Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [100]
Obviously, the progressive metanarrative did not appeal to those who were depicted as the racists, misogynists, and religious fundamentalists, even as they internalized its celebration of tolerance and equality. The Cold War metanarrative was much more their style. So when the great conflict between communism and capitalism began to slip into irrelevance, and the progressive enlightenment metanarrative continued to spread, Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell, and other leaders of the Christian right sought to supplant it with a new metanarrative that was tailored to their own political interests. The new story portrayed a domestic conflict that pitted secular humanists and gay militants against traditional Christians.
Soon enough, right-wing racists and xenophobes like Pat Buchanan adapted the religious right’s new metanarrative to their own needs by adding reverse discrimination and illegal immigration to the story. It was Buchanan who named the metanarrative “Culture War” in his 1992 convention speech. He explicitly compared the Culture War to the Cold War, the right wing’s previous metanarrative of choice.
The Culture War metanarrative continued to quietly blossom through the 1990s, but its progress slowed after 9/11 when President Bush ushered in a competing metanarrative: the War on Terror. Bush’s story about Islamic terrorists and the Axis of Evil versus freedom-loving America was popular for a time, but without a constant supply of fresh terror, it began to falter.
Thus, the Culture War came roaring back in 2004 with Bill O’Reilly leading the charge. O’Reilly embellished the story by anointing George Soros the undeclared premier of the secular-progressive conspiracy. With an audience of millions, O’Reilly helped transform the metanarrative from a fringe gospel to a staple of the right—just in time for the election of the nation’s first black president and the Fox News debut of Glenn Beck.
Following Obama’s election, Beck deftly combined the new story of white Christian persecution with scary elements of the old Cold War metanarrative, including secret revolutionary cells and the slippery slope to totalitarianism. In the process, he stripped the progressive enemy of any actual political agenda. Health care, fiscal stimulus, and environmentalism became mere fronts for the conspiracy’s true objective—unfettered power. Thus, Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth is just a scare tactic to enable the UN to seize control. Thus, Van Jones isn’t interested in environmental policy; he wants to change the whole system. Thus, communism and fascism become interchangeable. The doctrine is irrelevant; the progressives’ true objective is simply power. As Beck told O’Reilly, “They want to control every aspect of your life.”13
Without any ideology or policy agenda, the bad guys of Beck’s stories aren’t really political figures at all. They resemble the villains of fantasy fiction: epitomes of evil like Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter, and the original bad guy of the Western world, Satan. These bogeymen seek power for power’s sake and evil for evil’s sake. In Beck’s hands, the Culture War metanarrative has become more of an epic fantasy than ever before. As anthropologist George Marcus wrote:
The plausibility of the paranoid style is not so much in its reasonableness, but rather in its revitalization