Culture
The cultural Kryptonite of the American Right ...

Looking back at the cultural climate of the 80s can help us explain American behaviour today.

This opinion piece on Al Jazeera English should be an alert to anyone not a part of the US Republican Right, and while it seems to be based on fairly solid factual history, it is also quite disturbing.

As I read this piece I am reminded of some of the polling data about the global knowledge of the average American ... which makes a nonsense of the idea that the purpose of a representative government is to reflect this electorate in the decision making councils of the Congress. This is not a comfortable idea at all!

I marvel that President Obama got elected, and trust that he understands the nature of all the conflicting priorities that he must weigh.

National security must be achieved as much by winning friends as by defeating enemies. I think I was in my early teens when I learned about a Phyrric victory, and almost all warfare tends to that end. Making friendship contagious seems to be a better policy, and President Obama seems to appreciate more than most that things that we agree on are many even while there are some things where there remains disagreement.

Unlike many in the general public and the political establishment, President Obama does not see a world where there is America, and then the rest of the world. He sees a world that has immense diversity, but with many common human aspirations.

Where I might fault President Obama is in his expectation that his political opposition in the USA is more interested in right for the nation than merely right for their partisan goals ... notably removing President Obama from office at the next election.

And I also fault the supporters of President Obama for not understanding this threat both to the Obama Presidency and to the nation. This is important to the nation in that President Obama has done much to repair international damage done by the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld troika, but a lot still has to be done. Many ordinary people around the world who were friends of America understood the Bush response the terrorism of 9/11 and the search for Al Quaeda in Afghanistan, but could not understand the attack on Iraq ... and subsequently could not understand how President Bush got re-elected by the American people.

President Obama has changed things as fast as it is possible to change things under the American system of government. His record now has some interesting elements which his political opposition ignores. Some observations made by Bloomberg News include the factoid that the New York stock market has had the best run up for the two years under Obama than any time since 1955 ... the corporate profit improvement picture in 2010 is as good as at any time since 1948 ... while the loss of jobs, profits and stock market value under President Bush was the worst since the 1930s. As regards responsible governance, the US Federal Budget has done better under the Democrats than the Republicans during the last 30 years ... Reagan ran deficits and so did Bush I ... then Clinton got the deficit into a favorable position ... and Bush II took it back to record deficits together with a crashing economy. Obama is having to live with big Federal deficits, but the underlying corporate economy is a lot healthier ... including the US auto industry that President Obama insisted should get government assistance to avoid its total collapse, and now is recovering very well. While government helped stabilize the corporate economy, the corporate community has done little to build back employment ... and worse keeps arguing for policies that constrain public expenditure even for critical investment in education, future technology and infrastructure. Recent news from the corporate world suggests that US corporate tax payments are tiny, simply through use of a myriad of loopholes in the tax legislation, many, I would suspect, initiated by lobbyists on the corporate payroll! SHAME!

Al Jazeera English - Opinion

The cultural Kryptonite of the American Right

Looking back at the cultural climate of the 80s can help us explain American behaviour today.

1980s pop culture indoctrinated a cabal of youth that are growing up using Hollywood as a template [GALLO/GETTY]

Before US Tomahawk cruise missiles began to rain down on Muammar Gaddafi's air defences this past week, the only conversation that president Obama had to have was with his senior advisors.

They, and they alone would decide whether a country founded as a democratic republic would engage in what George Washington would have likely viewed as a 'foreign entanglement' – using 21st century ordinance against a sociopath with a history of violence and a worse hat fetish than Sammy Davis Jr.

Obviously, in 200 years the United States has evolved from a rebel-with-a-cause into a world power, and additional involvement in world affairs has become part of the cost of doing business.

There is also a good argument to be made that after the terrible mistake of the Iraq invasion, the US can do some good by putting an end to the murderous Gaddafi in Libya, as part of an international coalition made up of Arab and African countries, blessed by the United Nations.

Yet, that does not change the fact that congressional support for this operation was as important as an appendix or a Newt Gingrich marriage vow.

Obama and his people simply knew they could ignore the people's representatives and safely rely upon a militarised culture primed to support an attack on an Arab nation. Particularly one the US had already thrown down with only a generation ago.

It is this fact that makes author, syndicated columnist and talk radio host David Sirota's new book, Back To Our Future, not only a fascinating read about the culture of the 1980s, but a manifestly important work in helping explain why the United States does the things it does today.

From involvement in a civil war in Libya to allowing a madman sans background check to saunter into his local arms bazaar and purchase a high-powered firearm for an attempted assassination of a congresswoman.

The latter being easier than say, finding plutonium for your DeLorean in 1955.

'Outlaw with morals'

These 'political messages in non-political settings indoctrinated the young, when their filter for political propaganda was turned off.' As a result, these framed narratives became part of the conventional wisdom, continuing to this day.

In much the way E.T. heightened suspicions about our government, Lybian terrorists in Back To The Future and a bad-guy professional wrestling star named The Iron Sheikh helped prepare the American people for the role we've played in the Arab world over the past decade.

Meanwhile, the 'outlaw with morals', or rogue who had to work against the system to get things done, was a key message that reached the masses.

The bromide of 'government being the problem, not the solution', was not only contained in Reagan's philosophy, but Wall Street's ethic, the frontier mythology of many regions of the country, and films, music, and television series, but perhaps most importantly promoted using athletes by one of the most powerful marketing machines ever seen – Nike.

As Sirota offers about Nike's effect, 'they took this narrative to the level of societal saturation'.

This can at least partially explain the rogue individualism that can be found in the love affair certain Americans have with guns, and even more importantly, the corollary that only they can protect themselves, often from the very government they once looked upon for this service.

Of course, this cultural sea change did not just happen by itself. An array of right-wing think tanks and media organisations, born in the 1970s to lead this kind of a cultural revolution, synergistically grabbed this societal zeitgeist and hopped, skipped and jumped with it, declaring the 1960s and 1970s an illegitimate, naïve, or even dangerous social experiment.

As Sirota reminds us, in the 1980s a minister speaking at The Heritage Foundation, one of these newish (1973) and lavishly funded right-wing media and policy operations intricately tied to the Reagan administration, believed he and his ilk, were 'here to turn the clock back to 1954 in this country'.

'Prepubescents' in charge

As he sees it, appealing to the psyche and vision of the American people or pulling on their heartstrings, if you will, is in short supply on the Left, as 'Democrats do not use imagination and culture to open minds for their agenda'.

As Goldberg put it in a Nation piece, 'you can count how many people click onto a web page, how long it was viewed and how many people it was forwarded to but determining how much impact it has on the minds of the readers requires educated guesses and fallible intuitive human analysis.'

The Left had better begin to under this outsized role of culture, imagination and emotion in our politics soon.

Because if we are indeed operating in parameters set up by not only the politics, but the arts and letters of 1980s, reinforced by millions of dollars invested in long-term conservative projects to convince the American people this is the way it has always been, we are in for a rough decade or three.

For as Sirota says, 'our world is increasingly run by the prepubescents, college kids, and young ladder-climbers who were originally indoctrinated and inculcated in the 1980s.'

Therefore, if we are looking for an alternative to all-too-present strains of foreign adventurism, Wall Street me-ism and domestic militia-ism – among other challenges – we will need our own cultural rebirth to return to the values that once animated this nation.

Because, whether he comes from Krypton, Kansas City or Kazakhstan, I am not ready to start kneeling before Zod anytime soon.

Cliff Schecter is the President of Libertas, LLC, a progressive public relations firm, the author of the 2008 bestseller The Real McCain, and a regular contributor to The Huffington Post.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.