Got this interesting piece from an old friend (no link, sorry) that details the current plight of the Republican party:

From the American Prospect, a quote from David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who coined “axis of evil”:

Here’s the duel that Obama and Limbaugh are jointly arranging:

On the one side, the president of the United States: soft-spoken and conciliatory, never angry, always invoking the recession and its victims. This president invokes the language of “responsibility,” and in his own life seems to epitomize that ideal: He is physically honed and disciplined, his worst vice an occasional cigarette. He is at the same time an apparently devoted husband and father. Unsurprisingly, women voters trust and admire him.

And for the leader of the Republicans? A man who is aggressive and bombastic, cutting and sarcastic, who dismisses the concerned citizens in network news focus groups as “losers.” With his private plane and his cigars, his history of drug dependency and his personal bulk, not to mention his tangled marital history, Rush is a walking stereotype of self-indulgence – exactly the image that Barack Obama most wants to affix to our philosophy and our party. And we’re cooperating! Those images of crowds of CPACers cheering Rush’s every rancorous word – we’ll be seeing them rebroadcast for a long time.

Rush knows what he is doing. The worse conservatives do, the more important Rush becomes as leader of the ardent remnant. The better conservatives succeed, the more we become a broad national governing coalition, the more Rush will be sidelined.

This war is nothing if cultural. Conservative values have received a rather big gut check these past few years, and when the economy came down due to a lack of transparency (let’s just call it that, for simplicity’s sake) and when the White House was captured by Obama (who in many ways is really the antithesis to what Republicans stand for), that was the final knockout punch. Or at least then the crisis of conservatism became all too real for many of its followers.

You could sense a certain desperation from the conservative camp when John McCain pegged Sarah Palin as his VP candidate. It felt like a last-ditch effort for the road conservatives had been traveling for a while now (social conservatism, christian values, anti-elitism, free markets and tax cuts etc.) After the election, Bill Maher commented on Larry King Live that Sarah Palin was really a crossroads candidate for the Republican party. Now that the election is over, do they follow her, with what Bill called the “folksy, the candidate I’d rather have a beer with, know-nothing” rhetoric, or do they go back to their roots of being pro business, but not necessarily anti-intellectual?

Many who were “for” conservative values before the economic meltdown (or the Iraq war etc.) will and probably have jumped ship, rediscovering themselves as Keynesians (seems almost everybody swears by Keynes nowadays) and whatnot. And I’m not just talking about swing vote behavior, there might be more total transformations of identity for some, and given how easy people assume new identities nowadays through consumption and whatnot, many will not bat an eye over this.

These newly minted liberals are an interesting group to watch, but to me the “remaining” conservatives (both politicians and citizens) are even more interesting to watch. How do people react when much of their core beliefs are now being subject to such scrutiny, or even ridicule? After the election I saw quite a few calls from within the party to reinvent itself and appear more to the center – even make a more distinct break from the Christian right. So far the party has been pulled into opposite directions. The ones who want the party to stay where it is (or where it was going) are the ones who have used the most scathing rhetoric in attacking the centrists, and of course, liberals.

The selection of Michael Steele as the head of the RNC was widely seen as an outreach to minorities and possibly a first move towards the center, even though just putting a minority in such a position might not be that effective unless Steele shows some initiative on changing the party (there’s a black guy in the White House, remember?). By the way, in a rather candid interview with GQ, Steele himself said that the Republican party had trouble attracting minorities, because they give the impression that “we don’t give a damn about them or we just outright don’t like them”. In the interview he also said some things about abortion and homosexuality that got the Christian right up in arms, and he was forced to apologize and retract those comments. As a side note, his critical comments on Limbaugh earlier resulted in an apology, too, showing the anxiety of the party trying to reinvent itself.

Paul Krugman has been hammering the GOP, saying that “I’m shocked by the total intellectual collapse of the Republican Party in the face of this economic crisis. [...] I suggested a little while ago that the GOP has become the party of Beavis and Butthead, reduced to snickering at line items in legislation that sound funny.” It’s kind of like the jocks at the back of the class who used to make jokes during math class, but are now seeing that nobody’s laughing with them anymore, and people are taking math seriously.

Anti-elitism that occasionally spills into outright anti-intellectualism has been a staple of the Republican party (justly or unjustly) pretty much from the times of Ronald Reagan, it appeals to much of their (christian) base. But the current level of anti-intellectualism and populism coming from the GOP does indeed seem almost excessive. My guess is that conservative values being challenged as they are might have this kind of polarizing effect, and I guess you could see some of that in how conservatives are attacking the left now. Like in a heated argument, if you are pushed or feel threatened, you will stick to your talking points even harder – even believing in them more. How long conservatives can keep going on like this, I don’t know. Perhaps at some point Obama’s political honeymoon will be over which will give conservatives a breather, but they have to address the major question of what they are going to stand for if they want to become relevant again.

From a popular culture perspective, it’s going to be interesting to see how conservative values are going to be treated in cultural products or in advertising. My guess is that there might be some imagery not unlike the anti-yuppie stereotypes of early 90s, but also some lighthearted stereotyping of conservatism. Maybe conservatism becomes sort of a guilty pleasure for mainstream America? Maybe self-irony is the way out for conservatism? But this is a topic for another post.

But, as a last note, I leave you with this post by Tyler Cowen where he plays with the idea of a truly marginalized republican party from different angles. The lack of true, formidable opposition could spell doom for Democrats as well.

All three movies had their own respective plots, but all more or less played around with the same idea: work is a drag, and responsibilities are prohibiting you (the American male) from being free and realizing your true self. It’s the old “the mainstream vs. the avant garde” rhetoric that’s been a staple of Hollywood and American culture for decades now. Money and “career” eat at your soul, and only by letting go and embracing freedom, spontaneous whims and creativity can you truly be free – just ask William Whyte and “The Organization Man”.

Beware the Organization Man, for he wears a gray flannel suit and he has no soul.

Naturally, the truth about work life isn’t as dreary as movies would have us to believe, and the avant garde isn’t all it’s cooked up to be (if you can even call it that anymore). But the myth remains.

I’m wondering if we’ll see a decline in how often this myth is featured in American cinema. All three movies I mentioned were given a green light or shot during the end of the economic boom cycle. Life was good, jobs were aplenty and secure. People had the luxury to dream about a better life (and most of all, a better job). But now we’re in a recession and people are more thankful to have a job in the first place. Will Hollywood sense this or keep rolling out films that basically declare that your job stinks? If this recession is going to be as bad as some people speculate it will be, then its impact on contemporary culture should be quite imminent, and Hollywood is usually the first to smell a cultural trend.

I’m definitely keeping my eye on the list of upcoming movies.

“If there is anyone out there who doubts that America is a place where anything is possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.”

Those are the words with which Barack Obama declared himself as the next president of the United States. Truly a historic day and one that will do a lot of good not only for Americans, but the world-at-large. But aside from politics, I have another interest in the subject of Obama’s election.

Grant already touched upon this subject briefly, saying that either candidate winning would have effects on culture and commerce alike. Certainly, given how president-centric the US political structure is made to be, whoever is sitting in the White House will have an enormous influence on people’s daily life and perception of self. It’s my perception that for Americans the “idea” of America has more of an effect on the self than in most countries: the idea of the self-made man, the belief in democracy, America’s manifest destiny as the leader of the free world etc.

All these core American beliefs have been toiling in crisis pretty much from the start of George W. Bush’s presidency – especially for liberal Americans who happen to populate the majority of America’s biggest cities. I believe the Iraq war and John Kerry’s unlikely and crushing defeat in the 2004 election had left many liberals disillusioned and disappointed in America. As Douglas Holt points out in “How Brands Becom Icons”, one of the biggest drivers for consumption of identity products is how people aspire to meet a given culture’s or society’s identity models or “myths”, as Holt puts it. When there’s a disconnect between your own life and what you perceive your immediate culture expecting from you, this is when the tension and anxiety will create the most opportunities for brands and other cultural products (especially movies and music) to soothe these anxieties.

If we go back 30 years, we’ll find one of the most classic examples of a cultural product soothing national anxieties. As George Lucas himself put it: Star Wars was “really about the Vietnam War”. America had lost a big chunk of its belief in itself as the hero of the world after what conspired in Vietnam. In large part this was because this was the first fully televised war, people got to see the brutality of war in its fullness. The nation was badly divided when the war was over (as Obama said, even worse than it is now because of the Iraq war) but Star Wars, while it didn’t totally heal the American spiritual wound left by Vietnam, gave America the permission to believe in heroism and American ideals again. I’m sure the movie would have been a colossal success even without Vietnam, but it would have never found this kind of cultural resonance on its own. Similarly, I think Obama would have found followers and support on his own, but his message and persona hit a cultural key that really resonated. A lot of people say that without the financial crisis Obama wouldn’t have won. I say without the “crisis of democracy” (as Al Gore put it), a transformational figure like Obama wouldn’t have even been in the running.

I have some theories of how consumption and culture was shaped during the Bush years. I for one think that the DYI consumer movement was in part fueled by a sense of distrust and cynicism towards the establishment and any authority – especially by liberals in America. The Bush years have provided academics with a very interesting historical era to mine; not only politically but also culturally and commercially. I’m sure we will be reading about these findings a lot in the near future, but right now I just know that marketers shouldn’t neglect this newly found trust in old American ideals. It will be interesting to see which (big) companies will capture this new zeitgeist first, and which ones will do it best, not by just playing lip service to “change”.