Washington’s pundits have been united this spring. They’ve concluded that a single shift in culture on gay marriage has marooned one of America’s political ideologies from the public majorities of tomorrow.
The pundits are right that one political philosophy is being left behind but wrong about which one. It is liberals, not conservatives, who are chained to an ideology built for yesterday’s culture. The proof of this realignment is not on cable news, but...I have to admit, folks, at this point I was very interested to see what, besides the political events of the day, presaged this conservative ascendancy.
... but on cable television’s hippest drama, “Mad Men,” which this week kicked off its final season to great fanfare.Blink. Blink.
I thought next he was going to say that Mad Men shows the ruinous legacy of the liberal 60s because they made Don suicidal and Betty fat; alternatively, that it shows how great life was when women and black people were oppressed. Those would have made some sense on a juvenile level at least. But... To boil it down for you, the left is old and gross because Obamacare is sooo LBJ and soaked in "the collective emotional DNA of the post-war era," which the kids don't like because it's analog.
LBJ sold that audience national retirement pensions as easily as the age’s Mad Men built national brands of soap and beer. Similarly, the rest of society’s institutions nationalized as well — the American Legion, the Moose Lodge and the Methodist Church saw their ranks explode as the parents of Baby Boomers equated quality with conformity.
Fifty years later, Budweiser now disguises its products as pseudo-craft brands and the Methodist Church is withering in plain sight. The dominant brands of this age are not purveyors of conformed consumption but enablers of individualization — Apple, Google and Facebook.And any fool can see that if you like social media and fake microbrews, you're just naturally gonna be right wing. Haven't you seen Twitchy? Also:
Customers at the decade’s most ubiquitous national food merchant, Starbucks, have developed an entire language to express their half-caf, soy-no-whip, double-shot individual solutions.It's like the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan era, only much cheaper, which is good because since our economy was destroyed in 2008 fancy coffee is about all we can afford.
So why, in the era of individualization, is the American political left still selling top-down mandatory standardization in everything from health insurance to local electricity generation? When nearly every thriving national brand succeeds by empowering Americans to seek and achieve different results, only the Democratic Party is peddling redistribution and a system that on its best day generates only mushy mediocrity.Todd, you will not be surprised to learn, is an ad man, and this ripomatic reminds me of those post-Berlin-Wall corporate ads in which former slaves of Sovietism stepped into the sunlight and had a Coke and a smile. Only that's a bit out of style now. It's harder to convince people you represent the future when your suit is caked with dust from the demolition job you've done on the American Dream and your pockets are stuffed with fraudulent securities. Also, if you want to own "choice" as an equity, maybe identifying yourself with the dying anti-gay cause isn't such a hot idea.
I hope next they try to bring back South Park Conservatism and put Steve Crowder in charge. I could use a laugh.
UPDATE. Slightly edited because, like all the greats, I am constantly fiddling with my own work.
UPDATE 2. In comments, Mr. Wonderful asks:
There's got to be a name for this--this confident extrusion of analysis and prediction that seems so astute until it dawns on you, and your dog, that it is objectively, visibly wrong. Is this what they mean by "post-modernist political commentary"? Where they type something like, "Bernie Sanders, whether he knows it or not, is actually a Republican, because he's a member of the Senate, which is one of our oldest and most traditional public institutions"?PoMoPolComm might work, but being a traditionalist I prefer "bullshit."
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