Kontextmaschine

4th July 2021

Question with 7 notes

Anonymous asked:

Any *thoughts* about Tanner Greer’s “Culture Wars Are Long Wars”?

Ah, I pick up a certain self-recognizing fondness about the “general intellectuals”, “secondhand dealers of ideas” whose adoption and promotion of ideas to the broad symbolic-manipulation class is planting 20-year seeds. That’s okay, me too.

Not to be too Marxian base-determines-superstructure but this cohort replacement model doesn’t seem to have a place for material forces at all.

It also doesn’t account for failed succession and counterrevolution. You want to talk American culture war? “The Sixties”, significantly in the 1970s really, was acknowledged as a case of cohort succession at the time. “Generation gap”, remember?

And okay maybe that could explain the shift from flag-waving pro-military patriotism to wariness, John Wayne macho to Alan Alda sensitivity, happy housewifery to strident feminism, Rotary small business to Great Society civil servants as the overseers of society.

Okay. But then the ‘80s happened. America-Fuck-Yeah, Bruce Willis, Andrew Dice Clay misogyny. WWF and porn stars (AND the Moral Majority), Wall Street takeovers the new hot scene. And it was not powered by a new generation of Alex P. Keaton teenagers. (Really, he was a viewpoint character for Boomers who parsed cultural change through youth culture.)

“America’s most popular party will be openly run by socialists” was a real belief in the Ford-Carter era and since then has been laughable. How’d that happen? It wasn’t because conservatives started pushing back on the 70s in the 40s!

Tagged: culture waramhist