The Culture War is over, and conservatives have lost. No less an authority on the conservative camp in the Culture War Paul M. Weyrich declared in 1999: "I believe that we probably have lost the culture war. That doesn't mean the war is not going to continue, and that it isn't going to be fought on other fronts. But in terms of society in general, we have lost. This is why, even when we win in politics, our victories fail to translate into the kind of policies we believe are important." If we have won the Culture War, though, why are we in such bad shape?
* Union density peaked in 1953. * The GINI index was at its lowest in 1968. * The real hourly earning peaked in 1973. * The real value of the average AFDC grant peaked in 1977.
That is because our social and cultural victories have been made to serve the economic agenda that is against our class interests.
The Democratic Party successfully harnessed the liberalization of social mores to the political and ideological power of economic neoliberalism during the Bill Clinton years. The best example of the Democratic Party's success in marrying social liberalism and economic neoliberalism is the welfare reform. The partial victory of women's movement made new assumptions dominant: the assumptions that able-bodied women ought to work for wages rather than bear and raise children as the primary duty of women and that mothers and fathers should bear equal financial responsibilities for their children, so fathers should pay child support instead of making mothers depend on the government. The assumptions are not so much feminist assumptions per se as liberal petit-bourgeois feminist assumptions in particular. In any case, the Clinton administration effectively exploited the newly dominant assumptions and abolished AFDC: poor women should work and make the fathers of their children pay and become economically independent of the government (or so went the ideology). . . .
The rest of my posting is at <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004_05_01_montages_archive.html#108354621120591721>. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>