Troy

The Culture-Politics Nexus

Gil Troy (McGill University) “How Conservative Leaders and Personalities Shaped America’s Culture” Yes, yes, I know the script – as soon as you put “conservatives” and “culture” in the same title, I know exactly what I’m supposed to do. First I start with the 1980s. I talk about “Rambo Reagan,” and American militarism or neo-imperialism. I mock John Wayne, Clinton Eastwood, and the cowboy cult of cinematic violence. I deconstruct “the age of Dynasty” and American materialism, making sure to be incomprehensible as I ponder whether “Reaganism as a politically dominant ideology caused the aesthetically superstructural phenomenon of Dynasty.”1 I riff about Reagan’s post-modernist, imageoriented presidency, and for comic effect, I throw in some anecdotes about Dan Rather and hegemonic media. I lament the rise of MTV, Madonna and rock n’ roll materialism. I lead an angry chorus shouting “backlash” – as I blast the backlash against the 1960s, the backlash against women, the backlash against African-Americans, the backlash against environmentalism, the backlash against gays. I cry “scandal” as we snicker about Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s self-serving patriotism during Iran-Contra, the Reverend Jim Bakker’s self-enriching ministry in the PTL crusade, or the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart’s self-indulgent television preaching, until he was forced to say, in a paroxysm of sweat and tears, “I have sinned.…” And I culminate with talk of the Culture Wars and the march of the Midwestern and Sunbelt Neanderthals, quoting Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, William Bennett, James Watt, at their most reactionary. All the while, of course, with arch smiles, and not-so-subtle asides – I make this critique of Reagan’s 1980s a stand-in for a critique of George W. Bush – yet another conservative presidential dummy – and “his” America of hyper-aggressive, backward marching, money-grubbing, shopping-addled, television-addicted vulgarians. And, bringing it up to today, I describe modern America as a conservative dystopia, a mean, nasty, intolerant, Muslim-bashing, terrorism-provoking, poverty-generating, rich-getricher-poor-get-poorer center of racism and sexism, an “American Theocracy” – the title of a new book by Kevin Phillips2 – run by an unholy alliance of corporate America and Bible Belt evangelicals, an unreal land of reality shows, an excessive culture which has lost its bearings and its soul. Wow, I can already feel the love. I can feel the growing respect of my colleagues, the adulation of my students, the massive, affirmative head-nodding throughout Quebec and Canada, and – most important of all – the flow of research dollars – I’m in SSHRC heaven! Unfortunately, this political posture, while popular in certain circles, is far too crude and far too independent of those messy things called facts. What do we do about the fact that it was “Rambo Reagan” who reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev, that Dynasty was the product of 60s-graduates and Hollywood liberals – and was in production months before Reagan’s election, that whatever media hegemony, or rock n’roll materialism, there was in America predated the 1980s, and only became more intense in Bill Clinton’s America, and that, amid all the talk of “backlash” – from the left and the right, women and African Americans in the 1980s entered law schools and law 1 2

Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties (Durham, 1995), 1. Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy (New York, 2006).

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firms, medical schools and medical practices, unions and corporations, in unprecedented, numbers, that environmentalism and gay liberations became more mainstreamed as movements and concepts than ever before, and that for all the Culture Wars-talk culminating in discussions about “red” versus “blue” America, Senator Barack Obama is correct, most Americans are “purple.” Abortions, divorces, sex, drugs or rock n’roll, were not – and are not -- the exclusive preserve of the liberal east coast, and the concern about values and spirituality did not – and do not -- only thrive in the heartland. Now, I’m not being completely reductionist here and saying you cannot make certain assumptions about modern American culture or detect trends because, you are always going to have exceptions whenever you talk about 300 million, highlyindividualistic people. Of course, we have to be willing to generalize, to an extent, but we need to do it subtly, cautiously, in a scholarly manner. To do so we need to see continuities as well as discontinuities, and complexity not just simplicity. Let’s start with this question of continuities, and the related – and frankly far too premature question – of periodization, which gets to the heart of the Moment or Era issue. If we ask what I call the “Love Story” question – from the famous movie theme song – “Where do I begin” – let me offer two answers – and hold off on a third. Most of us who look at the “Reagan Revolution” begin with 1980, which, as the political analyst Bill Schneider notes, is “year one” for conservatives when they talk about the Reagan Revolution.3 Philip Jenkins, in a new book, Decade of Nightmares: the End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, identifies 1975 as the start of the “anti-Sixties.”4 In truth, the start of the era is the easy part. The real question is how do we assess eight years of Bill Clinton stuck in the middle of a Reagan-Bush sandwich. Do we view the Clinton years as a liberal interregnum or see Clinton as “the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland” (which is what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called Jimmy Carter, until Carter was succeeded by Reagan and began to look like a liberal).5 When we look at the question culturally, it is particularly interesting, and the partisan-fueled inconsistencies of both Republicans and Democrats comes through. During the Reagan 1980s, most Democrats blasted the new “Gilded Age” and worried about the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Somehow, those issues disappeared from mainstream Democratic radar screens during the Clinton years, and equally mysteriously reappeared during the Bush years. On the Republican side of the aisle, the culture of “sex, drugs and rock n’roll” was considered to have predated Ronald Reagan and now, George W. Bush, but from January 20, 1993 to January 19, 2001, was completely Bill Clinton’s fault. This game of partisan hot potato gets to the real question of continuities – and what I earlier suggested was a third answer to the “Where do I begin” question. In trying to unravel the nexus of culture and politics, we have to look at deeper continuities. Our narrative is frequently too presidentially-driven – we cannot forget that many of the cultural phenomena we point to as characteristic of this era are the products of modern capitalism, the leisure society, the spread of individualism and the cult of consumerism. These are, of course, American variations of the phenomena experienced throughout the industrialized Western world and built up throughout the 20th century. 3

CNN, 6 June 2004, 6:38 PM. Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares (New York, 2006). 5 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Boston, 1986), 33. 4

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We need to take into account the impact of the Baby Boomers, the legendary pig-in-thedemographic python, and how the stereotypical shift from the Baby Boomer youth culture to the Baby Boomer Yuppie culture shaped America. We have to assess the impact of individuating technologies from the VCR to the computer as well as the broader subversiveness of the media agenda, which is too consumerist and materialistic to satisfy true liberals and too subversive and anti-authoritarian to satisfy true conservatives. And we also have to appreciate the power of external effects, the conversation about American confidence in the 1980s might be very different without the Arab Sheiks’ inflationary oil shock from the 1970s, just as the discussion about militarism in “George W. Bush’s America,” would be very different without September 11. And we have to ask what is the political meaning to these cultural phenomena – is individualism, for example, a conservative or liberal value? When it is viewed in the context of acquisitiveness – call it the push for prosperity or greed and selfishness – individualism is often seen as a conservative value; when it is viewed in the context of the rights revolution – call it the proliferation of liberty or anything-goes victimmongering – individualism is seen as a liberal value. Similarly, consumerism seemed to be Reagan’s thing when he was president and America was prospering, and Clinton’s thing when he was president and America was prospering. All of this discussion is intended to raise question marks both about the broader theme of this conference – as an historian it feels a tad premature to start assessing this “Conservative Era” and too early to understand it – while also pointing out what my more sophisticated academic friends would call the “problematics” of defining the politicalcultural nexus. Nevertheless, I think we can identify three separate dimensions to this discussion: Conservatives consciously shaping the culture; Conservatives consciously attacking the culture; and Conservatives unconsciously shaping the culture. I. Conservatives Consciously Shaping the Culture: Here, Ronald Reagan offers the perfect model. Reagan wanted to be judged culturally as well as politically. He boasted in his Farewell Address that his era was a time, if not quite of “revolution,” of “the great rediscovery, a rediscovery of our values and our common sense.”6 Recognizing this cultural dimension as the key to Reagan’s story makes it impossible to examine the history of the Reagan presidency without also examining the history of the 1980s as a decade. Such an approach shows how Ronald Reagan invented the 1980s, and helped transform America as well as the presidency. The 1980s would be Reagan’s decade because Reagan skillfully rode and often took credit for one independently generated cultural wave after another. In a world of ever collapsing categories, Reagan’s Celebrity Presidency used the elixir of fame to help politics and showbiz converge. He spoke to Americans in the language of popular culture, strutting before the cameras at his ranch like the Marlboro Man, hosting Michael Jackson at the White House, invoking Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” character by daring congressional tax increasers to “Go ahead and make my day,” and joking – before an open microphone after Arab terrorists hijacked a TWA jet -- “Boy, after seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do the next time this happens.”7 6

Ronald Reagan, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Washington, DC, 11 January 1989, http://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan/speeches/farewell.asp 7

Los Angeles Times, 1 July 1985.

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An article from the 1920 campaign said it all. In this “new age of publicity…. The Man With the Best Story Wins.”8 Popular culture inundated Americans with stories. Reaganism shaped many of these plot lines. Especially in the first few years of the administration, it often seemed that Reagan was writing the nation’s stories, making its laws, and triumphing. Conservatives bristle at characterizations of their hero’s accomplishments as cultural and thus symbolic, especially because it feeds the liberal caricature of Reagan as a snake-oil salesman. But, particularly in the modern American polity, symbolic leadership is significant. Tone counts. The “Rhetorical Presidency” lives and thrives.9 When many historians talk about the idealism John F. Kennedy inspired in the 1960s, they wax lyrical. Yet when many talk about the song Reagan sang, they turn cynical. Obviously, differences in content remain relevant. But neither liberals nor conservatives should underestimate the modern president’s power to shape the nation’s self-perception and worldview, or the centrality of that mission in molding an administration’s legacy. In a world where the lines between popular culture and political culture have blurred, culture, however you define it, is an essential dimension to this tone-setting and any administration’s atmospherics. Reagan’s gruff political consultant Ed Rollins called his boss “the last American 10 hero.” This label captured the president’s outsized status in many American eyes as well as the nostalgia-laden fear of the complicated present that Reagan tapped into so effectively. Reagan became a hero by helping to restore America’s confidence, which then helped insulate him from some of the vicissitudes that weakened his predecessors -and helped distract Americans from some of his greatest fiascos, including the IranContra scandal. This model of cultural leadership, with the larger Reagan storyline eclipsing the prosaic and sometimes tawdry details of the Reagan presidency, accounted for Reagan’s “teflon” that so mystified and frustrated his critics. Ronald Reagan helped invent the 1980s in a matter of months. During his mythical “first hundred days,” and in the months thereafter, the new President helped establish a new national tone, shaping otherwise inchoate stirrings. Proof of a collective desire for a new mood bubbled up in 1980. The national euphoria – and sense of vindication – which greeted the “Miracle on Ice,” the American Olympic team’s surprise hockey triumph over the Soviet Union in February 1980, demonstrated what the Washington Post called “hero-starved” Americans’ yearning for a return to patriotism and national “self-esteem.”11 Eschewing the Carter era’s cardigans and jeans, the Reagans championed a new designer ethos. Americans wanted to return to glamour, evidenced by “Dynasty’s” premiere the week before the Reagans’. Eighty million people a week would soon be watching this “Dallas” knockoff as popular culture echoed, intensified and massproduced these themes of the Reagan inaugural. Work on the show had begun over a year and a half earlier, preceding Reagan’s election – and reminding us that even when conservatives set out to shape the culture consciously, they only succeeded if there were other forces at play. Reagan, in fact, was a master at riding these waves, and making them his own by naming them. “We sort of anticipated the Reagan era, viscerally,” Esther 8

Independent, 22 May 1920, 245, 244. Jeffrey Tulis, Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton, 1987). 10 Ed Rollins, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms (New York, 1996), 97. 11 Washington Post, 28 December 1980. 9

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Shapiro, one of the show’s creators, would say in 1988. “We picked up on the glitz and glamour of it.”12 Shapiro and her husband and partner Richard were Baby Boomers itching to upgrade. “I wore granny dresses in the 1960’s. I baked bread, I marched in peace marches, I made speeches,” Mrs. Shapiro said. By 1981, “I felt like dressing up again.”13 This yearning for glitz coincided with a new, fond “awareness of business,” as the publishing tycoon Malcolm Forbes would note. “Capitalism is back in, people realize that getting rich is just somebody entrepreneuring.”14 As both actor and politician, Reagan read people and audiences well. He knew he was more popular than his program. Rather than fight that, he would exploit it. Reagan was also struck by many Americans’ desire to celebrate their country. In his memoirs he would recall recuperating from John Hinckley’s bullet in April 1981, watching the space shuttle Columbia return after its maiden voyage. The “tremendous excitement” the landing generated around the country surprised Reagan. This outburst convinced him “more than ever that Americans wanted to feel proud and patriotic again.”15 Bolstered by what would be called the Reagan boom, Reagan linked the new or renewed patriotism with the new or renewed acquisitiveness. The entrepreneurs of the moment such as Lee Iacocca, Donald Trump and Ted Turner would join President Reagan in elevating the pursuit of wealth, the compulsion to consume, and the desperation to succeed from selfish acts of individualism into altruistic acts of patriotism. Reagan lionized such entrepreneurs, calling them his “heroes for the eighties.”16 Amid rampant Naderism and hostility to authority, businessmen had served as whipping boys in the Sixties and Seventies. By 1980, the two businessmen in top 10 prime-time television shows, George Jefferson and J.R. Ewing, were greedy foils; the 1970s’ popular detectives such as “Kojak,” and “Barnaby Jones” often targeted corrupt businessmen. In 1976, Irving Kristol warned that “the upsurge of anti-corporate sentiment in the past decade,” combined with American’s traditional populist discomfort with big business, “has put the modern corporation in the critical condition that we find it in today.”17 By contrast, the 1980s would feed the trend of the celebrity entrepreneur, the heroic CEO. Like John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie during the Gilded Age, like Henry Ford and Andrew Mellon in the 1920s, the president of Chrysler, Lee Iacocca, became an apostle of progress – in this era thanks to his television commercials peddling patriotism and K-cars. Meanwhile, desperate to feed Americans’ appetite for celebrity gossip, reporters made “The Donald,” Donald Trump, famous and glamorous, even while mocking his egoism and materialism. Businessmen like Trump basked in the media glow on “Page Six” – the New York Post gossip column which set the standard for such people watching – and the business pages, which expanded as fascination with business and business people grew. For a people obsessed with individualism, Americans remained remarkably susceptible to mass marketing of both heroes and products. As the economy improved, as 12

Los Angeles Times, 13 January 1988. New York Times, 7 April 1985. 14 New York Times, 7 April 1985. 15 Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York, 1990), 265. 16 Ronald Reagan, “State of the Union Address,” Washington, DC, 25 January 1984, http://www.presidentreagan.info/speeches/reagan_sotu_1984.cfm 17 Irving Kristol, “On Corporate Capitalism in America,” in Nathan Glazer and Irving Kristol, eds., The American Commonwealth 1976 (New York, 1976), 126. 13

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these conspicuous consumers swaggered across the stage, many Americans experienced a compulsive acquisitiveness, a moral and spiritual vertigo amid a grand national shopping binge. Affluent Americans overshot and overstretched, defining too many trinkets they could not afford – or could not find -- as “necessities.” We see here a line from Reagan’s rhetoric of resurgence to a changing climate of opinion regarding business to actual changes in American lifestyles, buying patterns, attitudes. Of course, this kind of excess is typical of every boom, when people have more disposable income, they dispose of it in all kinds of ways. But Reagan’s great gift was in showing how to put his imprint on these phenomena, and, on the whole, for most people, spin it in a way that made people feel good – that’s a model of cultural and political leadership future presidents will follow. II. Conservatives Consciously Attacking the Culture Of course, for all his cultural reach, Ronald Reagan never achieved as much as conservatives hoped he would – and liberals feared he might. To the conservatives’ dismay, Reagan dodged most of the cultural fireworks. He limited his cultural contribution to venerating the Midwestern values he imbibed as a child, encouraging surrogates like William Bennett, and crusading with his wife against drugs. Reagan abhorred modern America’s “spiritual or moral fatigue.” He blamed rampant “secularism” for creating a world where “no values are being taught or emphasized,” so that “sex education in our schools” is “taught in a framework of only being a physical act – like eating a ham sandwich.”18 Reagan sought a new cultural, moral, and political balance by appointing more conservative judges. But even here he preferred to advance his judicial revolution subtly. Eyeing public opinion polls, he lacked the stomach for the broader battles he had engaged in so zestfully as governor. His achievements on the evangelical so-called A,B,C agenda – abortion, busing, crime – were particularly limited. Typical of Regan’s half-measures was the statement he would send to pro-life rallies in Washington, demonstrating support but avoiding the photo-op. More broadly, not only did he fail to turn back the clock to the so-called “good old days” before the 1960s, but in many ways, Reagan presided over a Reagan Reconciliation, wherein many of the rebels and the revolutions of the 1960s went mainstream. The eighties would be perceived as the time of the great sellout, when yippies turned yuppie, when the conservative backlash checked feminism, environmentalism, civil rights, and the sexual revolution. In fact, just as the New Deal only became mainstreamed in the 1950s, when Dwight Eisenhower did not undo most of Franklin Roosevelt’s handiwork, Reagan’s America reinforced many of the far-reaching ideological, cultural, social, and even stylistic transformations of the previous decades. Nevertheless, feminists yelled “backlash,” even as women swarmed into the workplace; African-Americans yelled “racism,” even as a black middle class emerged; radicals yelled “sellout,” even as a new cadre of “thirtysomething” executives made corporations more responsive and less monolithic, let alone more open to granola and jeans. With these limitations in mind, it is nevertheless worth thinking about the attacks the conservatives unleashed on the culture, which resulted in the famous Culture Wars which broke out from coast to coast in the 1980s. Liberals sought to expand their gains from the 1960s and 1970s. Conservatives felt confident enough to counterattack. The 18

Ronald Reagan to William Wilson, 5 March 1987, 483149, Folder 282, Box 18, Presidential Handwriting File, IIs, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA.

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forces of right and left clashed repeatedly on abortion, busing, school prayer, the literary canon, school textbooks, museum exhibits, suitable nomenclature for women, blacks, gays,. The ensuing debate roused millions. Some ended up alienated and entrenched themselves on the far left or the far right, nurturing their anger and a mirror-image, embittering, sense of victimization. Nevertheless, even as the debate became polarized in newspapers and on campuses, most Americans embraced a contradictory consensus in the center. The changes occurred more gradually and more reasonably than the Chicken Littles of the Left or the Right sometimes hoped and sometimes feared. Following the President’s own mixed messages, the age of Reagan became an age of conservative libertinism, as a majority of Americans disliked abortion but wanted the option in an emergency – studies suggested that 56 percent considered abortion “murder,” and 68 percent believed it defied “God’s will,” yet 67 percent supported a woman’s right to choose, and, each year, as many as 3 percent of all American women had abortions.19 The cultural crusade President Reagan and his wife most invested in, the fight against drugs, was less controversial. It was a politically useful initiative, modifying Nancy Reagan’s image as a materialistic spendthrift and mollifying some of Ronald Reagan’s ideological brethren, while spotlighting a serious crisis that easily played as a liberal failure. A crusade against drugs advanced the broader Reagan agenda to repudiate the Sixties and "restore" America. Drug abuse was one of the nastiest social pathologies that decade spawned, as smoking a "joint" came to symbolize rejection of authority and fulfilment of one’s spirituality. By 1971 an estimated 24 million Americans over 11 used marijuana; heroin use had ballooned from 50,000 users in 1960 to half a million or more. Reagan denounced the “attitude of permissiveness” spreading the “plague,”20 and the resulting “climate of lawlessness” that festered.21 The way marijuana use had become “entrenched” shocked the Reagans. During the Carter years the movement to decriminalize marijuana progressed. In movies like "Saturday Night Fever" and TV shows like "NBC's Saturday Night Live," the "cool" people indulged in “recreational” drugs. By 1978, only 35 percent of high school seniors surveyed considered marijuana harmful. Targeting the customers, the Reagans mobilized traditional American values against modern permissiveness. They would struggle for America's soul on a symbolic plane with the skills honed making movies and running political campaigns. Both Reagans understood the power of their respective bully pulpits. The crusade had to be popular, politically beneficial and suitably self-promoting. The Reagans used the drug war to illustrate how government could champion morality without expanding its powers. Emphasizing individual behavior not government programs, the budget for interdiction grew from $853 million in 1982 to $1.5 billion in 1986, while the funding for drug treatment and prevention dropped from $200 million to $126 million.The war on drugs appealed to disgruntled lifestyle conservatives without complicating the rest of Reagan’s program or exposing the Republicans’ rift between libertarian conservatives and conservative moralists. 19

Louis Harris, Inside America (New York, 1987), 181, 179. Ronald Reagan, 20 May 1986, Public Papers of the President 1986 (Washington, DC 1987), 629. 21 Ronald Reagan, 14 October 1982, Public Papers of the President 1982 (Washington, DC 1982), 1314. 20

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The phrase "Just Say No" was as simplistic yet profound as the rest of Reagan’s program. The phrase sank into popular consciousness, inspiring a national youth movement and appearing everywhere, on t-shirts, caps, even the plastic base of urinals. The Reagans succeeded in grafting a competing message onto American popular culture. The writer Katie Roiphe would recall the "pushmi-pullyu" message of her high school years: "Our ears were filled simultaneously with Nancy Reagan's ‘Just Say No’ and George Michael's late-eighties hit song 'I Want Your Sex.'"22 Drugs remained exceedingly popular. Yet drug use peaked; the drug culture acquired a new illegitimacy. One quarter of America’s youth used drugs and alcohol, rather than one-third in the 1970s.23 “The idea that marijuana is harmless has gone the way of the Edsel. Research has proven that heavy use depresses production of sperm, contributes to lung cancer, and causes heavy users to suffer that unique form of lethargic depression known as ‘burnout,’” Adam Paul Weisman would write in The New Republic.24 By 1985 the number of high school seniors who believed marijuana was harmful would reach 70 percent, a striking reversal in less than a decade. "Just Say No" was on everybody's lips. The Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel 1984 rap song "White Lines -- Don't Do It," earned a gold record. The National Basketball Association contract began to demand athletes be drug-free. Borrowing a phrase from the writer Tom Wolfe, conservatives such as William Kristol and his boss William Bennett would celebrate the Reagan Administration for encouraging "The Great Relearning." "In areas ranging from drugs to family values to economics to foreign policy," Kristol wrote, "this Administration has stood for and encouraged a 'relearning' of certain fundamental truths that this Nation had forgotten or drifted away from in recent years."25 The Reagans' impact on drug usage, while considerable, did not solve the problem. Comprising less than 5 percent of the world's population, Americans still consumed 60 percent of the world's supply of illegal drugs. Nevertheless, the Reagans had altered American attitudes. "Drug bashing has become the latest rage -- a kind of national pastime," one CBS-TV correspondent declared in mid-August 1986.26 The campaign most influenced middle and upper-middle class youth who indulged in marijuana and powdered cocaine not crack or heroin. In 1987, even as the crack epidemic spread in the inner cities, cocaine use among high school seniors dropped by one-third to its lowest level since 1978. Daily use of marijuana among seniors plunged from one in nine in 1979 to one in thirty in 1987. Administration officials proudly listed the drop in drugs and the sea change in attitudes as among the highlights of "The Reagan Record."27 The Cultural Wars would intensify. In politicizing morality, especially during the 1988 campaign, the conservatives unintentionally helped squelch America’s “moral voice.” Treating morality like a conservative possession – and obsession – relativized ethics, triggering the tolerance of the many and the intolerance of the few. Too many liberals began to recoil at any public discussion of morality; too many conservatives 22

Katie Roiphie, The Morning After (Boston, 1993, 1994), 5, 121. "Drug Use Decreasing-- Trends Promise a Real Success," 18 March 1983, 1292225C, Box 13, FG 001, Ronald Reagan Library. 24 Adam Paul Weisman, The New Republic, 6 October. 1986, 16. 25 William Kristol to Tom C. Griscom, 27 November 1987, 535879, Box 54, FG 001, Ronald Reagan Library; Tom Wolfe, "The Great Relearning," American Spectator, December 1987, 14. 26 13 Aug. 1986, B-6, Box 53,White House News Summaries, Ronald Reagan Library. 27 The Reagan Record, 6 June 1988, 5613685C, Box 59 FG 001, Ronald Reagan Library. 23

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celebrated the moral life without actually living it; and too many Americans escaped the passions and the complexity into a pasty, “centrist” ethical non-partisanship, championing only one, new, commandment: “Thou Shalt Not Judge.”28 III. Conservatives Unconsciously Shaping the Culture: George W. Bush’s presidency offers a final, more contemporary case study –of a different, more minimalist, leadership style, culturally, if not politically. Especially since September 11, George W. Bush and his supporters see Bush as a bold, “big picture,” path-breaking president. In his new book Rebel-in-Chief characterizing Bush as an “insurgent” leader, Fred Barnes quotes the National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, saying Bush is “a revolutionary and has a revolutionary vision.” Bush himself told Barnes – taking a swipe at Bill Clinton -- “We didn’t come here to do school uniforms.”29 And yet, for all his sweeping ambition ideologically, diplomatically, politically, George W Bush tends to eschew – and even disdain – the kind of cultural leadership his mentor Ronald Reagan relished. Just before the president’s traditional lunch with television news anchors before the 2005 State of the Union, Bush snapped, “Why do I have to go to this meeting?”30 This is the kind of meeting, Reagan – or Bill Clinton – would have relished. Bush is not that kind of leader. In fact, David Frum in The Right Man calls him the “un-Clinton.”31 As a result, Bush’s impact on the culture has been more indirect, attenuated, and ambiguous, even on issues of deep concern to him. Consider, for example, the question of post 9/11 patriotism and militarism. In the latest, hottest, all-American pop culture version of cowboys and Indians, prime time and the movie screens are awash in good guys - -and gals -- hunting terrorists and Islamicists fanatics as world-threatening bad guys (and rarely gals). In early March, 16.5 million viewers watched the pilot episode of “The Unit,” a show created by the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright David Mamet about the exploits of a anti-terrorist special forces squad. The most popular series premier for this television season, it also scored the highest viewer total for CBS’s regular programming in nine years. The Tuesday night lead-in to “The Unit” is NCIS, for Naval Criminal Investigative Service. With its look at a military forensics team, building on the popularity of CSI: Las Vegas and New York, the show is an odd mix of two pop-culture trends of the moment, representing the kinds of pop culture shotgun marriages that insider movies about Hollywood have mocked repeatedly over the years. Now, clearly, these shows – and many others – are catering to Americans’ new, post 9/11 worldviews – and fears. But while George W. Bush is a central architect of the worldview, he is oddly distant from its cultural expressions. Unlike Ronald Reagan, he rarely dips into the repertoire of verbal and visual clichés popular culture puts at his fingertips, nor does Bush seem interested in shaping them. His influence has been indirect, unconscious, seemingly accidental. Similarly, George W. Bush is not the cheerleader for capitalism, business people or entrepreneurs that Ronald Reagan was. Bush has not launched his pro-business policies preaching the same kind of gospel of prosperity that Americans came to expect from Reagan, and even, to an extent, from Bill Clinton. Donald Trump in “The Apprentice” has played more of a role in explicitly fostering a pro-business climate – or, 28

Alan Wolfe, One Nation After All (New York, 1998), 54. Fred Barnes, Rebel-in-Chief (New York, 2006), 16, 61, 20. 30 Barnes, Rebel-in-Chief, 12. 31 David Frum, The Right Man (New York, 2003), 12. 29

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to be more accurate, in continuing to build on the cult of the corporation of the last few decades. Clearly, Bush is not a salesman. But whereas in foreign policy he has occasionally relied on Condoleeza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, there have not been parallel mouthpieces on the domestic policy side, further limiting his cultural impact. The success of shows such as “the Unit” and “the Apprentice” once again remind us that these cultural forces emanate from many different wellsprings, not simply the presidential source. Moreover, while Bush’s active disdain for the “liberal” media partially explains his refusal even to attempt to shape popular culture, he also benefits from the rise of what Sidney Blumenthal called the counter-establishment, or what may be more accurately called the counter-counter culture. Ronald Reagan did not have a Fox News Network and the legions of Rush Limbaughs were just beginning to make their mark on American culture. Bush obviously has a different personality and skill set – but also, two and a half decades – at least – into this “conservative era” – his task is much less daunting than Reagan’s was. Ronald Reagan truly needed to establish a counter-establishment; today, it is hard to tell which side is the establishment – especially since partisans are often claiming that it is their opponents who enjoy that kind of status. "If you can write a nation's stories, you needn't worry about who makes its laws,” Dr. George Gerbner, of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania taught. The modern Conservative era, whatever ultimate dimensions it takes, however it will be periodized, has been shaped by the dual political and cultural reality Gerbner recognized. As the contrasting styles – yet respective impacts – of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush demonstrate, there are many ways to influence the nation’s stories, especially if you are the American president. Seven decades after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration, the revolution in leadership he launched, making the President the dominant player in the American nation, not just the American government, continues.

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