I don’t like to miss posting on Hugh Hewitt’s “Vox Blogoli” invitations, so I had read the segment of the Jonathan Rauch essay from the current issue of The Atlantic: Bipolar Disorder that Hugh had posted on his Blog and was formulating my thoughts. Then, just before having to go into a client meeting, I heard a discussion with Rauch on the first segment of Hugh’s show yesterday. Rauch was sounding credible when he explained that he meant no slight to the religious right, and would have modified some of the offending sentences if he had thought about it longer. Then I had to stop listening, and was left with much confusion about whether Hugh and the Bloggers that had already responded to this call to Blog were beating the straw out of the man.

Then this morning, Hugh was able to provide the entire article to us, courtesy of the Atlantic, and links to his analysis in the Weekly Standard article, Big Media’s 40 Days and 40 Nights. A re-read, some more contemplation, maybe read again a couple of times, and wait a minute. I don’t think that Rauch is off the hook just yet!

His article is attempting to pave over the chasm that is the current Culture War in America, using many examples of how close to center our society is, to say that we are not really divided culturally, but have become so politically.

An odd thing, however, happened to many of the scholars who set out to map this culture war: they couldn’t find it. If the country is split into culturally and politically distinct camps, they ought to be fairly easy to locate. Yet scholars investigating the phenomenon have often come back empty-handed. Other scholars have tried to explain why. And so, in the fullness of time, the country has arrived at today’s great divide over whether there is a great divide.

Perhaps, but my take on his information is that the political divide between right and left, which has become very pronounced, is the precursor of a greater division in our culture, and that from his center-left viewpoint he does not recognize this. It is a unique failing of the cultural elite to not care about or understand the beliefs and actions of the common man. The power of the mainstream media (MSM) since the dawn of the radio and television eras has only recently been challenged. Talk radio was the vanguard, then the cable news shows, and now the Blogs, each delivering information in a more individualistic, less centrally controlled way, each being more immediate and topical, and more personal.

As Hugh puts it in the Weekly Standard article,

What is unfolding is the rapid rewiring of America’s collective sensory system. …

American politics is becoming more ideological because American voters are getting much more information on the debate that has been underway since Vietnam. Not surprisingly, the side more closely attuned with traditional American principles and values, especially of the religious variety, is winning. And the new network cannot be rubbed out. It cannot be ignored, or shouted down, or killed off by Big Media.”

And that’s the crux of it. In the ’60s and ’70s I observed my parents and remember myself as we dutifully watched the ABC, NBC or CBS newscasts each evening, with their never ending leftist slant against the Vietnam War. They at least had a conservative newspaper in the Tulsa World to give them some respite from the MSM onslaught, but Uncle Walter was oh, so convincing. These were the voices that they had listened to during the Great War — they trusted these folks to tell them the truth. They had no idea how corrupt and perverse it would eventually become. They had no alternate media, no opposing viewpoints except for their own. What gave them the gall to think differently from the editors of the major metropolitan newspapers and the world-wide television news bureaus? Only their Christian faith and the religious community they worked so hard within.

The cultural, and political, pendulums swung too far left quite some time ago. They are now at the bottom of their movements, heading on and up to the right. The reason that America is perceived to be so evenly divided right now is that some in the vast majority that had forever been listening to the homogenized output of the MSM has discovered the new feeds of information, and are passing it along. The left has had its message delivered via MSM IV for so long that new leftist information channels don’t contribute to many converts. The right, whose voice had been stifled since Vietnam and Watergate, is speaking once again to open ears, intimately, without having to shout, via rationale and reason.

It has often been jokingly said that conservatives don’t protest because they have day jobs. There’s truth to that, and now that we have alternate information feeds, we don’t have to be inundated with “news at 11″ video of the latest protesters doing something disgusting. We can inform ourselves with real stories that have real meaning, at least to us, and keep the MSM flotsam from tainting our impressions. It’s too true that once you see something, you never get rid of that image in your mind. “They” know that, and use this principal mercilessly to advance their agenda. We now have the media amour to protect ourselves from their assaults.

So, Jonathan Rauch may be correct in his assessment that our culture is not as divided as our politics, but it soon will be. I happen to think that as more and more of the politically-disconnected voters on the right, especially the conservative Christians and others that honor the Judeo/Christian values that this country was founded upon, discover those of like mind, the Culture War can be won for the good of all. (db)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 26th, 2005 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Focus On Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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