels, William E Buckley, Jr. has his hero, Blackford Oakes, fornicating repeatedly outside of marriage. In the first novel of the series, Saving the Queen, the intrepid spy has sex with the Queen of England. In his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), Buckley alerted the regents of Yale to a professor who had suggested at a conference of the American Social Hygiene association that taboos against premarital sex were "unrealistic." "As a professor," the young Buckley warned, "Mr. Murdock has wide influence, and it cannot be expected that his remarks and attitudes will have no influence on his students." If the mere mention of premarital sex by Professor Murdock, away from campus, was enough to turn Yale undergrads into crazed sex fiends, imagine the effect of the smoldering pages in Buckley's spy novels in which his hero and his hero's girlfriend--both Yale students, both unmarried--do what Buckley wanted Professor Murdock to be fired for mentioning. Nor is Buckley's fiction alone in posing a potential threat to today's impressionable youth. Newt Gingrich has written a novel, 1945, in which a "Nazi sex kitten" does various things to his protagonist that cannot be mentioned in a family book like this. Then there is Texas Senator and Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm, who back in the 1970s sought to invest in a series of soft-core porn movies, with titles like Beauty Queens. Let us call the problem of sexual explicitness in literature and film the Buckley-Gingrich-Gramm problem. Let us assume that writers and investors like the editor of National Review, the Speaker of the House, and the co-author of the Gramm-Rudman Act, by writing or subsidizing soft porn, really are contributing to the delinquency of minors. What is to be done? Irving Kristol, in the past several years, has repeatedly called for government censorship of sexually explicit material, even "soft" pornography. As a practical matter, this would mean a great expansion of government bureaucracy, at the state and local level, if not at the federal level. Thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands, of civil servants would have to be employed to pore over books, magazines, and movies scanning carefully for naughty bits. Most western democracies abandoned regimes of strict censorship in the past several generations, precisely because of the high cost compared to the dubious results. Before 1989, however, the communist governments of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites maintained a regime in the cultural realm that should have made any American conservative proud. On point after point in their critique of the western media and western literature, indeed, the communist apparatchiks agreed with the would-be cultural commissars of the American right like Irving Kristol and William Bennett. They hated the same things, like modern art ("bourgeois formalism" to the Soviet-bloc left, the "avant-garde" to the American right). They preferred classical music and ballet (the older, the better) to jazz, rock and roll, and modern dance, which struck them as entirely too suggestive. In fashion, as in manner of sexual behavior, the Soviet left, like the American right, tended toward the puritanical. By calling for censorship of the sort that has only recently been dismantled in communist Europe, Kristol and allies are simply completing the parallel between their views of cult and those of such prim defenders of public and private decency as Stalin and Fidel Castro. The best answer to conservative advocates of heavy-handed censorship (as opposed to the limited censorship that even a liberal community will engage in) comes from the great eighteenth-century English conservative man of letters, Doctor Samuel Johnson, in a conversation his biographer James Boswell about the poet Matthew Prior: I asked whether Prior's poems were to be printed entire; Johnson said they were. I mentioned Lord Hailes's censure of Prior, in his preface to a collection of "Sacred Poems," by various hands ... where he mentions "those impure tales which will be the eternal opprobrium of their ingenious author." JOHNSON. "Sir, Lord Hailes has forgot. There is nothing in Prior that will excite to lewdness. If Lord Hailes thinks there is, he must be more combustible than other people." Even when I considered myself a conservative, I was skeptical about the nostalgic picture of a wholesome, virtuous small-town past. (I refer here only to the state of personal morals and mores within the white majority; the institutionalized immorality of slavery and segregation is an entirely different question.) Today we have the Hell's Angels; back then, they had Hell's Kitchen. The inner-city black and Hispanic gangs of today are better armed, but no more vicious, than the brutal Irish American urban gangs of late nineteenth-century New York, like Dead Rabbits and the Five Pointers. Al Capone owned much of Chicago political class and police, during the very era that many contemporary conservatives look back on as a Golden Age. Somehow today's moralistic conservatives manage to overlook the fact that the Golden Age of political corruption in the United States was inaugurated by the single greatest effort at conservative moral reform by law American history: Prohibition.

The conservative theory of morality, as I observed above, combines the myth of the Golden Age with the devil theory of history. The older southern Democratic right that taught today's Republicans how to wage culture-war politics was not afraid to name particular groups of devils: blacks, Catholics Yankees, Jews, communists. Today's Republican right prefers to describe the enemies of God-fearing white Christian folk in vague terms: "the cultural elite," or "the media elite," or--the favorite demon in right-wing demonology--"the new class." The idea of "the new class" has two sources--dissident communists in the early twentieth century, like the Pole Max Nomad and the ican James Burnhlam, who explained Stalinism by saying that "a class" of intellectuals and party operatives had taken over in post-capitalist Russia instead of proletarians, and the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, a conservative who worried that the liberal business civilization of the West was breeding anti-capitalist intellectuals in its midst who would ultimately destroy capitalism. Neither the socialist nor the Schumpeterian versions of the new-class thesis appears convincing today. Stalin's dictatorship , far from representing the triumph intellectuals, rested on the traditional agencies of tyrannical regime military and the secret police. Intellectuals in the Soviet Union who questioned the government line were systematically harassed, imprisoned, or executed. Schumpeter's prophecy that intellectuals would power in the West and impose socialism seems equally absurd today. Throughout the western world, socialist parties are in a state of disarray. What is more, there is no western democracy, apart from France, in which intellectuals have any significant influence or prestige in politics compared to conventional party politicians. If the new class really exists and has planned to lead the industrial democracies into socialism, it has been remarkably ineffective. None of this necessarily discredits the contemporary conservative version of the "new class" theory, in which the term, severed from its origins in the writings of Nomad, Burnham, and Schurnpeter, has come simply a catchphrase that lumps together moderate conservatives, liberals, and socialists into a single category, and implies that they belong not simply to one of several opinion factions, but to a distinct social stratum or class. In his recent book The Freedom Revolution, House majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas divides the country into virtuous "doers" and sinister "talkers." The latter constitute the new class--a group subdivided into six subspecies: "politicians, educators, journalists, lawyers, theologians, and entertainers." (Armey, an educator before he became a politician, must be the exception to the rule that people like him should be doubly distrusted.) The "doers" know what the "talkers" deny: "The market is rational and the government is dumb." What is the source of the irrational enthusiasm for tyrannical state power on the part of deluded new-class "talkers"? Jeane Kirkpatrick explains: "Rationalism, optimism, and activism have been and still are the source of liberal and radical political action. They also are characteristics of the politics of the new class." They are also--it should be pointed out--characteristics of the Republican political class; remember Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America"? What is supply-side economics, if not the archetypical example of a utopian political-economic program as rationalistic as it is optimistic? What is Jack Kemp, if not the embodiment of an optimistic, utopian "talker"? Kirkpatrick herself, when she spoke at the 1984 Republican convention, did not see fit to promote virtues that were the opposite of new-class vices like "rationalism, optimism, and activism"--say, virtues like irrationalism, pessimism, and sloth. Another equally dubious version of the new-class theory posits a quasi-Marxist class struggle between professionals (who are collectivist and therefore bad) and the business class (whose members are for free enterprise and therefore good). According to Irving Kristol, "The simple truth is that the professional classes are engaged in a class struggle with the business community for status and power." Are dentists and lawyers really engaged in a power struggle with corporate vice presidents? According to the most thorough study of the American professional class, Kristol's "simple truth" is simply false. A study of attitudes among American professionals conducted by Steven Brint, a sociologist at the University of California at Riverside, has demonstrated that professionals do not have the left-wing, anti-business attitudes imputed to them by conservatives. True, highly educated professionals tend to be secular and relatively liberal on subjects like civil liberties, sexual rights, and tolerance of political dissent. On economic matters like labor and welfare rights, however, Brint discovered that affluent professionals tend to be far more conservative than average Americans-and far to the right on the issues of crime and the military. Brint concludes, "Even the most liberal segment of professionals--the people who would be counted as members of the 'new class' in any version of the theory--were, by and large, far from unconventional in their tastes or decidedly left-of-center in their political views, and they certainly show little opposition to the basic organizing principles of a business civilization." Brint's findings should come as no surprise. For decades, even as neo-conservatives were fantasizing about a leftist crusade by members of the new class, Americans with advanced education and high incomes have been far more likely than average Americans to vote Republican. The "new class," then, is a figment of the neoconservative imagination. Professionals and business executives alike tend to belong to a single class, the dominant elite in the contemporary United States-the managerial-professional overclass, which tends to be liberal on social issues and conservative in its economic views. If neoconservatives sought to be genuine populists, they would attack the overclass, in the name of the socially conservative and economically liberal working-class majority in the United States. But such genuine populism would mean attacking the overclass media, including the Wall Street Journal, and overclass institutions, like the conservative foundations that funnel money to writers supporting lower regulation on business and lower taxes on the rich. If the idea of the new class confuses the adversary culture with the professions, the neoconservative notion of "the bourgeoisie" hopelessly confuses patriciates and business classes. This mistake is easier to make in English and French, where "bourgeois" since the nineteenth century has come to mean "mercantile' " than in German, where burgerlich retains the older political and social connotations of the burgher, the citizen. For an equivalent in English, one must imagine that the term "burgesses" had survived--and described eminent citizens from old families, not just the rich or corporate executives. The bourgeoisies of early modern Europe were not mere business classes; they were urban patriciates, groups that were political and social elites as much as they were economic elites. The term "genteel" in its origins, has nothing whatsoever to do with capitalism; its root is gens, or family; it refers to aristocratic or patrician lineage, not to money. The great bourgeois dynasties, like Thomas Mann's family in Lubeck, Germany, were more like aristocratic families than like the lower-middle-class shopkeepers idealized by Thatcherites in Britain and neo-conservatives in the United States. The ethos of the great bourgeois families stressed public service in city-state or national politics; the idea of a strict separation between government and business, to say nothing of the idea that government is inherently wicked and corrupt and the market good and constructive, would have struck members of the old European bourgeoisie as absurd. Though this kind of bourgeoisie made its living, at least in part, from commerce, modern industrial capitalism, by shifting the locus of economic power away from merchant-princes to national and multinational corporations with salaried managers, destroyed the social conditions that made an old-fashioned bourgeois elite possible. The real enemies of the old-time bourgeoisie are the sponsors of the conservative movement on Wall Street. It is questionable whether many of the virtues that the neoconservatives ascribe to the bourgeoisie are "bourgeois" virtues at all. Many so-called bourgeois virtues (as the late Christopher Lasch, a populist of the left, pointed out) are characteristic more of lower-middle-class and working-class and rural folk than of the metropolitan rich and the corporate elite. The "Confucian" work ethic of many Asian-American immigrants, in its Chinese origins, has nothing to do with a bourgeois or commercial society at all. Although many first-generation immigrants from Asia, like European immigrants before them, are compelled to take minor jobs in the private-sector economy, the Confucian value system of East Asia is the product of a society in which government office, based on academic merit, was the highest goal of the ambitious. Confucian values are not the virtues of the bourgeois, but of the mandarin, of the state bureaucrat. In this, they resemble the work ethic that Anglo-Americans noted among immigrants from German-speaking Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The old-fashioned "Prussian" or "German" virtues of discipline, obedience, and erudition are those of a thoroughly statist and collectivist cultural region, in which the middle class, the Mittelstand, literally, the class in the middle, tended to consist not of shopkeepers but of minor government functionaries. Since the virtues prized by statist, communitarian societies end to produce individuals who function well in modern, bureaucratized, industrial capitalist enterprises, the fact that the two leading capitalist countries in the world, apart from the United States, are the former authoritarian states of Japan and Germany should come as no urprise. However, it casts doubt on the American conservative dogma that "statism" and "capitalism" are somehow incompatible. In reality, modern government and modern industrial capitalism are both highly bureaucratic--and the modern societies that flourish tend to be secular Confucian and Teutonic nations in which the "bureaucratic virtues," rather than the "bourgeois virtues" or laissez-faire "Individualism" shape communal norms. The neoconservatives, then, are as mistaken about the bourgeoisie as they are about the new class. The only postwar American conservative who got matters right was James Burnham, the former Trotskyist intellectual who became an editor of National Review. In his 1940 book The Managerial Revolution, Burnham argued that the old bourgeois-capitalist order was giving way to a new system of managerial capitalism. Nostalgia for the old days of small-scale proprietary capitalism was useless; the task confronting western civilization was to find institutional means to preserve individual liberty and national independence in a world of military and trade blocs and bureaucratic elites (in both the public and private sectors). Had later conservatives built upon Burnham's insights, the conservative intellectual movement would not have wasted half a century on preposterous conspiracy theories about leftist journalists and pinko professors. But then, the conservative intellectual movement would not have been useful in promoting the narrow interests of members of the rapacious private-sector managerial overclass seeking to pass themselves off as members of a benevolent and virtuous "bourgeoisie." Although it was never plausible and has been convincingly discredited, the neoconservative version of the new-class theory has become one of the cliches of the Republican right. The reason is that it gives the appearance of social-scientific validation to the apocalyptic conspiracy theories of the mostly southern and western Protestant fundamentalists upon whom conservatives now depend for votes. By talking about a new-class conspiracy of "amoral elites" trying to brainwash "our children," Ivy League intellectuals on the right like Kristol and Novak and Bennett and Kirkpatrick appear to be giving credibility to the deepest nightmares of deluded working-class white evangelical Protestants. In 1994, conservative evangelical circles across the United States were swept by rumors that the Disney corporation was beaming subliminal sexual messages into the minds of young viewers