You should all read
my friend Alyssa Rosenberg’s long and smartly written piece
in The Washington Post on
the evolution of the culture wars. Rosenberg, a culture
blogger who frequently writes about the intersection of politics
and pop entertainment, traces the evolution the culture wars from
80s-era right-wing concerns about morality and decency—think:
congressional
hearings about violent video games, schools banning Bart
Simpson shirts, Vice President Dan Quayle criticizing the Murphy
Brown for deciding to become a single mother—to the culture wars of
today, which often feature left-wing critics concerned about
political messages in media—concerns about fair or proportional
representation of minorities, about art’s willingness and duty to
depict patriotism, about how sports interact with ideas about
violence and gender. Understood this way, the two culture wars, the
one on the right and the one of the left, are in some sense really
just one big culture war, with today’s left-leaning activists
replacing yesterday’s conservative concerns.
What connects all of these new skirmishes, in particular, is
that fundamentally they are about self-identification and
individual expression: People increasingly want to see
themselves—or at least more people who look, think, act, and live
like themselves and their communities—represented in media, both as
creators and as characters.
Rosenberg reviews several of the fronts in the new culture war,
noting its multiple strands and the way they have split
apart. “As the new culture war has widened,” she writes, “it
has also fragmented, turning less into a clash of great powers than
into a series of intractable guerrilla conflicts, marked by
shifting alliances and the rapid emergence of new players.”
It’s that fragmentation that is in some sense the key to making
peace with the culture wars, and to understanding that there’s a
path to victory for all sides. Thanks to the incredible profusion
of creative outlets for storytelling, and the incredible
niche-ification of media—Rosenberg cites a Variety report noting
that scripted television series on cable alone have increased by
1000 percent (!) since 1999—there are opportunities for everyone to
see themselves and their interests depicted in more or less
whatever way they would like to see themselves and their own worlds
represented on screen and in stories. Politicization of media and
pop-culture storytelling might bother some viewers, but in a
niche-driven business, it can also be a market-differentiation
strategy. The incredible expansion of choice, and the ability for
content with relatively small audiences to survive and profit,
means that both interests, and all sorts of subtle variations in
between, can be satisfied.
Part of what I like about Rosenberg’s piece is that her
conclusion—that more choice, and a healthy private market that
supports that choice, can make us all winners—is an essentially
libertarian one. Indeed, it’s not too far off from the argument
that many libertarian types tended to rely on in response to the
first generation of culture wars, when conservative
decency crusaders were leading the charge: Don’t like it? That’s
fine. Don’t watch it—and if you want to see something else, go
create it, and find an audience to support it. But don’t go begging
the federal government to intervene and resolve these issues in
your favor.
What that means, of course, is
that the culture wars themselves—the criticisms and complaints, the
protest movements and consumer activism—are in some sense a
necessary part of the process. Those public debates, conducted in
seemingly endless blog posts and comments sections and press
releases and panel discussions, can feel exhausting (I’ve
declined to write on the GamerGate fracas so far in part because I
find the entire uproar too frustrating, in too many ways, to dwell
on it at length), but they are vital to the healthy evolution of
these debates about we want culture and politics to be, and what it
should be, and how it is.
The flip side to that, of course, is that you need these debates
to be allowed to continue without intervention from on high. And
when these cultural conflicts get taken to powerful authorities,
especially to government authorities like the FCC, that’s generally
not what happens: That’s a process of shutting down the debate and
putting a stop to that process, which, yes, can be long and
tiresome, but is also the mechanism by which these things are best
resolved.
I looked at the explosion of TV choice
in my own recent print-edition feature on the evolution of
television, setting the expansion of choice and the explosion of
smart programming in the context of the general mediocrity of
television for television for so many years before. And as I noted,
when FCC Chairman Newton Minow gave his infamous “vast wasteland”
speech in 1961, television producers, fearing the agency’s wrath,
explicitly designed shows to his taste—taste one show packager
described as “generally antiseptic, somewhat
didactic, slightly dull, offensive to no one, and above all
else ‘justifiable.’” For decades, even after Minow left, the agency
would exert a dulling influence on television programming, which
was extremely cautious about upsetting its federal overseers.
That’s how everyone loses in the culture wars. What Rosenberg
does so well is show not only how the multitude of market offerings
lets everyone (or at least more people than ever before) win, but
how the culture wars themselves can help shape those victories, by
pushing both creators and industry executives to respond with even
more choice and variety.
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