RETURN OF THE CULTURE WARS - BUT DID THEY EVER LEAVE?

Some very smart analysts, including POLITICO and  PressThink founder Jay Rosen, are talking about the current Republican strategy in support of Sarah Palin as a "reigniting of the culture wars."  Attacking with all the code words of past anti-"left" vocabularies.  And here's Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal:

I'll tell you how powerful Mrs. Palin already is: she reignited the culture wars just by showing up. She scrambled the battle lines, too. The crustiest old Republican men are shouting "Sexism!" when she's slammed. Pro-woman Democrats are saying she must be a bad mother to be all ambitious with kids in the house. Great respect goes to Barack Obama not only for saying criticism of candidates' children is out of bounds in political campaigns, but for making it personal, and therefore believable. "My mother had me when she was eighteen…" That was the lovely sound of class in American politics.

When the McCain Summer of Love ad debuted, I wrote this - They Will Campaign Against Us Until We're Dead, and Maybe After.  If you watch CSPAN, especially Washington Journal, you know from the phone calls how much anger still exists; how much hatred of the generation I grew up in.  Against our opposition to the war, mischief and outrageousness, and even more, our search - no, demand - for peace. Going after all of us, FORTY YEARS LATER, still works.

I guess that since I've been posting quite a lot about that time forty years ago, the memories are long on both sides.  But Barack Obama was 7 years old in 1968.  It's not and never was his culture war.  It is, however, the never-ending flash-point in the conservative playbook, a safe way to rile folks up and re-ignite the hatred and anger manifested in the 60's and 70's and again in the 90's when that Boomer couple, the Clintons, were in the White House.

I've given up trying to figure out how to respond.  Most Americans, including us 60's people, love our country and loved it then.  It was the a desire to return the country to its true nature -- just as it is today -- that drove us.  But it's far more useful to the McCain campaign to taunt us -- and Barack Obama; and to divide us, too, with these ancient battles.  The tough part is figuring out how to answer.

Comments

[Hattie]

We should not lose courage. What gives me hope is a new generation coming along that is much more activist than the Gen X or Y cohorts. They remind me of...us!

[mythster]

I never realized until today how the antagonism of the extreme right, the "red" (neck) side, for anything or anyone who exhibits even a modicum of
intellectual capacity or resistance to the great American "Love it or leave it" credo is reflecting the "Know Nothing" party line that was so popular in the nineteenth century. The unread, uncultured, "uncurious" segment of our electorate has been and perhaps always will the pawns in the ideological battle for control of our nation. With one out of four adult Americans unable to read above a fifth grade level, it isn't surprising that the "powers that be" in our political universe are able to get away with so much.
How much more can we take?

[Cynthia Samuels]

All three of you - sorry I just found these comments -- make such great points! I too am frustrated at the willingness to bend, twist or just plain avoid the truth. Funny how Rove keeps coming up --McCain's campaign head is a Rove protege.

[Darlene]

It's really hard to keep to the high road when the Rove slime machine keep trying to drag us into the gutter. So much for the Republicans being 'uniters'. They have mastered the art of dividing the country into cultural wars.

[Mary Margaret Hansen]

Sarah Palin delivered her Rovian lines really, really well last night. So well that I was frightened for us all. She's going to be a good campaigner and a great divider. Her remark comparing soccer moms to pit bulls was scary and not funny. And her base is sure to believe each one of her remarks about Obama. Don't we wish even more for Hillary right now?
Was that open wonderful hippie time in the late 1960s so completely frightening to another part of our nation that they'll continue to crush any vestige of it?

[Kittysmith]

I'm beginning to feel like a electoral bi-polar: one minute flush with excitement, elation and hope akin to my campaigning as a teenager for Gene McCarthy then Bobby Kennedy, sneaking around at night tacking up signs on telephone poles instead of dating. The next minute plunging into cynicism: Why bother, they fight dirty, always have, always will. They'll reflect all the good we believe in and all we've accomplished (and this 56 year old is DAMN PROUD of her generation!) in their goblins' mirror to turn it all to slimy, boiled spinach.
Today I'm cautiously optimistic. We must, like Obama/Biden, keep to the high road and watch our backs. Peace. Now.