English to Russian Art/Literary Poetry & Literature contextual phrase

Both sides will make sure America’s culture wars continue

The culture wars that so enlivened the 1980s and 1990s in America are said to be over. The savage fights that raged full-scale as recently as two years ago over gay rights, gun control, environmental protection and general permissiveness, and that culminated in the Antietam of culture battles, Bill Clinton’s impeachment and trial, seem to have just petered out.
Pundits say the combatants, exhausted from all the verbal shelling, have accepted compromise rather than press on for total victory, and this has led to a new spirit of accommodation. One observer writes that the “crackle of cultural gunfire is now increasingly distant.”
It makes you wonder what country they’re living in.
If Americans don’t hear the crackle, it might be because the bombs detonating overhead drown it out. If Americans look around they will see that abortion, gun control, environmental protection, gay rights and, lately, campaign finance reform are still hot-button issues, and neither side seems especially willing to lay down arms. If anything, they seem emboldened after an election that showed the citizenry to be evenly divided. No one wants to give ground for fear that the tide of battle will turn. But while the political war over social issues rages on, what these observers might have really sensed is an increasing tolerance in the popular culture for things once considered unacceptably outside the mainstream . Just a decade ago, there were no gays in television situation comedies. Now NBC’s “Will Grace”, one of the most popular sitcoms, celebrates gay characters, and no one seems particularly lathered about it.
A decade ago, television commercials barely hinted at sex, lest they offend potential consumers. Now they hurl sexual innuendo, and no one bats an eye.
More than a decade ago, Madonna scandalized polite society with the suggestion that a new romance made her feel like a virgin. Now radio plays the most sexually explicit music, and no one notices. One might be excused for assuming, then, that there has been a truce and that a new era of cultural coexistence has dawned. But in truth this is hardly a new state of affairs. The popular culture has always been more tolerant than the political culture, and the tension between the two has accounted, in part, for the launching of the culture wars. Although it is a chicken-and-egg question, cultural conservatives raise a taboo and purveyors of popular culture violate it. Then the conservatives rail against the violation, and the purveyors of popular culture rise to the challenge and push the envelope. Then the conservatives howl over the latest transgression, and the popular culture transgresses once again. And so it goes. It is a dynamic and continuous process, a symbiosis not only between the so-called conservatives and liberals, but also between both of these cohorts and society generally. Without it the culture would be directionless, which is not only why culture wars will continue, but also why America need them to continue. How dull the culture would be without them. Conservatives might be ascendant in politics, setting the agenda since at least the days of Ronald Reagan, but they are always the beleaguered ones in the war over the popular culture.
That discrepancy between political power and cultural power is something to which they have never quite been able to reconcile themselves. Militant conservatives simply cannot fathom how one vote Republican, profess to embrace conservative values and yet buy Eminem CDs or watch NBC’s “The West Wing” or go see R-rated movies. To them it is both inconsistent and a betrayal.
The barrier, as they see it, isn’t between politics and culture, but between conservative values and liberal values. They won the political war, so how come their troops aren’t carrying the cultural one, too? Much to their dismay, the answer is that there are two different sets of armies in these two theaters of combat. In the political theater you have the familiar forces of liberalism and conservatism. In the cultural one, you have a variegated group of pop culture consumers including political right-wingers on the one side, and a bellicose band of religious and moral conservatives on the other. The conservative commentator David Brooks argues in “Bobos in Paradise” that the old bourgeoisie and the old bohemians have in the last generation morphed into what he calls “Bobos” – bourgeois bohemians. The longhaired, tie-dye-shirted, sandal-shod free spirit is now in the corporate boardroom, and the things that seemed to divide the counterculture from the business culture have largely disappeared as a result.
These Bobos are obviously far less inclined than their Rotarian predecessors to fight the prudish battles against popular culture. They are products of that culture, and they like it.
Despite their heated rhetoric and noise, cultural conservatives just don’t have the numbers.
When the culture wars began in America 150 years ago, it was because elites and aristocrats, a tiny faction, feared and detested the rise of a genuinely democratic culture of almanacs, crime pamphlets, dime novels , penny newspapers, theatrical melodramas, popular music, circuses. As the elites saw it, this new culture, appealing to the masses, threatened the country by degrading its standards and morals. It was a culture of the proverbial lowest common denominator. As the 19th century progressed, the elites gradually gave way to middle-class moralists and reformers, but the moralists’ arguments were essentially the same as the aristocrats’. Popular culture undermined American values. It promoted sex, violence, vulgarity and disrespect for authority.
That was the argument when cultural conservatives were attacking saloon shows at the end of the 19th century, silent films, including the films of Charlie Chaplin, early in the 20th century, and sexual comedies in the 1920s and gangster pictures in the 1930s. It is still the argument when they attack movie blockbusters, cutting-edge television programs and rock CDs.
In professing to save America from the toxin of popular culture, conservatives were also saving themselves. Popular culture promoted the sort of values that further marginalized the critics and made them seem even more old-fashioned and irrelevant. It is a war they cannot afford to lose, so they have to keep soldiering on no matter how inexorably the popular culture seems to advance. They don’t seem to realize that this culture might not be a form of cultural illiteracy. It might be a form of rebellion for people who deliberately choose what is likely to infuriate cultural commissars intent on telling them what is good for them.
Since the days of Andrew Jackson, people embraced the “trashy” in direct proportion to the critics’ hatred of it, thus asserting their cultural independence and power. It is one of the reasons the popular culture often goes to extremes. At the extremes lies the greatest irritation value.
The culture wars might ebb and flow, but they will never end. Conservatives cannot concede defeat , because to do so would end the hope of their worldview ever prevailing.
And consumers of popular culture need that opposition to give themselves a target, a boundary to transgress. Without conservatives to excoriate it, the popular culture would lose its subversive subtext and the sneaky thrill of violation that fuels it.