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You Say You Want a Revolution: What It Could Actually Take, a Series
A waiter comes over to a table of Jewish women. He asks, “Is anything all right?”
It’s okay; I can tell that joke! My wife is Jewish, and she thinks it’s funny. Remember when we could tell harmless jokes to each other? How about you, Ricochet reader? When you look at today’s culture, today’s mass media, see the movies, the TV shows, look at major media in general, ‘Is anything all right?’ This is aimed, but not exclusively, at social conservatives. I often spar with you but you deserve the cultural tools to defend yourselves. When it comes to subject matter, we’ll keep slugging that out the Ricochet way, on the Member Feed. This is about dealing with the media world outside Ricochet.
GMcV alleged “expert advice” has to be taken with this caveat: I made my living in the ways it’s been done before. I don’t, and can’t, know for sure what’s going to work in the future. I’m usually pretty good about why something hasn’t worked in the past. Previous posts on Hollywood Communists and Hollywood Conservatives can always be elaborated on later, but they basically bring the story up to the present. I’ve participated in how long-term change is done in the media and the details of what it costs to actually do it. My one rule: Human nature hasn’t changed over the years. My hunches, and I strongly suspect yours, are largely based on it.
Yes, of course, there are multiple ways that the culture of 60 years from now could be as unimaginably different from today’s as that of 60 years ago. A change of that magnitude takes the moral authority of the decades-long struggle to untangle the effects of legal racial segregation, the institutional tactical cleverness that it once took to divide the cultural “turf” and smartly hand off its sections, 1968-2018 to the very segments of the Left most motivated to explore its boundaries. Doing its equivalent in cultural heft and lasting deep influence would be a big deal that would have to last a long time, decades. It didn’t happen spontaneously for the Left, and it wouldn’t for the Right. Still, there comes a tipping point where that kind of change is so popular it more than pays for itself, more than pays for everything that went into creating it, plus interest, plus opportunity costs, plus the hard to price but genuine satisfaction of making things popular that ought to be popular.
Step back. Much of the daily social change thought of as “liberal” has happened since WWII, and is widely accepted, sometimes led by today’s conservatives. Let’s get this out of the way fast. There are no 1940s-style racists among us; at Ricochet, anyway. Anti-Semitism on the right isn’t a fiftieth of what it was as late as the ’50s, when I was a kid. Even the least feminist of our readers—which is really saying something—doesn’t yearn for a “Handmaid’s Tale” world. This post is largely neutral about the issues. It’s about tactics of expression that some of you might find useful when thinking about remolding public opinion. The point is for the overall, all-enveloping culture outside our website, there is no permissible debate anymore. Apparently too many outsiders react to all of us like they were the line of vengeful, torch-bearing villagers coming up the hill in a Frankenstein movie.
Despite the caricatures of pop culture, most of us—not all of us, of course—made our peace quite some time ago with truck stops stocking copies of Playboy magazine, Raquel Welch going topless for the big kiss scene, and the chances that people may arrive at the altar with at least some sexual experience. By the ’70s, those were no longer the hottest of cultural arguments, not because San Francisco and Greenwich Villlage said so, but because Nashville and Jacksonville came to agree. If an unmarried couple wanted to live together, that was between them and a consenting landlord. That compromise held up pretty well in the Reagan ’80s: if you’re an adult, read what you want, buy any videotape you want. Almost no limits. But keep it out of the broad public arena.
That truce had its friction for both sides in the ’90s. Gays didn’t get anything better than “Don’t ask, don’t tell”.”Forget about marriage; back then, nobody would even give them civil unions. Radical Blacks got Bill Clinton’s Sister Souljah moment and the back of his hand once in office. Feminists were angry and unhappy with the man-obsessed, “do-me” feminism of HBO’s “Sex in the City.” On the other hand, SoCons never got ABC to drop “Ellen” or the occasional bare backside on “NYPD Blue.” SoCons never got Disney to condemn the informal “gay days” at the theme parks, or to sell Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax. Believe it or not, nobody got everything they wanted.
When in the 21st century and how did this unofficial, un-agreed-to national cultural truce unravel? It wasn’t an equal fight; the Left invaded. Taking over the staff of, say, New York’s Whitney Museum was one thing; muscling the NCAA, the NFL, and NASCAR into compliance was another. The right lost specific fights because they’d basically already lost the war a long time ago. Sure, government put a heavy thumb on the scale, but public opinion on a lot of social matters really has shifted, though not nearly as much as pollsters and Hollywood suggest.
There are always valid reasons to be doubtful about the prospects for long-term change and outright cynical about the short term. Let’s not kid ourselves. You and I and other Ricochet readers are a varied bunch who won’t agree on everything. We are cultural allies only up to a point. That expression of the old Left’s, “Fellow Traveler,” says it well. Be realistic. Conservatives ought to know that some policies are not going to be popular without a profound public shift that would have to take decades. In 2019’s world, LGBT-themed marketing by Disney is not going to discourage many grandmas from buying merchandise, from “Frozen” or Kylo Ren masks. To me, that’s okay. I like it. If you don’t agree, you should think about your options. They include transformation.
OK, an analogy. Please bear with me if you will. In 1939, all of the biggest world powers knew that atomic fission could be weaponized. Germany, the UK, Japan, the US and the USSR all had research programs that suggested that an atomic bomb was possible, but the scale of industrial production it would need was so gigantic, so expensive, that not only couldn’t they do it, but each grimly reassured themselves that nobody else was going to be able to either. Scientists and chemical engineers estimated that America would have to spend a breathtaking fortune to isolate even a few grams of fissionable Uranium 235, and at that stage, nobody knew what a bomb’s critical mass was—a kilogram? Ten? A hundred thousand grams? The cost of an entire war to produce just one single bomb? By 1940, that seemed to settle the question for FDR’s advisers.
Then in 1941, the British changed everything. They’d been in the war for a year and a half. America was still standing on the sidelines when UK scientists and military men sent a report to their counterparts in the US. It said, fairly bluntly, that a practical bomb was possible after all, and we’d better start working on it fast, because if we know it, the Nazis know it too. The report said how it could be done, technically and organizationally, with practical, if ultimately optimistic estimates of time and cost. They estimated $100 million but said frankly that it could be ten times that cost.
In the end, it was closer to 20 times that, but the bomb ended the Pacific War and transformed America’s role in the world. The 1941 UK report was what engineers and marketers might call a detailed product definition and packaging specification. It couldn’t anticipate every detail and breakthrough. It was a crucial preliminary blueprint for action. That’s what we’re suggesting that we all take a shot at here; designing a future cultural architecture and guessing at the outside dimensions of a large, generations-long movement with the focus of a Manhattan Project or a Moonshot that could actually make a difference. I’ll suggest ways it could be done. In the comments, you’ll most likely suggest many other ones, almost certainly better ones. After all, if nobody can even so much as imagine it could happen, let alone playing a part in making it happen, then we can all confidently guarantee it won’t.
Published in General
After you read it, you’ll tell me!
Promise.
ENDSTATE: To live in a nation-state in which my greatest political concern is that my district’s representative and my state’s two senators represent my views on taxation, state and local…and maybe a little bit federal. That I can listen to who I want, when I want, on the platform I want. That political–and now corporate tech–entities have no suasion over how I live my life, day-to-day. That I do not feel the hyenas nipping at the heels of my beloved Constitution or the Bill of Rights, nor the ideals ensconced in the Declaration of Independence, and thus spur me to think about violence and buying extra ammo every month. That I can go to my municipal/county government to resolve issues of waterways, fishing, lobstering, mangrove preservation, and endangered species without some federal twit who’s never visited the Keys or the Glades, never been subsurface on either snorkel or SCUBA making a dumbass decision with the authority of Thor’s Hammer on a subject he knows nothing about and in which has zero equity.
To live in a community where friends and acquaintances that are trying to open businesses are not stymied by idiotic regulatory guidance that means that their start-up loans are not dead-on-arrival because due to federal regulations, or due to state regulations issued to be in compliance with federal compliance; because of this, that their P&L prospecti are not dead on arrival when they show up at the bank, with a good idea/plan and an ardor for working their butts off.
To live in a country where I’m not being told to “pay my fair share,” where my fair share looks pretty exorbitant compared to that 50%+ part of the electorate that pays nothing. Oh, and paying off that tax debt means that I have to limit what I can provide my sons and daughters in a couple extra bennies. My kids, mostly, didn’t have private horse-riding lessons, dance lessons, wrestling camps, or violin lessons. Because the “fair share” of the taxes paid on income earned on the sweat of my brow precluded that. Pero (as they say down south), those who worked far less could get vouchers for far more because, supposedly, they were disadvantaged.
Gonna end it now, because I am in danger of working myself into high dudgeon, and I have (productive, paying) stuff I have to do.
Does that sound like an endstate?
Mongo for temporary dictator.
Just for a little bit, ’til we get things shook out.
Right. If you try to stay dictator, I’ll shoot you. (I’m mostly dead already; I’ve got nothing to lose.)
Don’t worry. If I’m tempted to stay dictator, I’ll shoot myself.
Mongo for temporary dictator.
Here’s the problem with a lot of this: The leftists completed their capture of the cultural and educational institutions before the digital revolution shoved us into our self-segregating ghettos.
Let us assume for one moment that we are successful in creating competing services. Then whatever engagement we have now with each other is completely severed. Over here the progressives will be watching Netflix, chatting on Twitter and posting family updates on Facebook. And over there the conservatives will be watching Conflix, chatting on Swatter and posting family updates on the thirteenth mouth-to-mouth-get-out-the-AED-and-revive-it version of MySpace.
Rupert Murdoch owns Fox. Other than FNC he never did anything with it but allow his progressive employees to make him more money. And then he sold out the studio to make even more progressive crap for Disney.
I’d take a Judge Mental nomination to be temporary dictator seriously. The man knows whereof he speaks.
Can’t argue with that. Heck, I don’t argue with that. Capturing enough of the culture to make the other side afraid of pushing back too hard isn’t science fiction; it’s what we actually had in living memory. (What do I mean by ‘enough’? Very roughly speaking, a third to a half.)
I’ve said here that if, hypothetically, Murdoch had run his feature films the way he chose to run his news channel, it would have significantly altered pop culture in the past 30 years. Here’s the proviso: if he was successful. If there had been something significant about Fox’s hits and the way they connected to the country. Of course he would have been opposed inside Hollywood; I’m not naive. But so what? Opponents can be overwhelmed. Cultural radicals who thought the Seventies would be the Sixties were shocked when the Eighties turned out to be the New Fifties.
The idea of owning a major cross platform media giant is only one way to go, though it’s one of the most obvious ones. Ultimately a conservative cultural revolution that’s 100% bankrolled by the Kochs isn’t, if you’ll excuse my use of the word, sustainable. Having a conservative media ghetto isn’t the final goal, but having a company that proves that marketing un-woke but conservative friendly products is actually profitable does help credibility.
It’s not an exclusive formula. In fact, if everyone else tried to compete on the same terms, we should welcome it.
The problem is the Brothers Koch don’t know anything about culture & don’t bankroll it.
Also, let me speak in favor of ghettos. So far as I can tell, conservatives have next to nothing to show for their cultural preferences or tastes, except of course the resurgence in country music. So ghettos would be great! Conservatives should build schools/institutes for people who want to do the whole master-apprentice thing to learn how to play music, the pop-folk crafts of an hundred years back or up to the mid-century.
So also with film institutes that teach people how to write a story, how to film it, & so forth. In both cases, there are masters available who are either conservative or just hated by Hollywood. I can think of names–people who might want to teach craft if they are funded in return to make their cheap-by-Hollywood-standards movies. Why not?
If conservatives do not honor & reward talent, liberals will have a de facto monopoly.
American Cinema Foundation; a conservative organization in the movie business. McVey used to be the director; he handed that spot off to Titus.
Suddenly I’m in favor of impeachment.*
*PIT-related meta-joke. Don’t ask.
Lake –> sword –> unimpeachable decision. Them’s the rules, Drew!
FIFY
Are you calling Gary a moistened bint?
Only if Titus was calling him a lake.
We probably shouldn’t do a PIT-takeover of this nice thread. But that was fun.
Gotta have some fun, or you turn into a leftist scold. That’s like rule #6.
“Why are you drunk at the wheel, son?”
“Honest, officer, that’s like rule #6. I’m pretty sure!”
I wasn’t drinking and driving, I was drinking then driving.
Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Is that a fair summary of your points? I just jotted those off and I’m late to meet nephew at the gym, so feel free to add or edit.
Outstanding summary. In fact, your comment is better than mine. But mine was more cathartic.
Hey, this post is competing for attention with Bethany’s adorable baby and Susan Quinn’s beloved grandpa. I’ll take all the crowd-winning empathy we can get.
Quality, Gary. Not quantity. Call this the Politically Adult Thread.
The man has a definite gift for mission statements and marketing.
So I don’t think what conservatives want has changed in an hundred years. What they can get & when has, as well as the social & technological conditions.
Conservatives have had some amazing successes–the courts, which they have packed all legally under Trump. It’s McConnell’s gift to America & if conservatives think ahead to how important it is to have pre-Progressive, pre-New Deal courts back, they will build that man a statue & monument & all that–some of it while he lives, so that everyone understands the honors that await someone who saves his country.
I think this means there’ll be more political debates, less invisible control of American lives. It’s a good time for conservatives to create organizations that rebuild civil society.
We’re–well, I’m–proposing that we learn from the success of the Federalist Society. They’ve been around “forever”. They never turned into a showboating, crusading face of the conservative cause. They weren’t being snobbish, but they just didn’t have to and knew that building a self-serving infrastructure would be counterproductive. They had another job than issuing daily press releases on the GOP challenge to a seat in Indiana’s 8th district. It was far-sighted; remaking America’s judiciary, and as far as possible, its jurisprudence. Unlike, say, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Federalist Society never turned into a racket. I don’t know how exact the promises of its mission statement were, but it’s had amazing success in its generations-long quest to balance the Federal bench. This is where ACF is at; not the whole thing by any stretch of the imagination, but the keeper of a stable, long term vision that never quits and is gradually implemented for a generation or more.
JAG, and Don Bellisario’s enormous contributions to conservative mass audience entertainment, have been much neglected by the media. You can guess why. Still, his shows (and their spin-offs, and their spin-off’s spin-offs) reach as many consumers as any living media conservative not named Rush Limbaugh or Rupert Murdoch. [… although Rupert’s legacy is tilting off-balance, and the NCIS spin-offs are culturally centrist at best.]
Yes, conservative billionaires should have bought CBS years ago, and NBC, etc. Top down solutions work better than grass roots. Big picture guys get big things done. Someone said old conservatives need to buy big tech companies. Better young opponents of “progressives” should build tech (and biotech) enterprises.
In this country you create wealth first, then multiply exponentially, then your resources get to push the larger culture in your preferred direction — if your audience wants it.
The first step isn’t political networking, it’s domain expertise. Across the way, Norman Lear and Larry David started off writing jokes. Most of the tech billionaires started off writing code. Ted Turner started with billboards. Donald Trump mastered construction, celebrity, hospitality, and TV, then shortcut the entire politics industry.
Yes, networking is important for conservatives, to link our too-thickly-walled silos. Someone should have told your luncheon companion about JAG. Someone should have told me about your JAG tribute. I could have found this thread a week ago.
Is it folly to imagine a text-based web camp as fountainhead of a political revolution? Won’t it more likely happen via texting, WebEx, ye olde phone calls, Horowitz retreats, RJC bashes, conservative cruises, or hordes of really good dinner parties? Maybe the Great Turnaround will come when we link forces with the party planning industry. Not political parties, party parties.