12/31/2004

Stop the madness

Ed Kilgore brings up how Democrats can fight the culture war here. As I mentioned several weeks ago, the war against television should be an easy one for liberals...hell, that's why we're single-handedly keeping PBS in business. Why is it so hard for liberals to speak out on this issue? We support government funding of the arts and like-minded sophisticated culture, so why don't we feel the government has a right to talk about primetime TV? After all, liberal vision was the force behind the fairness doctrine, PBS, and other schemes to make television a tool for enlightenment. For my money, refusal to talk about things like television betrays a grander failure of vision among liberals today. Liberals don't keep quiet about television because they believe criticizing reality TV dreck is like censorship. They do it because television is "too mainstream" an arena for change, and thus seen as a "somewhere down the road" project. And there you have it, the mindset keeping good liberals down. An organizing principle for society that considers some public spheres off-limits is a principle bound for permanent minority status.

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