Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [68]
Day after day, white Southerners looked at the television and what did they see? They saw a kind of morality play in which there were the heroic, the civil rights activists, and these horrific bestial, violent white Southerners. And now you have George Wallace, standing up, standing up for America, he says, but really standing up for white Southerners.13
But Wallace did more than stand up for white Southerners. He gave them a new mythology that would enable them to deny their bigotry and assume the mantle of the aggrieved victim. As they absorbed America’s evolving values of tolerance, Wallace’s rationalization gave them the key to escape the cognitive dissonance between racist beliefs and the ideals of tolerance and equality.
This pattern repeated itself in less severe ways across the cultural spectrum. Feminists challenged male chauvinism. Gay rights activists challenged homophobia. Religious reformers, including religious humanists, challenged dogmatism. In every case, cultural conservatives were cast as intransigents, bigots, chauvinists, and prudes. They became a society of Archie Bunkers, scorned and ridiculed. In What’s the Matter with Kansas? Thomas Frank neatly described modern culture’s contempt for what O’Reilly would call traditionalists:
The “Middle Americans,” after all, are the people the ads and the sitcoms and the movies warn us against. They are the prudish preacher who forbids dancing, the dullard husband who foolishly consumes Brand X, the racist dad who beats his kids, the square cowboy who is gunned down by the alternative cowboy, the stifling family life we are supposed to want to escape, the hardhat who just doesn’t get it.14
In Frank’s view, the media’s scorn provoked working-class resentment, which fed the backlash against “liberal elites.” But this suggestion buys into the persecution myth that Hollywood is culturally distinct from Kansas. Middle Americans don’t live in a foreign country. They are capable of enjoying Seinfeld and Frasier, just as those elitists on the coasts are capable of appreciating Married with Children and Roseanne. Notwithstanding Pat Buchanan’s fear that the nation’s “ethnocultural core” has begun to dissolve, we can rest assured that American culture still drives through Kansas en route from California to New York. If anything, the growth of media and rapid transit has made American culture more cohesive than it was in the 1950s.
Similarly, the social upheavals of the 1960s were not confined to the coasts, leaving the rest of the country in some kind of permanent stasis. If a New Yorker and a Birminghamian had been simultaneously cryogenically frozen in 1959 and thawed out in 2010, I’d wager that the Birminghamian would be more shocked by the transformation of his hometown. The biggest cultural shift of the 1960s was not the length of men’s hair or the availability of cannabis. It was the nationwide embrace of two ideals that had been present since America’s founding but long diminished and constrained: tolerance and equality. These two ideals drove the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, religious pluralism, and nearly everything that the nation has fought over since 1964.
While today’s conservatives may reject what they view as the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, few would reject the ideals of tolerance and equality that underlie them. These ideals have become fully embedded in America’s “ethnocultural core,” and conservatives, like virtually every other American, have fully internalized them. For bigots like Jerry Falwell and George Wallace, the process of assimilation must have been wrenching. Within the span of a few years, American society had come to revile racists’ deeply held beliefs. More important, insofar as the racists internalized the new ideals, they likely began to revile their own beliefs, producing cognitive dissonance.
The rationalizations of persecution paranoia reduced that dissonance and thus gave the bigots back their virtue. As imaginary victims of intolerance,