The Cultural Revolution

The Nixon Thesis of Conflict was, and remains, a Cultural Revolution.

A foreign policy challenge was answered with a cultural solution. The War in Vietnam was transformed, through Nixon, from a foreign fight to a domestic one.

In the Nixon Thesis, war is a proxy for the more important battle, the battle for conformity at home. Thus the Reagan Administration engaged in two proxy wars,  along with the budgetary struggle called Star Wars, in order to sustain an ongoing cultural war.

The nature of any political AntiThesis is that it accepts the premises of the Thesis and tries to moderate it. Eisenhower accepted the Roosevelt Thesis premise of government, moderating it to serve middle class ends and balance its books. Clinton accepted the Nixon Thesis of cultural war, moderating it to serve liberal ends and balance its books.

Why are we in Iraq? We fight them over there so we can fight them over here. The them is different in the two halves of the sentence. The first them refers to militant Islam, the second them to cultural deviation at home. The only thing which can square that circle is the Nixon Thesis, war as an instrument of cultural conformity.

But who enforces cultural conformity? Democrats have often asked, why is religion such a big part of the conservative coalition? It’s religion’s job to enforce the cultural norms. Thus today the people least-trusted for positions of leadership are atheists, who don’t recognize the right of religious leaders to do this. In this way the Thesis becomes a win-win for both politicians and preachers.

Nixon used Billy Graham for this, Reagan used Pope John Paul II for
this, and Bush has the whole panoply of denominations he can use. But Graham, John Paul,
and the others also used the Republican Party, to gain the
power they cared most about, the power to control what people did in
private  and felt in their hearts. That power today is greater than it has been for over a century.

In exchange for accepting war, preachers get to control the cultural
limits of personal behavior. But such a process works like a drug, on
both leaders and the led. Increasing amounts of conformity are
necessary to achieve the same "high," the feeling of being morally
right under a platform of continuous war. The same process that works
with Sunnis and Shiites works with Catholics and Protestants. Both sides need the current conflict to enforce their cultural norms. Without it, people just might start to think for themselves.

All this was bound to come apart. The war would get too big, the
conformity would get too rigid, the contradictions would become too
uncomfortable to bear. But crossing the line in this case becomes more
than a political choice — it becomes heresy. That’s why the Dixie
Chicks became so reviled. (Notice the women, at right, watching the young girl throw away her Chicks CD.) It had nothing to do with the war or
politics. The Chicks were run out of the religious culture, country music being
at the center of its conformity.

Once you understand the nature of this process, a lot of things that
don’t seem to make sense make perfect sense. The Religious Right makes
perfect sense. The continual war in Iraq makes perfect sense. Not sense
in terms of, this makes sense, but sense in terms of, I see where
they’re coming from.

And when you see where the other side is coming from, you’re halfway to defeating them. Nixon understood that he was in a cultural war from the start of his career.

The nature of the last political crisis was a cultural one. Those
who wound up on the other side of this never understood that fact.
Journalists, academics, musicians, advocates for minority rights of all
kinds, they could only gain acceptance by adopting the premises of the
continual cultural revolution. And given the nature of that revolution, they were continually squeezed by it, one step back bringing demands that they step back further.

So what is the key Clue of our time?

It is that the current political crisis is not a cultural one. It is, at heart,
an environmental one. The continual conflicts of the last 40 years have
led us to a place where we as a species are destroying our own planet.

The practical solutions are pretty obvious. We need more oxygen, less carbon dioxide. The
means for that change are also pretty obvious. Education and
technology, driven by new norms of consensus, transparency, and
openness.

The tools of peace, rather than the tools of war, are the
only way out of the mess that we’re in.

The Nixon of our time will be the leader who can square that circle and make that change.