The "Brown-Mondon Thesis" and the Ascent of Kulturkampf

In their study of mainstream media coverage of "populist" movements some years ago the academics Katy Brown and Aurelien Mondon observed the media's tendency to "deflection" as they divert attention from elite instigation, leadership, exploitation to make the movements seem bottom-up expressions of genuine popular feeling; "euphemization" and "trivialization" as they put less threatening labels on or brush off the aspects of the movement's agenda acceptable to the mainstream (e.g. racism), with "populist" itself a key linguistic element in the process; and "amplification" as they make them seem not just more broadly-based but larger and more popular than they really are. (An astroturfed group of extremist far rightists from the fringe? Heavens no, they are a grass-roots movement of ordinary decent citizens, the very salt of the earth, whom the coastal elites have sadly forgotten . . .)

Brown and Mondon's highly empirical analysis was oriented toward the discourse of the moment, which remains our moment. However, one may argue for the tendency being an old one, rooted in aspects of the media's operation that were by no means recent developments at the time (Brown and Mondon acknowledge aspects of the "propaganda model"), with the culture war now so widely taken for granted exemplary of them. It was what was then the far right that declared the "culture war" and insists that the central conflict in contemporary American life is between progressives and traditionalists over matters such as the place of religion in public life, and norms of sexuality and family structure, due to "real" Americans (Euro-American and Christian and especially White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, rural and small town, "heartland"-Southern and Western) finding themselves besieged by a civil rights movement gone "too far," and a counterculture that was ever an obscenity--and being "mad as hell," aren't "going to take it anymore." And it was the media's unquestioning acceptance of the right's narrative that produced the image of a country divided between "Red" and "Blue," rather than seriously countenancing the argument that the culture war was not a product of bottom-up, grass-roots concerns, but rather the What's-the-Matter-with-Kansas?-like manipulation of the electorate by political elites in the now centuries-old way of using "culture" to divert attention from their practical (i.e. economic) concerns, and corral some of those voters behind politicians with otherwise unpalatable political platforms in a massive, longstanding, piece of deflection (from elite agendas to supposed popular concern), trivialization/euphemization (as the media coverage downplayed the frank racism, sexism, etc. of the culture warrior's vision, which undeniably reaches toward a restoration of the past that would put "minorities in their place," or even remove them from the picture, while rolling back the gains by women, etc.) and amplification (as the hardcore "culture warrior" was made to seem much more representative of the American public than they really are)--the more in as those who challenge the strenuously cultivated conventional wisdom about the issue get such short shrift in the press. And then because the proponents of the culture war, with the media's help, succeeded in building it up, the media said they had to spend that much more time covering it, intensifying the attention to the culture war, and culture warriors, yet again.

That particularly prominent aspect of the culture war that has been the campaign against abortion rights is exemplary. The Supreme Court's decision in Roe vs. Wade (1973) that established the unconstitutionality of any denial of abortion rights was actually made by a conservative-dominated Court to virtually no controversy at the time; what was then the far right in the country had to work tirelessly to propagandize the public against the decision to produce an exploitable controversy ; all as in spite of that poll after poll showed that the opposition, if greater than before, remained a minority, a solid majority of Americans consistently supporting the Roe vs. Wade decision and the reproductive rights it protected down to the present. However, one would never guess that from the media coverage of the issue, which as it deflects attention from a history of elite political maneuvering, normalizes what was previously an extreme political position, and amplifies the support for that position, implying, often more than implying, a country for which this was naturally at the top of the agenda ever since the Supreme Court made its decision in a malignedly more "liberal" era, and which has since been intensely (and nearly evenly) divided over it.

As it has gone with the culture war and the battle over abortion rights so prominent in it, so has it gone with economic libertarianism and the alt-right, the Dark Enlightenment and the manosphere, climate denialism and the Great Replacement, the Tea Party and any other right-wing tendency or program one cares to name, in every case an elite role and agenda written out of the story as the media presents what may be marginal and extremist as a bottom-up expression of genuine popular feeling, the true Voice of the People which they naturally, rightly, lavish with respectful attention, abundantly platform, treat with the utmost circumspection as they put on a great show of endeavoring to understand what they do not necessarily agree with--while chastising anyone who would criticize them for it . Indeed, even where what they face is simply too much for them to accept and they do take a more critical stance (and it must be admitted that the blatant ascent of right-wing extremism in the last decade has made it very hard for many media figures to not do so in some degree), there are decided limits to their breach of the platform. Not the least of these is their readiness to accept the premise that the extremism they have a harder time normalizing is the expression of the darkness of disoriented mass man the stuff of so much irrationalist theorizing about "totalitarianism" rather than manufactured above their heads for the sake of recruiting shock troops to serve the much more material imperatives of the rich and powerful that are at the heart of everything the right has done in the past, and does today.