It’s a Big Club, and You Ain’t in It

What George Carlin can teach us about the culture wars.

George Carlin

Jamie Paul Here. This week’s post is by contributor Timothy Wood, responding to a previous article written by fellow contributor Johan Pregmo, which you can read here.

I also have a piece out in Queer Majority: “Overturning Roe and the GOP’s Continued Descent Into Extremism.”

---

The beacons have been lit. Trumpets sound the call to arms. Online, in the streets, and at the ballot box, we all raise our banners to win the “culture”, whatever that means. Two weeks ago, my fellow contributor Johan Pregmo wrote in these pages that the left has won the culture war, they just can’t admit it. And so the fight rages on. Of course, it’s not solely a left wing battle cry. It wouldn’t be much of a “war” without two sides. And if we’re being honest, the political right — especially the religious right — pioneered this game back before it was trendy. But we’re missing something much deeper.

It never ceases to amaze that in all this excitement, few seem to ask the question behind the question: why are we allowed to continue? To channel the ghost of George Carlin, it’s because that’s what the people who own this country want. Don’t kid yourself. You are indeed allowed to continue. If you doubt it, then fuck around and find out. Go find yourself an issue that disrupts the bottom line and see how quickly business and politics align themselves to squash it.

With enough money, the possibilities are almost limitless. You can found nonprofits, advocacy groups, lobbies, and think tanks that happen to be keen on attacking your opponents. You can buy or own newspapers, media companies, tech platforms, or, indeed, politicians. According to one study, only a dozen donors accounted for 7.5 percent of total federal election spending over a ten year period. That’s not 12 businesses or organizations, that’s 12 individual people. The calculus is very simple: it’s an investment. What’s a few billion here or there if it means that nobody looks too closely into your offshore accounting, and that the IRS audits poorer Americans at five times the rate of wealthier ones? For good measure, we can probably just find some excuse to give out money, like the 16,000 separate subsidies awarded to Fortune 500 companies alone. 

Remember back when we were having a public debate about letting members of Congress trade stocks, given, as the New York Times put it, their “strangely good timing” on the market? Without looking it up, do you reckon that ever passed, or just waited calmly to die a quiet death after the news cycle moved on? Senator Jon Ossoff’s proposed bill to ban congressional stock trading has been missing in action since January, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s since February. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi’s was referred to committee a few weeks ago. We can take bets on whether the bill makes it out alive. And it’s not hard to imagine why they’re in no big hurry, given that over half of Congress are millionaires, compared to only about one percent of the people they’re supposed to be representing. 

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is busy lamenting our myopia, because we might discourage some poor neglected investment banker from running for public office. Maybe — and just hear me out on this one — if you care more about your portfolio than your society, you shouldn’t be running for Congress. The Journal has the gall to tell us the existing STOCK Act should allay all our concerns, despite the fact that it is routinely violated with no consequences. And on those occasions when it is actually enforced, it amounts to a paltry slap on the wrist from regulators who are themselves often involved in the same schemes.

None of this is a secret. It is a literal conspiracy, but not the kind that gets people excited, because it’s all happening in plain sight. Members of Congress spend so much of their time working the phones and begging for money that they make televangelists look subtle. Even the ACLU, part and parcel of its continued decay, has come out saying that we really need is more money in politics, not less. It’s all in front of your face. These are publicly traded companies, lobbyists, and politicians that file public financial disclosures. It’s not some hidden agenda; it’s openly celebrated. In non-Western countries, we have a name for this: kleptocracy — rule by thieves. Here, we call it a “conflict of interest”, and brush it under the rug.

Unfortunately for us regular folk, productivity has outpaced wages for generations. The minimum wage has stalled at $7.25 an hour, and hasn’t been raised in 13 years. It took 16 years from 2004 to 2020 for the Department of Labor to update the threshold for salaried exempt employees from $23,660 to $35,308, meaning that you can qualify for a white collar exemption from minimum wage and overtime protections if you make an average of $17 an hour for a 40-hour work week, or a few thousand less than the median salary of a garbage collector. Even this modest increase only came after years of lawsuits. To speak nothing of non-wage benefits, the cost of housing and raising kids, or pesky little things like a generation that no longer expects to retire, and the 56 percent of us who can’t foot an unexpected $1,000 emergency. Going back to dearly departed George, they got you by the balls.

But our attention is easily diverted from the lower pay, longer hours, and benefits that compete with retirement plans to see which can disappear faster. Enter the culture war, stage right. A comedian joked about trans people. Some kids were taught about LGBT in the classroom. There are too many white Oscar nominees. Disney is too woke. This person went as a Puerto Rican to a costume party a decade ago. Something something cultural appropriation, groomers, colonizers, globalists, and on and on the merry-go-round spins.

Economics are complicated. The US tax code alone is some 7.7 million words, in addition to around 60 thousand pages of related case law. And that’s just the bit that you have to struggle through when April rolls around. What we need is something nice and simple to rustle our jimmies and make us feel involved. Unlike the tissue of corruption and dysfunctional gridlock our government is mired in, the culture war goes down as easy as soda pop. And it serves the former’s purposes. It doesn’t require a grand scheme; it just requires the incentives to align into an obvious path of least resistance. If you can’t be content with sports, fashion, religion, video games, gambling, fried food, or drugs, and you fancy a bit of politics, then that’s what you’ll get. But it won’t be the kind that gives you any meaningful or lasting influence over the levers of real legislative, judicial, or executive power. It’ll be enough to make you angry, and if it doesn’t, then you better be angry about those other people who are angry. It’s a distraction. 

This isn’t to say that all issues outside of economics are unimportant. But isn’t it a little strange that culture wars seem to consistently consume the majority of our public discourse? When money is on the line, we get an army of lobbyists and think tanks who literally write the bills for lawmakers. For the rest, we get a token outlet for our frustrations, just enough so that we can exhaust ourselves in public catharsis while mostly changing nothing of any import.  

Culture wars do not fundamentally threaten the powers that be, plain and simple. The nontroversy or scandal du jour arises, and off we go to fight the good fight. And none of it disturbs wealthy donors or the revolving door, in fact it helps politicians fundraise and furnishes them with talking points so that they can pretend to be doing something. These are the safe zones where we can dump all our vitriol without upsetting the applecart. 

The sad reality of the culture wars is that all sides are losing, and we’re doing it enthusiastically. In terms of the public’s ability to meaningfully affect policy change in the long term, this only functionally works in one direction. Gains can be reversed. Laws can be overturned. If we want better outcomes, we must set up better conditions. Culture wars distract us from the real work of politics by pretending to be that work, like an aspiring marathon runner convinced that eating ice cream and “marathoning” Netflix counts as training. We won’t win by idolizing the end-state while neglecting the steps necessary to get there.

See also: “A Better World Is Worth Fighting For”

---

Subscribe now and never miss a new post. You can also support the work on Patreon. Please consider sharing this on your social networks. You can reach me at @AmericnDreaming on Twitter, or at AmericanDreaming08@Gmail.com.