America’s Endless Culture Wars

America’s current culture war resembles the new World War I film “A Very Long Engagement.” Two sides are locked for years in trench warfare, but neither has much to show for its efforts.

Still, President Bush’s reelection by “moral values” voters has sent the Republicans into a victory dance -- they won the battle and seem to believe they’re winning the war.

Many Democrats, suffering from combat fatigue, are arguing, as Thomas Frank’s bestseller “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” indicates, that the culture war is a fiction invented by GOP elites to dupe the white working class into voting against its economic interests.

Both sides are wrong. A recent visit to Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell reminded me of a basic truth: The battle over culture is far more complex than most conservatives acknowledge and far more enduring than most liberals admit.

Bell, who was born in 1919, explained much of this in his classic book, reissued in 1996, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.” Few could be better prepared to diagnose those contradictions than Bell.

As a child on New York’s Lower East Side during the Depression, he and his friends foraged for fruit at loading docks, experiencing capitalism’s inequities firsthand. As a young socialist, he denounced big business in speeches and articles. He was a charter member of what might be called the New York intellectuals’ Greatest Generation, along with Irving Howe, Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer.

In “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” Bell argued that capitalism, which emerged in the 16th century with the rise of the great European banking houses, originally rested on the Protestant work ethic. It succeeded because it matched discipline with self-denial. But the acquisitive instinct fostered by capitalism would come to subvert the moral basis that initially allowed the system to flourish.

In the 20th century, Bell argued, it created and fulfilled desires the original capitalists never dreamed of. With artists and bohemians (always at war with the values of bourgeois society) leading the way, society jettisoned traditional boundaries and behaviors. Character was out; self-fulfillment was in.

Bell based his arguments on what he scorned as the hedonism of the 1960s, but the dynamic hasn’t changed. Today, you wind up with corporations eager to profit from supplying the worst gangsta rap or the most extreme pornography to consumers for whom nothing is sacred except their own desires.

“The modern hubris,” Bell wrote, “is the refusal to accept limits. The modern world proposes a destiny that is always beyond: beyond morality, beyond tragedy, beyond culture.”

Bell gets tagged as a dreaded neocon by the left, in part because he started the Public Interest with Kristol, a magazine that debunked liberal shibboleths about the welfare state, among other things. But as Bell said to me with some exasperation, he remains “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.”

Few things infuriate him more than the GOP’s moral contradictions, as its concerns over cultural decay bump against the needs of big business. For instance, Bush sponsors a sexual abstinence program for teens while gliding over the fact that his biggest media booster, the Fox network, airs such titillating shows as “The O.C.”

It’s also the case that conservatives who preach moral values readily turn a blind eye to ethical violations committed by corporations. Despite plenty of evidence that the accounting industry was running amok, Bush acceded to reform only when the calls for it became overwhelming. Now he should be denouncing the outrageous compensation package slated for Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s outgoing chief executive, under fire in an accounting scandal -- but once again, the silence is deafening.

And what about the Democrats? They claim to do a better job in holding corporations and Wall Street accountable, but their rights-based platform has made them loathe to back societal limits on much of anything. Even now, as the Democratic Leadership Council pushes a moral values agenda, the backlash against it is mounting.

The fact is that neither party can afford to ignore all the cultural contradictions identified by Bell. With social conservatives, libertarians and neocons pushing conflicting agendas, the unity of the GOP is more fragile than it may appear. One of these days a canny Democrat will link the voters’ demand for moral values to their anger over corporate excesses to call for a new age of reform. For that to occur, however, the Democrats will have to admit that culture matters.

As American capitalism thrives, and global capitalism spreads, the moral issues at its core will always inflame politics. The culture wars aren’t resuming. They’ve never ended. Remember that even though the Western allies thought they’d won World War I, it was only a temporary truce until the next war erupted.