Un-Credibles
Cartoons, Puppets, Dems
Andrew Sullivan
The new conventional wisdom is that the election results were not so much a triumph for right-wing Christians as a more general endorsement for George W. Bush's clear, reassuring cultural presence in a troubled time. How else to explain the nine million extra votes he racked up this time, when only a third of them came from evangelicals? How else to explain the one in five gay voters who went for Bush despite his determination to rob them of civil rights? Or the big gain in Bush votes in, say, New York City?
Well: here's another cultural explanation. A large part of the pro-Bush vote - especially among blue state residents - was a vote against the left elite and the cultural attitudes it represents in the public imagination. It was a vote not so much for Bush or his often religious policies (or even the war on terror), but against the post 9/11 left, against Michael Moore and political correctness and Susan Sontag and CBS News, among a host of others. I have to say that this was the most appealing thing about George W. Bush for me. If he hadn't so obviously screwed up the Iraq war and endorsed a constitutional amendment against gay rights, I would have succumbed myself.
Two recent movies brought this home to me. "The Incredibles" is anything but a left-liberal movie. Although brilliantly animated, funny in patches, and engrossing, it's not a patch on Pixar's previous masterpieces. Its characters are less inventive, its plot more contrived, its jokes less wry. But its moral is a very canny one, and may account for its popularity. The Incredibles are a family of super-heroes who are forced into early retirement because their feats had incurred too much collateral damage. The lawsuits filed by aggrieved and pesky crimps on super-heriocs had made the Incredibles a liability. So they were required to go into hiding, to restrain their unique powers, to conceal their genetically-given talents. The fundamental moral of the movie is that this restraint is wrong, and needs to be overcome. Letting the talented earn the proud rewards of their labor, and the fruits of their destiny, harms no one and actually helps those in the greatest need.
Is this a moral for the religious right? Hardly. "The Incredibles" in some ways portrays normal American bourgeois life as stultifying. Its brutal parody of family squabbles is by no means an encomium to traditionalism. It's not anti-family, of course. But it is pro-talent and pro-opportunity. It is in favor of the urge to get out there and achieve things without apology. Within the right-left rubric of American cultural discourse, the movie is therefore rightward-tilting. And that's why many critics on the left have decried it.
Or take the latest product from South Park creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker: "Team America: World Police." You might think of South Park as a quintessentially blue-state product. Its humor is profane and scatological; the show is at ease with sexual candor, racial jokes, and regularly lampoons organized religion. But, once you look beneath the surface, you find that this blue-state comedy has little truck with liberal political correctness, Hollywood piety, trial lawyer insanity, hate crime hooey, and all the other shibboleths of the good government left.
The same is true of "Team America." No good liberal would have as much fun with bad ethnic stereotypes. A recurring gag is the fact that Kim Jong Il pronounces his "r"s and "l"s the wrong way round. Heh. No right-thinking listener to Air America would be comfortable with an activist group called the Film Actors Guild or F.A.G. for short. The quintessential voice of liberal activism on the web, Daily Kos, had this to say about the movie:
"What do we get? Peacenik liberal Hollywood actors coddling up to terrorist regimes (ha ha). If you hate Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo, then you'll love seeing them get killed in a bloody battle with Team America. One dead Rush Limbaugh would've attoned for using Michael Moore as a suicide bomber. Perhaps massacring Fox's whole afternoon lineup and Tom DeLay would've balanced out the dead actors. But oh well. Me, I didn't care for it."
What Kos doesn't get is that Parker and Stone don't think that Fox is as pompous or as self-important or as cringe-inducing as Tim Robbins passing himself off as an intellectual. And neither do most Americans. Yes, Stone and Parker often lampoon silly morality crusades. Their South Park episode on Mel Gibson, "The Passion of the Jew," was a devastatingly hilarious take-down of Gibson's psycho-sexual extremism. But there is also a love of ordinary American culture and of American power that animates and centers the Parker-Stone sensibility.
Yes, "Team America" shows the gung-ho Brookheimer version of American patriotism as absurd, clumsy and crude. But Stone and Parker never lose sight of the fact that Kim Jong Il is worse; or that real enemies are out there; or that America is better than many other whiny world powers, paralyzed by fear and inertia and hypocrisy. That's why you both lament and celebrate the U.S. missile crashing into the Louvre, and why cheers went up in the blue-state movie theater I was in when Susan Sarandon plunged to a gruesome death. And for all the home-grown idiocies of South Park, you grow to love the dysfunctional redneck Colorado town where the cartoon sitcom is based. The humor is at America's expense; but it's also born out of a real and intimate love of American culture itself. Colorado is, after all, a red state.
This is what the left has lost sight of. Americans tend to believe that talent needs no apology; that action is often better than complaint; that their own country, despite its many faults, is still a force for great good in the world. The left tends to view things a little differently. The most shocking manifestation was the way in which the far left saw 9/11 as an indictment of America, rather than of Jihadist nihilism. A more anodyne version was the way in which the Kerry campaign tried to reassure Americans of Kerry's commitment to national defense by playing up his Vietnam record, rather than unleashing him to rage against the evil of terror. The legitimate criticisms of the Iraq war seemed at times to emanate from a welter of whining, rather than from a determined attempt to win in Iraq, and from righteous, well-deserved anger that Bush had botched it. Facing a world of unprecedented danger, the Democrats still offered little in the way of a constructive message about what they would do proactively to defeat the enemy. For all his faults, Bush did.
At home, the Democrats spoke too easily of people injured by fate or economic transition or social injustice, while scanting the positive things that people can and will do to change their own circumstances, to beat the odds, to rise above their own limitations. They had a trial lawyer as vice-presidential nomninee and a candidate who had spent a lifetime in politics achieving very little, even by the standards of the U.S. Senate. They may have made legitimate points; but they seemed too like the critics of the super-heroes "The Incredibles" rather than their fans.
The truth is: there is a conservative majority in this country not because the religious right is a majority but because the Republicans have also been able to corner the market on the themes of achievement, individualism, energy, action. And they have also won over those who disdain the politics of resentment, whining and permanent criticism. If James Dobson represents one wing of contemporary Republicanism, Arnold Schwarzenegger represents the other. Democrats will never win over the Dobsonites. But they can win over the blueish voters who voted red last time because the pious, do-good, elite whining of Gore and Teresa and Hillary seemd so alien to many Americans' entrepreneurial, anti-p.c. and irreverent popular culture.
There's a reason Schwarzenegger couldn't be a Democrat. And a reason why he's a red-tinted governor of one of the bluest states in the country. If you want to understand why, go to the movies and watch cartoons and puppets. They'll beat focus groups every time.
November 19, 2004, The New Republic. |
