III The Popular Front - Interlude

Interlude

Every revolutionary class mus t wage war on the cultural front.

—LEWIS COREY, THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM (1934)

Lewis Corey, a journalist and radical political theorist who helped ght just such a battle, saw the shape, if not the tone, of
the future. I rst learned about Corey in a history of the United
States’ original cultural front, an alliance of radical workers, artists,
and intellectuals that brie y ourished in the 1930s, guided by Stal-
in’s invisible hand, and then was thought to have disappeared. Or so
held conventional wisdom, u ntil Yale scholar Michael Denning dis-
covered that the cultural politics of those years were an unstable mix
of totalitarian in uence and wild diversity that didn’t dead-end with
the close of the decade. Rather, the cultural front of the 1930s owed
into postwar American li fe in diluted but more widespread form.
The cultural front—the spirit of a more tightly de ned “Popular
Front” of antifascist pol itical parties, sects, and factions —transformed
class politics in America: it gave classes a sense of themselves as
struggling over not just wages but also ideas, aesthetics, rituals, cus-
toms, the imagination of things to come.1
The idea of “classes” disappeared from America following World
War II, absorbed into the great blob of the Cold War. And yet a cul-
tural front survived. The evidence? The so-called culture war fought
to this day between fundamentalism and secularism.


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That American fundamentalism contai ns within it a multitude of
beliefs, impulses, traditions, politics —just a few of which have been
explored here—must lead us to question the other side of the battle.
Secularism, of course, conceives of itself as rational and thus open to
all empirical data. And yet it, too, is subject to the broad brush with
which it’s easiest to paint social conditions. Culture war was a label
created by conservative elites who wanted to demand of the public
the old question of union battles: which side are you on? But the les-
son of elite fundamentalism is that the sides are not just blurry;
they’re interwoven.
The Cold War liberalism that led to American wars and proxy
wars, for example, ran parallel with elite fundamentalism’s sense of
its own divine universalism. The Family’s Worldwide Spiritual Of-
fensive infused America’s global mission—the economic reconstruc-
tion of Western Europe and the militaristic destruction of Southeast
Asia alike—and that imperial project in turn sparked the i magina-
tions of elite fundamentalists, providi ng them with an alternative to
traditional fundamentalist separatism. Domestically, the establish-
ment practice of containing political argument within such narrow
con nes that most Americans could barely conceive of the radical-
isms, left and right, that shape politics throughout the rest of the
world sat comfortably with the desire of elite fundamentalists for a
politics of no politics. The results include elections based on “charac-
ter” rather than ideas, debates as rituals meant to result in reconcili-
ation, the consensus of the powerful represented as a reasonable
pro cess in which everyone gets some small piece of the action. We
call this “comprom ise,” and consider our democ racy healthy.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, it was the Left that recognized
that American democracy was drifting toward empire, and that the
democratic project had never been anywhere near complete to begin
with. Since then, it has been the Right that discerned the cracks in
democracy’s veneer and the hollowness behind it. From that percep-
tion arose the conservative movement that declared culture war. Cul-
ture war as a slogan may be relatively new, but we can easily identify
its antecedents on the San Francisco docks in 1934, or with Jonathan


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Edwards sitting beside Abigail Hutchinson’s bed in Northampton in
1735. In both cases—and now—culture war revolves around an im-
pl icit critique of what Abram called “materialism.”
Edwards saw as his enemy the unwitting banality of the Ameri-
can business society, fools who did not realize that they dangled over
an abyss. Harry Bridges and the men and women whom he fought
beside in San Francisco were all too aware of the abyss; they saw as
their enemy the economic system that held them precariously
suspended above it. The populist fundamentalism that in the late
1970s marched into the public square railed against the same familiar
enemy, but now de ned entirely as secularism. What does secularism
do, according to this fundamentalist front? It cheapens life, it sells
sex, it puts a price tag on the human soul. It makes people into com-
modities. And who will oppose this godless deviltry? “Followers of
Christ,” a term that requires quotes to distinguish it from the much
broader category of those who believe in or are born into one of the
many Christian traditions no longer considered valid by the new fun-
damentalists. Followers of Christ—those who cleave to a unique
American fundamentalism—de ne themselves more sharply. They
are a class, a revolutionary one, no less, dedicated, in theory at least,
to the transformation of American life and thus the world.
But they’re vague on the details. They’d like to abolish abortion,
and they’d l ike to pray in school and do away with pornography, and
drive queer people back into the closet (or “cure” them, say the opti-
mists among them). And then what? What about hunger, poverty,
the greed and bl indness that drives global warming? All important
concerns, concede American fundamentalism’s elites and populist
champions. Would the steps they’ve proposed bri ng an end to the
com modi cation of bodies, the pricing of souls, a culture in which
dollars pass for ideas? Hardly. But the believers, the fundamentalists,
those who would reshape society along lines of their idea of Christ’s
order, have no further solutions. They are a cultural front without a
politics. Where once there was a critique of what some might call
godlessness and others might call capitalism, there is a vacuum. And
in that empty space, the status quo remains unthreatened. Secular


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democracy, such as it is, faces no serious challenge. Nor, for that
matter, does the elite fundamentalism that for the last seventy years
has coexisted alongside it, ensuring that the United States was never
ful ly secular, nor democratic.
The story so far has been about how elite fu ndamentalism has
shaped domestic and foreign politics, how a theocratic strand ran
through the “American century” and remains taut in the new one.
Now the story turns inward, into the lives of ordinary Americans,
toward the cultural front of fundamentalism. It’s this cultural front,
converging with the political project of elite fundamentalism, that
justi es the label of “Popular Front.” In the United States in the
twenty- rst century, the Popular Front is that of fundamentalism,
the faith that prom ises that you can be born again, that m iracles still
occur, that we might yet revive the nation. This Popular Front will
no more rebuild the economic and structural foundations of America
or its soft empire than did that of the 1930s, but it has already trans-
formed the way we think, the way we live, the way we feel, the way
we know ourselves and the world.
Culture war, then, is a misleading term for such a metamorphosis.
What the elite and populist movements of American fundamentalism
have together wrought is not a culture war but a cultural evolution,
one that is adapti ng to the twenty- rst century much faster than
secularism. This religion isn’t an opiate of the masses; it’s the Ameri-
can Christ on methamphetam ine.