It's not fair to knock a page-long argument that's forthcoming in full in book form. But Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer have just such a piece up at the Chronicle -- an intriguing discussion of the rise of conservatism in the 1970s titled "The Incomplete Revolution." Although it's brief by necessity, the assessment it contains still seems evocative but itself incomplete:
there is another America. Abortion remains legal despite decades of
attacks, stem-cell research retains public enthusiasm, and the rights
of homosexuals remain a desired goal. Yes, voters continue efforts to
cut large parts of the federal government, but President Bush's effort
to privatize Social Security has failed, while conservatives lost
control of Congress in 2006.
The tensions will not go away. The incomplete revolution that
conservatives directed in the 70s makes the problems they face today
difficult to overcome. Conservatism can't be transformed with a new
president. The challenges of conservatism started in the 70s and will
continue into the future. America turned right in the 70s, but not as a
result of a political sweep. As the conservative movement took shape
and expanded its influence, it faced a series of challenges, a
persistent struggle between conservative political power and liberal
social change. The struggles that shaped the right in the 70s during
the rightward turn linger today.
This is true, but what are we to make of the lingering? How are we to make sense of the way the tension has not just lingered but changed? And change it certainly has. The culture wars, specifically, have neither ended nor been won. Yet it seems obvious that the terms and the grounds of the fight involved have shifted, and some of the battles actually have been won. (Abortion is a 'frozen conflict'; gay marriage is a new conflict; the drug war is an old conflict; and the conflict over the sexualization of culture has definitely been lost). In order to make sense of all the questions that Schulman and Zelizer beg so well, we're well advised to arrange for a follow-up book on conservatism in the 80s.
Because the split Schulman and Zelizer evoke -- political victories and cultural failures -- really took off in the 80s. A lot of things we now take for granted as tentpoles of the cultural pavilion really took off in the 80s. The 'youth vote' became established as a joke, for instance. But although some of the split between conservative political victory and cultural failure can be attributed to some particular generation gaps in voting preferences, much more interesting is the underlying phenomenon by which 'the generation gap' became informally institutionalized as a cultural norm in which parents and children were by definition alienated from one another, and often openly hostile.
How did this happen? Simple: kids of the '60s grew up into adults of the '80s, adults whose inability to maintain coherent lives within authoritative moral institutions was unprecedented. It wasn't so much that people suddenly had 'loose morals'; critics on the left are right to emphasize this. But in doing so they often downplay the more important point -- that loose morality in the '80s somehow managed to overthrow the cultural institutions and social conventions that protected and reproduced moral authority. Indeed, this change had little to do with cultural agitation on the political left, and much more to do with the organic character of the generation that got married in the '70s and divorced in the '80s. The permanent generation gap only makes sense in the context of the unprecedented failure of people coming of age in the '70s to maintain the authority of the family in the '80s.
This is just one window, albeit a particularly important one, onto the kinds of factors that have contributed to the culture wars' shifting terrain, and help account for the weird limbo in which conservatism finds itself today. Schulman and Zelizer begin a fascinating story about the crystallization of conservatism during the written-off decade, but we'd do well to remember that carving life up into themed, display-window decades mistreats history and frees our memories to unmake important connections -- specifically, the narrative throughlines that play out across whole lives, not kitschy trend-eras. Obviously Schulman and Zelizer aren't contributing to this problem simply by focusing on a neglected aspect of a neglected decade. But the way their conclusion seems to peter out amid a string of apparent unanswerables suggests decades work has some pretty heavy inherent limitations, limitations which in this case could strongly benefit from a cultural history that connects the world of 1977 to 1997 through the saga of nastiness and rot that was the 1980s.
Recent Comments