Background Noise

The ugly wallpaper of our culture and the internal contradictions of liberalism

Conservatives find spectacles such as the recent Don Imus spanking to be very difficult to deal with. On the one hand we recognize that public rudeness of the sort that Imus routinely engaged in is destructive and damaging to society at large. On the other hand we recognize that the sort of power-play shakedown masquerading as moral grandstanding that the Sharptons and Jacksons engage in is also profoundly destructive and damaging to society at large. It’s a no-win situation.

Together they contribute to the coarsening of the culture and the increase in cultural “background noise” that has become an ironic hallmark of Baby Boomer liberalism. Modern liberalism has been trying to balance innate contradictions that have pretty much destroyed its intellectual consistency, and which threaten to turn over its practical operations to hucksters and con men.

Just as the thing we call “conservatism” is really an amalgam of different political, social and theoretical strains of thought – sometimes contradictory and often in uneasy alliance – so the thing we call “liberalism” is not an especially unified theoretical field. Two dominant strains in particular have fought tooth and nail against each other for the past 40 years.

In crude terms they can be described as the “Old Left” versus the “New Left.” One of the animating drives of the Old Left – derived from its base in socialism – is that a small core of activists needs to wield power on behalf of The People. To do so effectively requires a certain amount of coercion. It is from this strain that modern liberalism gets its joy of bossing people around and telling them what they can and cannot do. The New Left strain emanates from the personal liberation vibe of the 60s and on. This largely non-political school of theory encouraged people to let it all hang out, to shed the uptight bourgeois moral and cultural constraints and explore the limits of self through chemical experimentation, sexual freedom and whatever felt good.

One does not need to be a social scientist to see the conflict inherent in these two schools of thought sharing the same political movement. The New Left dared us to throw off the shackles of sexual morality. When this produced entirely predictable results, the Old Left (in the guise of feminist radicals) clamped down with Sexual Harassment theory, litigation and laws. The New Left encouraged – nay, commanded – that we speak truth to power, and we be free to express ourselves in every manner from strip tease to teach-in to graffiti. The Old Left responded with campus and office speech codes and “hate crimes” laws. The New Left asked us to explore personal spirituality and exotic religious traditions, while the Old Left banned religious expression from the public square.

Contrary to what you may hear in the media, Don Imus is the perfect representation of the New Left. His age places him squarely in the Boomer cohort. His graying, thinning hair stills dangles to 1972 length. And while he is no political radical, he beautifully captures the ethos if the “let it all hang out” school of liberalism. He affects to be hip and cool, and “speaking truth to power” has been replaced with the much easier act of saying whatever crosses his mind. The Old Left has generally tolerated this with a wink and a nod, until he wandered into an area of the cultural landscape that they police. Then they leveled him.

In a sense, liberalism is directly responsible for encouraging the increasingly ugly background noise of our culture, and then seeking to selectively paint over it with even uglier rules and personal destruction.

It is frustrating for many conservatives because we believe in rules too. We agree that Imus is a rude and destructive archetype and that we will be better off for not having him polluting the airwaves on a daily basis. But to do it this way is to reward and empower the even-more destructive Old Left. We believe in rules that are organic in nature, arising from shared cultural traditions – including religious traditions. We believe that one ought not to call people rude names, because it is wrong to do so. The Old Left wants to selectively prohibit name-calling only when it reinforces reactionary power relationships. If one doubts this, just imagine the response if Imus had referred to the U of Minnesota Ice Hockey Team as a bunch of Cold-Blooded Nordic automatons. (Cue sounds of crickets chirping).

It is always a fine line when one wants to cheer an outcome for the wrong reasons. We need to constantly remind ourselves and our fellow citizens that the answer to the increasing cultural cacophony is not the selective repression of the left. It is to allow our cultural traditions to breathe on their own once again. It is to allow religious guidance back into public life. It is to retake the institutions that shape the culture to give these things a chance to happen. It is to begin teaching our children that letting it all hang out isn’t the starting point for personal freedom.

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