The cultural strategy of the Reaganite Right was prepared as early as 1976 by Daniel Bell in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Blame the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s - rebellious students, civil rights agitators, wild-eyed feminists - for the grievous decline in public morality, cultural literacy, educational standards and everything else that has gone to hell: blame them and not, say, the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The Culture Wars proper - the assault on multicultural education and identity politics, on feminist gains and gay rights - followed in the 1980s; and as they raged on into the 1990s, it made tactical sense for the Right to train some guns on liberal campuses, for where else (besides Hollywood) were those damn subversives so concentrated now?

LRB 8 May 2003 | PDF Download