Even if I want to grant Stu Rothenberg that Arnold and Willis Jackson, Maude, Meathead, and Will & Grace destroyed traditional culture, and even if I am willing to acknowledge vastly different media reactions to last week’s two 5-4 Supreme Court decisions (one, bad, that gutted the Voting Rights Act, one, good, that undermined that Defense of Marriage Act), his conclusion doesn’t follow.
Social conservatives probably see Obama, liberals on the Supreme Court and Democrats in Congress as their main adversaries. But they are wrong. The most important leaders of cultural liberalism may well be the members of the media and entertainment communities, and social conservatives simply have no strategy to deal with that.
But, Stu? What the fuck do you think Fox News is if not a strategy to combat the cultural liberalism of the media and entertainment industries? What is right-wing radio? What are voting suppression efforts? What is Citizens United? Why did they gut the Voting Rights Act? What was Birtherism all about?
And let’s not exaggerate the liberalism of the media. The vast majority of them thought that George & Dick’s Excellent Adventure in Iraq would be a swell idea. They vastly preferred John McCain’s personality to, say, Al Gore’s. Most of them are calling for Ed Snowden’s head on a pike, which in my experience in not a typical left-wing position. Yes, most national political reporters don’t live in Oklahoma or Alabama, so they don’t act like they do. That might make them culturally liberal to a degree, but it doesn’t mean that they’re aiding and abetting the great socialist revolution.