Will The New Culture-Wars Wreck the Leftist/Liberal Alliance?

For those skeptical, the short answer is probably no.  Nevertheless, I think it's time we have a talk.

For some of us (not myself, but more on that later), what felt like one of most poignant examples of left-wing cultural shaming in years came in the form of 2014's The Lego Movie; pictured above. (Actually, a film within the film is pictured above; the actual movie's comedy is much better.)  After a short-but-dramatic prologue, the film opens in the life of Emmet Brickowski; a dopey, vacuously giddy peon living and working in Bricksburg, a glossy but nearly-as-dopey dystopia run by the bureaucratic dictator President Business, whose citizens' minds appear to have been proactively numbed into impotence by inanely optimistic pop-songs (actually; just one inanely optimistic pop-song that plays endlessly) and the one-meme sitcom pictured above.

Fortunately, the movie's satire isn't actually all that one-sided.  In due time, the film also points out some things that are beneficial about this environment; its big failing just being that it's a dictatorship, and jokes are made at the expense of the pretentiously pessimistic and avante-garde with as much enthusiasm as they're made at Emmet's empty but comfortable life.  The Lego Movie is probably one of those rare works that makes fun of all sorts of things and people while not really hating on any of them, and I love it for that; among other things.  Yet the amount of people who have concluded differently; both critical of the film (as with Fox News, whose critique I am not linking) and fond of it, is rather revealing of broader trends that have always been brimming within our culture and have up until recently avoided scrutiny.

Authoritarian cultural whinging from moral conservatives; typically of a religious persuasion, has become well-known to our society.  From dancing to rock and roll to Playboy to Dungeons and Dragons to Pokemon to Harry Potter, birth-control to pre-marital straight sex to promiscuous straight sex to gay sex, drink to drugs, religious old fogeys have constantly condemned pleasure-centric popular culture in deference to religion's greatest built-in asset against innovation and free-thinking; prophetic fear-mongering.  Whether it's called Armageddon, the Apocalypse, Ragnarok, Kali Yuga or any number of other things, fanatics have maintained that the falcon is being lured further and further from the falconer, until society becomes so sinful the world will end and the select few will be judged worthy to ascend to the kingdom of Heaven.  Fortunately, as liberalism and science have consistently made our kingdom of Earth increasingly more heavenly, we've increasingly ignored these sanctimonious old bores, and they may have met their functional Waterloo last decade, when George W. Bush's application of divine right to patriotism led to some very unpopular policies both at home and abroad, and we saw one rapture prediction after another proven resoundingly false.  The deaths of Jerry Falwell and Fred Phelps probably helped, too.

Yet even as we have sneered down our noses at the once-loud; now ever-softer Religious-Right authoritarians bemoaning the supposedly degenerate state of our popular culture, another bout of moaning has been coming in from another direction; occasionally satirized but not, until recently, recognized for the danger it potentially is.  Largely associated with what have become known as hipsters, the idea that bread and circuses (to borrow an old Roman term for "spit in the bucket") have neutralized us has never been far away from self-assumed rebels acting in the name of progress and liberation.  To their credit, I believe many of these people do sincerely believe that; they are not religious fundamentalists in sheep's clothing--at least not to any official religion.  What they are, however, is so obsessed with the romantic rebellious notion of going against the grain, that they do so without thinking of whence or wherefore that grain came; it's not always from the same old discredited religious ideals, and in many modern cases is, in fact, from their own.

There was a time in intellectual history when free-market capitalism was considered a radical idea.  A time where the idea that someone should attain wealth from hard work and merit flew in the face of the long-standing tradition of landed nobility hording it, a time when state-sanctioned merchants had the unique power to exchange goods between nations, driving their monopolistic prices to levels only such grandfathered-in aristocrats could afford.  When capitalism rode into intellectual favor with liberalism and democracy, it's not even an exaggeration to say that it was, in essence, the "socialism" of its time; the lofty but always desirable ideal that economic power, just like political power, should belong to the masses.  Unfortunately, some years and industrial technology later, there was also a time when the free market seemed to be undermining itself, as those who succeeded from it bought up the means of success until they were in short supply for others, and then reduced the others to cogs in mass-production.  Fortunately, pragmatic regulations and sub-state organizing for economic justice have largely saved the system, but from that grim-but-departed era of Carnegie, Dickens and Marx, more recent left-wing cynics have unearthed the premature conclusion that capitalism is inevitably oppressive, and applied it to capitalism's unique brand of culture.

The result, especially when taken to its logical (and, when a defense of contested culture is mounted by the contented, probably inevitable) extreme, thus becomes eerily similar to the old argument of religiously-minded critics; while they hollered slogans along the line of "The degenerate liberal media is making you sinful; repent before Satan takes our souls!" progressive critics have warned "The fascist corporate media is making you stupid; wake up before we're all subjugated!"  I am sad to admit that among the latter critics was my father, a product of the 1960s who, in his worse moments, blamed my supposed brainwashing by this supposed fascist corporate media for everything from my insistence that eating an apple would not sate my appetite for chocolate, to my association of organ music with the horror genre of literature.

This ongoing cynical idea of popular culture and its media being somehow "fascist" is probably the key reason that the few remaining arch-conservative satanism alarmists, via their presumptuous "Illuminati" theories, managed to recruit a disturbing amount of anti-authority/anti-war youth as an audience last decade, in probably the most shameful trend of counter-culture I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing.  Hopefully, most of these young rebels eventually realized that ironically, religious Rightists on the fringes of society had co-opted their anger at a religious rightist in the White House, but I still see things that make me think many haven't.

I got this forum response because I like Cars 2.

While progressive and conservative social critics naturally have their differences in how they process culture to fit their own biases, both in essence can and do arrive at warcries that boil down to "stop enjoying these things I dislike", and insist upon creating a higher culture that fosters higher ideals; however they define "higher".  Yet even as the twin viper heads of the authoritarian horseshoe snap at it from the right and the left, popular culture continues on its merry, liberal way.  While mass-media, like any institution wielding great power, comes naturally under skepticism, including plenty from liberals, in fact it, in a way perhaps unsurpassed by any other byproduct of capitalism, has had a positive association with those ideas widely seen as liberal, and in fact, progressive, for quite a while.

Consider, for example, popular music in egalitarian terms.  Almost since the dawn of recording technology, via such historical music genres as jazz, blues, rock, soul, funk, disco and rap, it has conveyed and glorified the talents of African Americans to American society as a whole; often well ahead of the time government and other mossy well-established institutions were willing to accept black people as having perfectly functional brains.  Naysayers may point to to the constant influx of white artists into these once-black genres as evidence of some top-down takeover, and yet onward through the present day, black innovators always come back to music, and many are rich.  Black power also broke into movies en-masse in the 1970s, which also saw the rise of feminism in cinema; sometimes, as in Pam Grier's case, within a single film.  Rather counter-intuitive policies for a media supposedly interested in propping up the established power-brokers!

For many, the 1980s were the loudest decade yet for popular culture; in essence facilitated by the pro-capitalist policies of Reagan's New Right Coalition.  Going by rabid anti-capitalist cynicism, this should have mean their collective values dug themselves in to establish an intellectually-strangling conformity, and yet even then, myriad pop songs critical of the era's prevailing right-wing culture were allowed in; The Message, Money For Nothing, Material Girl, and The Future's So Bright; to name a few.

In the 1990s, even as the Reagan era's D.A.R.E. garbage continued to be taught in state-funded schools, Sublime was conquering the radio waves with marijuana-friendly messages, and this has just snow-balled from there.  By the 2000s, another very conservative era insofar as official politics, the vocally pro-marijuana Jack Black was considered a fine casting choice for children's movies.  Now, as more and more states move towards legalizing marijuana, it is little accident that a news show has emerged noting its lucrative potential.

Finally, this decade gave us Mackelmore, whose 2011 gay rights anthem "Same Love" took the charts by storm.  At the time, gay marriage was still banned in California.  Shortly after, it was lifted here, as in some other states.  Then, yesterday, gay marriage was legalized nationwide.

Make no mistake; it's not my intention to ride capitalism enthusiastically.  I think it has its problems, and I'm happy to talk about them another time.  Yet while one of its less pleasant elements is its embrace of amoral values in the name of personal gain, as even proponents like Adam Smith and Ayn Rand allowed, the upside of amorality is that businesses realize "holier than thou" attitudes don't appeal to the masses.  On the contrary, as no person can spend as much money as every person, businesses keep their fingers on the pulse of the nation, and reflect people's desires with what they sell.  The inconvenient truth for liberals who are also leftists, and have a knee-jerk reaction against anything related to the free market, is that in the area of culture, that free market made its peace with the beat generation, complete with all of its sexual deviation, hazing, loud music, mock-satanism, raunchy attitudes, and even egalitarianism, a long time ago.  Far from the allegations that mass-media is just a tool for the political and economic elites to hand down authoritarianism from on-high, it has served oftentimes to amplify people's desires for liberty and justice far faster than they reach legally elected representatives and the writing of bills.

Yet still, radical leftists, many who also consider themselves liberals, continue to attack consumer-driven pop culture, banning pop songs the masses voted into prominence with their money, digging up old right-wing talking-points about violent video games, and other tiresome dreck, and finally, perhaps because the old moral authoritarians on the Right no longer scare anyone, people on the same political side are turning against them.  Once again, I don't believe that this means the Leftist/Liberal alliance is about to collapse.  I am not convinced the political Right has become devoid of its old gallery of moral authoritarians since it fell out of favor, and should they let these old scoundrels out of their sleeves come 2016, I still see the alliance between social liberalism and economic leftism enduring.  Still, it has never been more obvious that this alliance is not the only one imaginable.  If the Left still hasn't resolved its internal turmoil within the next four years, I may be saying something very different, and resolving this turmoil means in essence moving away from the obsession with "punching up" at the products of popular culture.  Ultimately, this culture is a liberal invention, so while those shenanigans go on, the Left is essentially punching itself.