Washington Monthly takes a look at the rise and fall of Culture11. I thought these passages were the best:
[C11's] founders were all committed evangelicals, and Carter, who had once run a small newspaper in East Texas, envisioned the site as a place where social conservatives could talk about culture--a safe zone between the purely political critiques of the conservative media and the secular liberal criticism that dominated the mainstream media, neither of which answered the questions he wanted answered about television and movies. "The Christian culture has the 'shit counters': the people who say, 'This movie has thirteen bad words,' or whatever," Carter told me. "We didn't want to do that. We thought there was a real audience for criticism of books, TV, and movies by people who actually liked books, TV, and movies."
Deepening that point...
"In the interest of being more than provocative," [C11 politics editor James Poulos] said, getting to his serious question, "are we ever going to be able to address the question of cultural necessitarianism without being confident that we're getting our cultural criticism right?"Stripped of its woolly academese, what Poulos was asking was, can conservatism properly push back against a popular culture that it doesn't really understand? How does a movement that yearns for the values of the past confront a culture that prizes novelty? This was a problem that had bedeviled modern American conservatism since Buckley first inveighed against the Beatles in his syndicated column. It was something that Poulos, who had dabbled in screenwriting and indie rock (his band was called the End of History) in Los Angeles before moving to Washington, had kicked around in his own writing. "The right has a lot to learn from people who are completely outside of it," he explained later. If they did that, they "might actually win some latecomers, people who have lived unhappy or unsatisfying lives. And if they show up at the door of the right and say, 'Gosh, my super-transgressive life is sort of unrewarding, maybe I've exhausted this mine of self-indulgence and personal freedom and saying 'fuck the man,' and the right is completely disinterested in engaging those people, I think they're missing out."
Poulos was more pontificator than reporter, but this line of thinking dovetailed with Friedersdorf's belief in sending conservative writers out to experience the world. If Poulos wasn't quite the Wolfean observer that his coeditor was looking for, his occasional pieces about his time in Los Angeles arguably came closer to Friedersdorf's ideal than anything else Culture11 published--they were biting but empathetic, and tapped the unexamined is-this-all-there-is melancholy that underlies the irony-heavy hipster milieu. "Ambiguity was cultivated and non-commitment a social compact," he wrote in one piece about the L.A. scene. "A blurring of the basic facts took shape as a habitual coping mechanism."
And:
What Big Hollywood does isn't criticism, or reporting--it's ideological accounting. And its failure to get its arms around the culture in which it is swimming is symptomatic of the broader failures of the conservative movement. For decades, the Nixonian notion of the silent majority created a strong temptation for conservatives to simply wall off the parts of society that they didn't like or understand, secure in the belief that there were more people on their side of the wall. Ballot for ballot, this may have been true in the 1970s and '80s, and even into the '90s. But if you build a border fence, it's difficult to see what's happening on the other side of it. Which is why in 2008 the Republican Party awoke to a world in which it was losing every politically important demographic battle and had essentially ceded the field on issues like education, where it hadn't contributed a new policy idea since the school voucher, and energy, where the best plan it could come up with was a renewed push for offshore drilling. Big Hollywood's mania for ideological categorization stems from the same mind-set--shared even by some of the smarter reform conservatives--that produced the Bush administration's disastrous loyalty-over-performance hiring practices: the instinct to see everything, from the Sundance Film Festival to NASA's atmospheric research programs, as just another battleground. What Culture11's editors got right was the observation that, regardless of what you think of the world as it is, you can't figure out how to wrestle with it until you understand what's actually happening in it.
All this makes me wonder how I would see the conservative movement, such as it is, today if I were a college student. I came to conservatism as a liberal undergraduate, because in large part conservatism made sense. If you weren't there, it's hard to convey how stultified and self-deluded 1980s liberalism was, especially on campus. Coming to it as a sneering liberal, I was taken by how liberating conservative thought was -- something that became even more clear to me when I graduated and entered the Real World of crime, taxes and personal responsibility.
Mind you, I've learned a lot since then, and the kind of conservatism that engaged my imagination and converted me in the 1980s isn't the kind of conservatism that engages my imagination and holds my loyalty in 2009. The world has changed, and so have I. One gets the idea that today's mainstream conservatives have not substantially changed a thing since the 1980s; I imagine that if I were on campus today, the conservatives would seem as irrelevant and stiff-necked as the liberals did in my undergraduate youth.
As Claes Ryn put it in a penetrating TAC essay, organized conservatism finds itself wrecked today because it abandoned the culture, and taught itself to see the culture only in political terms. What we've turned into is a slightly more sophisticated, somewhat more secular version of Joe Carter's Christian "shit-counters." And see, this goes back to yesterday's discussion (which I tried to launch, but which, like every homosexuality-related thread on this blog, gets taken over by the grinds) about why churches and social conservatives have got to find some way to articulate the old verities, the permanent things, in a way that's compelling to people in this culture. You can't just stand there and yell, "No!" at whatever the liberals throw out there, and expect that to change minds and win hearts.
To the extent that Culture11 intended to be part of the answer to the questions conservatives ought to have been asking ourselves, it was noble. That Culture11 failed to find traction on the Right is as much a tragedy for the Right as it is for Culture11, because whatever C11's faults -- and it had them -- it shows that conservatives, in general, aren't capable of doing the kind of rethinking and repositioning that the moment requires.
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"Social conservatives (like liberals) reject the free-market because it does not control consumer behavior but caters to it. At some point social conservatives will be forced to make a choice between a free people who shape a culture by individual choice or an "offical" American culture controlled by committee -- and in doing so, decide if they truly are conservative in principle."
R Hampton
March 24, 2009 2:08 PM
Interesting point, R. Hampton, and it certainly contains more than a grain of truth. But when the creative force in a large, influential industry (in this case, Hollywood) is so overwhelmingly "of one mind" politically-speaking, at some point, does not that industry begin to control consumer behavior AND cater to it? What I mean is – we've now had several generations raised on the progressive ideas that infuse – some subtly, some quite obviously – the majority of Hollywood filmmaking. I would argue that, thanks in large part to Hollywood, liberalism is simply the air we breathe, now. Most folks don't even notice it. In other words, after feeding us decades of progressive, counter-cultural ideology, Hollywood (and the rest of the entertainment industry) has created a majority of consumers who don't know any better and just want more of the same. The counter-culture is now the culture. This is why, when I hear the word "conservative" these days, I wonder what it is we're trying to conserve.
"If you know much about Goldberg you realize that he doesn't exactly consider the Bush administration to be a shining example of conservatism. Maybe that helps."
1. I'm sure Goldberg says that now. Was he saying it 5 years ago? 4 years? 3 years?
2. The point is not that Goldberg may also disapprove of Bush/Cheney. It's how does anyone think fascism is on the Left, not only despite all historical evidence and philisophical argument to the contrary, but in the face of a self-described conservative government engaging in blatently authoritarian policies?
Let's be honest. Goldberg came up with a title he thought was really clever and was going to write a book that fit that title, intellectual honesty and decency be damned.
Mike
MargaretE,
I don't agree that Hollywood is so clearly of one mind. In the midst of the 1970's when All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore, 60 Minutes, etc. were airing, there was also the Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, Donnie & Marie, and the Wonderful World of Walt Disney. Some of the "conservative" offerings proved to be popular at Liberalism's height. So what does this prove? (1) Hollywood is not the monolith it's characterized to be, (2) Consumers do have a choice, (3) People are not zombies.
I suppose you don't agree, but it would be helpful if we can determine exactly when Hollywood became this liberal brainwashing tool so that we can see what influence it has had upon public, and to what degree it was subversive versus informative. But this begs the question, how is it that the U.S. existed for about a century and a half without (national) radio, television, or film programming - that is, without a centralized method for behavioral control.
But the most important point I have to make if one of property - a core conservative principle. Who owns culture?
Rod: All this makes me wonder how I would see the conservative movement, such as it is, today if I were a college student...
I *have* college students - and I know how they see conservatism. They're not impressed. As you wrote in a later post, re: the lack of conservative intellectuals vs. blowhards & media stars, all they see are the blowhards.
I agree with stefanie. Not just blowhards either, but a morally bankrupt Republican Party that pays lipservice (y'all have heard this stuff before) to pro-life and who thinks that morality never leaves the pelvis.
That's why I come here - to find a conservatism that thinks harder than Limbaugh/Hannity/OReilley.
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