How the Right Has Turned Everything Into a Culture War -- And Why That's Terrible for Our Democracy

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http://www.alternet.org/news/154339/how_the_right_has_turned_everything_into_a_culture_war_--_and_why_that%27s_terrible_for_our_democracy/

The political press takes it as a given that there is a sharp dividing line between the “social issues” propelling the culture wars (abortion, school prayer, gay rights) and matters of substance (the economy, foreign policy, immigration and safety-net programs like unemployment benefits). But as the American conservative movement has veered sharply rightward over the past 30 years, that line is no longer so clean. Today, conservatives have a social argument for every subject of debate – everything has become part of the culture wars.

Viewing tangible matters through a cultural lens is not new. In the 19th century, dime novelist Horatio Alger wrote a series of formulaic books about poor, young, street urchins meeting some wealthy benefactor who teaches them the value of hard work and living a clean life. Once the urchins get on a properly Protestant, chaste path, their fortunes grow and they end up rising to the middle-class. It's a narrative that resonates with the right today.

But the intermingling of social and concrete issues has accelerated in the age of Obama. Many on the right consider Barack Obama alien – consider birtherism, or Dinesh D'Souza's claim that the president is influenced by “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior.” Whereas social issues once served as a distraction from matters of substance, today cultural narratives dominate conservatives' arguments.

This is not just a matter of academic interest. It's helping to fuel the growing reality-gap between conservatives and liberals – and not just because we continue to see these issues as matters of substantive policy while increasingly they see them as cultural. It's also because people tend to be more defensive about social issues, and less likely to be open to counter-arguments or new information.

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1. Nope. That's NOT what Horatio Alger books say.

Hard work has little to do with it except for conveying subservience. The urchins are RESCUED BY THE RICH, who make it perfectly clear that without that rescue they have no chance of escape from the streets. It's never their own work so much as it is sucking up to the boss (and having the right genetics). AND, success does NOT consist of joining the ranks of the wealthy, who are far beyond aspiring to. Success consists of middle-class respectability - i.e. having a "job" that governs your morality.

I'm not surprised the American right has romanticized this story. It tells, not very far beneath the surface, the story they really believe - that the rich are gods, and convey all boons and blessings, but only to the deserving. And the "deserving" risk their lives to suck up to the rich on a regular basis.

Ragged Dick is at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cinder/ragged.htm and I quote

His physiognomy is noted: he is a good-looking boy that appears aristocratic with a frank and open face.

can you say "white"? I sincerely doubt he looked like a Zulu king.

there are several sequences in which Dick is falsely accused of thievery; because of his wit and natural likeability, he is always cleared.

Yeah, that works all the time for poor criminals.

a former customer, Mr. Greyson, invites the boys to his house for dinner, at which Dick's natural likeability attracts Greyson's daughter, the nine-year old Ida.

Dick is 14 or 15, and he's got a 9-year-old after him. Cool.

the two boys, while on the search for better-paying and more respectable jobs, take a trip on the ferry to Brooklyn by. En route, a young boy falls into the river, and the father swears great rewards to the rescuer. Dick, an excellent swimmer, dives off the ferry and saves the boy. The father turns out to be James Rockwell, a wealthy industrialist and patron, who rewards Dick by giving him a well-paying job as a clerk at his office.

And Horatio Alger's INTEREST in young boys? Wikipedia sez:

Alger had been serving as a Unitarian minister in Brewster, Massachusetts for about a year and a half when a church committee charged him with pederasty. He denied nothing, said that he had been imprudent, and quit, vowing never to accept another ministerial post. Church officials were satisfied and no further action was taken