Why Cultural Warriors Suck

There are only two kinds of Americans, and these two groups will probably never see eye-to-eye on anything. In fact, their views are so foreign to one another, they seem to be occupying parallel universes. I'm not talking about Liberals and Conservatives, or blacks and whites, or men and women, or Mac users and PC users, or New York City and the rest of the country. No, I'm referring to the difference between the Cultural Warriors and everyone else.

What do I mean by “Cultural Warriors?” Well, the “Culture Wars” are a series of unresolvable arguments about topics such as drugs, abortion, gay rights, public displays of religion, America being a “Christian Nation” or not, gun control, and whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama is closer in spirit to Adolf Hitler. These arguments are just as pointless as the “Yankees suck/Yankees rule” debate. No one is going to be convinced by the other side's arguments, and there's never going to be a defining event that proves the rightness of one position or the other. The Culture War is a lot like the War on Terrorism and the War on Drugs in that it isn't really a war, it makes some people very rich (in this case, political pundits), and it is never going to end.

Cultural Warriors are people who have volunteered to fight the Culture Wars for one side or the other. They stay on top of the issues, they read blogs voraciously, they comment on the blogs, they protest and counter-protest whenever they can, and they never waver in their convictions.

Cultural Warriors include people like Glen Beck and Michael Moore, the portly, constantly smirking Hector and Achilles of the Culture Wars. Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart are well-known recreational drug users and Cultural Warriors, although Stewart sometimes lightly rips the Democrats if there's a joke in it. Sarah Palin is Xena, Cultural Warrior Princess, and Ann Coulter is a male version of Xena. Wonkette and Redstate are two of the many Culture War fortresses on the Internet. And if you think the Culture Wars are a new phenomenon, remember that Ayn Rand and Father Coughlin could out-demagogue anyone on Fox News or MSNBC with one side of their mouths.

While the two sides disagree about nearly everything, they both rely on one core belief: there are no noncombatants in this war. That is, everything is a political statement for one side or the other. There is always something outraged about, and every new outrage is a skirmish that will determine the winner. A sculpture of the Ten Commandments outside a courthouse will force judges to rule by the law of the Bible; schoolchildren singing a song praising the President is a 1984-style indoctrination. If the other side's politicians are having an affair, they're hypocritical scumbags; if our guys get caught having an affair, they're victims of character assassination by the media and the other party. These arguments are not ever resolved because they can't be resolved. Instead, we go onto the next issue, which is always just a cable news cycle away.

Cultural Warriors, thanks to their numbers and their noise, can drive the public debate and make a whole lot of money if they get their own show, but they never make policy decisions. Partly, this is because they hardly ever hold office (Palin even resigned as governor to take part in the Wars), but mostly their suggestions are not adopted because they don't make suggestions. They aren't interested in the nitty-gritty details of laws and governance, unless those details can support a point they want to make. If a fact or report disagrees with their already-resolved opinions, the find a way to cast doubt on that fact or opinion, or they simply ignore it.

The problem with this hyper-politicized viewpoint is that it is incredibly limiting. Veteran Cultural Warriors are all bile and bias, so they assume that everything in the world is biased. This makes them unsuitable scientists, because scientists have to draw conclusions from facts, not facts from conclusions, and good scientists have to be able to recognize when a hypothesis has been proven incorrect. Cultural Warriors will never produce a worthwhile work of art, because their ideology prevents them from understanding art. Everything is considered from a political standpoint, so they lose sight of aesthetics and treat everything as a form of propaganda. Conservative Christians flocked to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ not for its virtues as a film, but because Gibson is one of them and wants to further their message, much like dyed-in-the-wool Liberals enjoy Michael Moore's movies. This is the sort of art that a Cultural Warrior produces--political in the shallowest possible sense, guaranteed to be enjoyed or hated depending on the party affiliations of the viewer, and boring to look at.

Meanwhile, a whole lot of Americans go through life without considering the political ramifications of Christmas displays in public buildings or renting movies at Blockbuster. Some people are not bothered by the biases of Fox News and MSNBC because they never watch those channels. Mind-bogglingly, some people don't even think of politics as all that important. These people are easy to ignore because they don't blog, don't appear on television, and many of them don't even bother to vote. You can criticize this sort of attitude as being apathetic or unappreciative of the rights given to us by modern democracy--then again, given the state of political debate in this country, there's something to be said for ignoring it and hoping it goes away.

For an example of Cultural Warriors fighting over Whole Foods in the most ridiculous manner possible, watch this video:
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Why Comparing US Presidents to Hitler Sucks

What's wrong with these pictures? Besides the photoshopping jobs, I mean.

I can think of one problem, right off the top of my head: neither of the men depicted here are like Hitler. And by "not like Hitler" I mean "In no way like Adolf Hitler except for superficial similarities that can be attributed to all three being male members of the species Homo sapiens and also politicians (politicians not being a separate species, despite some evidence to the contrary)."

Hitler, for those of you who don't know, was this guy back in the first part of the last century who took control of Germany preaching a doctrine of open anti-semitism, totalitarianism and militant nationalism. Unlike most politicians, he made good on his campaign promises, systematically killing millions of Jews and other minorities and starting World War II (although you could probably make the case that given the state of Germany after the Treaty of Versailles and the rise of Fascism and Communism, war was inevitable even without Hitler).

Barack Obama and George W. Bush are not Fascists, don't advocate the murder of minorities, don't enjoy marching or moustaches--not like Hitler. This is not rocket science people. But here's a blog, from before the last election, explaining how Obama is like Hitler; here's another blog from a few years before that explaining how Bush is like Hitler.

These people are pretty much openly nuts (the liberal likens Bush's arrest for drunk driving to Hitler's arrest for attempting to overthrow the Bulgarian government, while the conservative says both Obama and Hitler were popular with young people), but they aren't isolated nuts. Plenty of liberals made sometimes-half-joking comments about Bush being a Fascist for imprisoning suspected terrrorists without trial and conservative protestors are holding up Nazi signs as a way of calling Obama a socialist or something. (The Nazis were Fascists, not socialists. Fascists and socialists fought a war in Spain in the 30s. They weren't friends.)

To be fair, anyone who makes a seriously compares any US politician to Hitler is way out on the fringe.* The truth is there aren't any elected officials who are even secretly Fascists--or Communists, for that matter. But the existence of these kinds of statements and the media attention they get points to an increasing hysteria in our national dialogue.

It's not enough to disagree with the politics of the President, you have to invoke the worst bogeyman in history. The Iraq war wasn't just a case of interventionalist foreign policy gone wrong thanks to incompetence, it was as bad as Vietnam. Arresting a few hundred suspected terrorists means we're going the way of 1984 . Gay marriage will destroy the family. Giving the government more control over health care is sure sign that the US is turning into Soviet Russia. Does anyone actually believe any of this?

The confusing, wildly inaccurate way pundits and bloggers are used to debating is not only stupid and self-defeating (no one is going to expand their view by listening to someone shouting), it obscures the points on which most Americans probably agree. For instance, in the health care war, everyone can agree on these three points:

1. If the government or large multinational corporations control health care, it will suck.
2. No matter what happens with this health care reform, the government or corporations will be in charge.
3. Health care is still going to suck, unless you happen to be rich.

So lets step back, okay? Making health care a little more socialist (it already is slightly socialist, with Medicare and Medicaid, which no one seems to mind) isn't the revolution. The Nazis and the Bolsheviks are not in power, it's the Democrats and Republicans, which is bad enough.

*BONUS: Why Rush Limbaugh Sucks (part 1 in a planned 437-par series): The Democrats apparently planted some protestors to make it seem like there were more Republicans calling Obama the next Hitler. Rush Limbaugh denounced the Democrats for this, which would be fine if he hadn't compared Obama to Hitler a few days earlier. If you bother to read the transcript in the first link, you'll find him comparing the Democrats to the Nazis at the same time he's accusing Democrats of making the Republicans look like wackos, which is a nice trick if you can pull it off. He also claims, bizarrely, that the Nazis were leftists. Keep it up Rush!

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