In today's column, Jonah Golberg confesses to a nepotistic desire to aid his conservative family:
Think about it: If we'd really won a culture war — with all of the aggrandizement of territory implied by such a term — wouldn't our troops be raising our flags in a few more enemy forts? …. Meanwhile, I don't see Harvard, Yale, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Hollywood, the Episcopal Church, or the Courts, getting demonstrably more conservative.
He goes on to add a detailed list of other positions he would like to see filled (I've trimmed it down to its essentials):
--The keys to the executive bathrooms at ABC, CBS and NBC.
--The cast of Fox and Friends to take over The Today Show's studios.
--Ramesh Ponnuru as the editor of the New York Times.
--Rich Lowry can have his choice between Time and Newsweek.
--Matt Labash will get Esquire.
--Rick Brookhiser at Rolling Stone.
--Andrew Sullivan can have The New York Times Magazine.
--Robert Bork will be the dean of the Yale Law School.
--The faculty of Hillsdale and Harvard will simply switch places.
I love Jonah's column but I'm beginning to recognize a demographic myopia in his perspective. Notice how all of these positions are located in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. Yet the culture wars are often fought by footsoldiers in the "fly-over states."
Notice also how Goldberg mentions "The New Yorker" and the Episcopal Church rather than Texas Monthly and the Southern Baptist Convention. He appears to have overlooked any cultural insitution that is significant in the Red States. Honestly, how many people do you know that read the New Yorker after attending Episcopal services?
Are we fighting the culture war to protect civilization or to help the conservative elite improve their bios? Is the fighting in the trenches undertaken solely to allow our intellectual generals to take positions of of honor among their liberal peers in the cultural elite? We are already being co-opted by South Park Republicans. Now it appears we have to worry about Resume Republicans as well.
At times it appears that the conservative elite is a little embarrassed by their middlebrow ideological brethren. Growing up in East Texas I would notice a similar form of "useful disdain." On Election Day the county Democratic leaders would drive around the rural areas picking up African-American voters and shuttling them to the polls. Minorities could be counted on to vote for a Democratic ticket and were treated as the last defense against the evils of Republicanism. At the end of the day party leaders would drop this prized group of registered voters back off in the country, dismissed and forgotten until the next election.
I feel a similar attitude from the conservative elite. Once every four years I climb into the back of the pickup and am carried to the polls. I'm expected to do my duty in order to ensure that a Republican's backside continues to warm the seats of power in Washington. I receive a pat on the head and a promise of a $300 tax refund for my efforts.
How did we get here? There was once a time when being conservative meant promoting the the Burkean ideal of "little platoons." Conservatives used to rail against Big Government. Now they just want to be the one's signing the pork barrel receipts. Once conservatives pushed for local control of power. But I suppose that when you can get position at American Enterprise Institute writing policy letters on the importance of local government, running for a city council seat in Tulsa loses its luster.
1
Good point, Mr. Carter.
It's interesting that you mention the Southern Baptist Convention; it went through a radical shift of leadership in the last 20 years from liberal to conservative--not because the intellectual elite of the convention shifted that way, but because the churches throughout the country were conservative, and they wanted their convention to be that way too. The so-called back country churches held on to the truth and eventually sent the liberals packing.
Such a model doesn't have to be limited to ecclesiological realms. If the liberal cultural elite don't watch their steps, they could quickly be rendered irrelevant by middle America (remember what happened to the Dixie Chicks when they overstepped their bounds). That's why conservatives in the fly-over states need to be ever-vigilant.
posted on 11.24.2003 2:43 PM2
I saw this editorial earlier today and thought about commenting on it, to a certain extent along similar lines. There are a couple of points of interest in this:
First, that any "victory" in the so-called culture war by the conservative contingent is decried by the liberals, leading to the notion that conservatives are "winning" the culture wars. Largely untrue, sad to say: media as a whole remains largely wedded to liberal philosophies.
The second issue relates to the type of conservative involved: many of the conservative elite, as you term them (no offense here, but do you have issues with elites?) are not actually social conservatives but rather conservative on other issues, most notably economically. Social conservatives aren't necessarily seeing the culture war won, regardless of the existence of Fox News and the like.
posted on 11.24.2003 8:16 PM3
***(no offense here, but do you have issues with elites?)***
That's funny that you mentioned that. Initially, I had planned to start a series of post on how our country needs a "new" elite and this was to be a part of that. Unfortunately, though, I got lazy and didn't start it today.
I don't have a problem with elites, per se, but with the idea of what it takes to be considered in that class. Elites are a necessary element of leadership in any culture. But I think the so-called elites in our country are classified as such for all the wrong reasons.
As you can probably tell, this is a subject that I'll be wasting a lot of time on...
posted on 11.24.2003 10:14 PM4
It's God's country here in the Midwest, JP. The East and Left coasters don't spend much time here.
posted on 11.24.2003 10:51 PM