“This is the issue of this election [1964]: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
—Ronald Reagan
“Maybe I’m a prehistoric monster by being an individual. It’s highly likely. All I offer to others is their own individuality. Grab it!”
—Johnny “Rotten” Lydon of the Sex Pistols
“That myth [that punks are Leftists] got knocked down for me when I learned that Johnny Ramone was a hard-core Republican.”
—Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam
It’s all happened so quickly, really. In 1964, Barry Goldwater lost the presidential election but won the heart of the Republican Party, turning it decisively in the ostensibly market-oriented yet traditionalist direction we know and love, leading to Reagan, Gingrich, and the familiar think-tanks. Yet 1964 also saw the initial collaboration between Lou Reed and John Cale that would lead to the formation of the Velvet Underground, arguably the first alternative rock band and thus the precursor to punk—to take just one relatively arbitrary example of an American counterculture movement.
One of these two forces, conservatism, is routinely vilified by the media and by youth (conservative campaigners may take short-term solace in the thought that the young don’t vote in large numbers, but the young will one day be old, and their youthful allegiances, such as enthusiasm for Obama, will not be entirely forgotten). The other force, punk, is a media darling, respected by highbrow critics and multiple generations of young fans alike. That’s not surprising, given its viscerally appealing attitude of rebellion, flashiness, and anarchy.
One of the stupidest recurring mistakes conservatives can make—in a world where the media inevitably shape discourse, in a country founded on freedom and rebellion, and in a world where the cultural battle for the future takes place in the mind of youth—is to accept the mantle of the fuddy-duddies and let the country’s free spirits, creative types, young people, and individualists go running to the other camp, where they’ll end up, in a tragic non sequitur, aiding and abetting stifling collectivist bureaucracies like the Environmental Protection Agency and money-wasting institutions like the Department of Transportation, not participating in some imagined eternal rock concert of joy and liberation.
In suggesting that the Right try sounding more free-spirited and anarchic, though, am I just advising conservatives to graft foreign components onto their philosophy to win new support, like a triangulating politician who decides, after checking opinion surveys from his district, to be conservative except on agriculture subsidies? Not at all. Take my own childhood as an example of how the conservative and punk sensibilities naturally complement each other.
Before an adult life as a New York City media guy, I grew up nerdy and suburban in New England in the final years of the Cold War. I was no ingrate—I recognized, as most Americans do, that we have things pretty good here, and I admired President Reagan for having said so unapologetically and for chastising the Soviets for their failure to learn from our example. And the problem with the Soviets, lest we forget, was not that they lacked religion (subsequent foes have been a reminder that religious people can still be totalitarians) or merely that they had missiles aimed at us (that was a symptom of the conflict, not the source). The problem was that they ruthlessly stifled individual freedom and capitalism.
Our domestic intellectuals—Left or Right—could sneer at pop culture and consumer culture all they liked, but even as a teen I knew enough about history and the state of the rest of the world to know that New Wave albums and local shopping malls were things to be treasured. When Reagan talked about defending America, these things were precisely what I wanted to see defended. They were not just decadent exceptions to a more truly-American social fabric made up solely of farms and churches.
One of the nice things about youthful naïveté (unconservative though any praise of ignorant youth risks being) is that because of not knowing which components of the culture are “supposed” to fit together politically, you might just happen upon a combination that makes more sense than the usual party line.
Take, for example, the assumption that punks are outcasts, lowlifes of a sort. This was hardly my impression back in high school, when the slickest things on TV were punk-influenced videos, and the artiest kids in school—the ones dominating the literary journal and the theater club—were a pantheon of New Wave girls who seemed like an elite, not a gang: from Mary-Alice, the artist with intense red hair buzz cut on the sides and big and wavy on top, to Emma, the short and pale but adorable Australian (an immigrant!) who dressed like a Victorian and had dyed-white hair—not to mention Lisa, the half-Asian Goth chick. They weren’t subverting our school so much as running it, and I don’t think the Soviets would have liked them one bit. Well, screw the Soviets—and anybody who thinks it’s Leftist control freaks like them that make people like our little New Wave elite possible.
Now, some might complain that by embracing New Wave, which was punk made palatable, danceable, and sellable for safe suburban teens, I am simply contributing to bourgeois society’s tendency to absorb and water down radical subcultures. Good! What greater testament could there be to the value of bourgeois culture than that it has the capacity to learn from and incorporate the best aspects of radical subcultures without losing its fundamental stability?
And make no mistake: America generates radical subcultures. What are we “conserving” here, after all? A nation of play-it-safe sticks in the mud? Hardly.
Conservatives, myself included, are often drawn to imagery and a tone conveying order and discipline—respectability and reverence—but we too often overlook the tumultuous real history of the nation we are attempting to defend and speak for:
This is a nation in which, during the Revolutionary period we rightly revere, ad hoc groups of rioting (and frequently drunk) citizens in a given locale, such as the Sons of Liberty, would spontaneously declare themselves a legislature, “mobbing” representatives of the existing colonial governments—and even post-Revolution governments—into abandoning enforcement of prior laws.
This is a nation in which, until the late nineteenth century, virtually every white male was a freeholder of independent property and, in effect, a self-employed man (a farmer, normally), as repulsed by the idea of becoming an employee as by the idea of taking orders from kings and politicians. (Much that conservatives defend as traditional is quite newfangled, from the corporation to the nuclear family—not that I am thus condemning these things, merely suggesting that we look deeper to see what really endures and what we’re really conserving, while at the same time accepting the potential for mind-bogglingly vast changes and upheavals.)
This is the nation so opposed to government interference that anti-draft riots burned down significant portions of New York City during the Civil War—not far from where Reed and Cale would live together a hundred years later on the Lower East Side.
Damn it, it’s the nation that invented cowboys and the frontier.
This is a nation that—without any help from government—invented jazz, flappers, beatniks, bikers, rock ‘n’ roll, the anarchic punk movement, and now the roiling and spontaneously communal realm of social networking.
This is a nation that may even now be rediscovering its roots in “Tea Party” antigovernment activism, tapping into the revolutionary imagery and rhetoric that I’ve long hoped might one day remind even my fellow New Englanders that they were not always servile before government.
Keep in mind that al Qaeda hates it all, from the hippies to the evangelical Christians to the Hollywood starlets—and there is a sense in which they’re being more consistent in their analysis than we are. They have not, to my knowledge, expressed much hatred for Medicare or the Department of the Interior. Nor should they. These are not individualist institutions that threaten to spread, as American pop culture has, around the world—boosting rebellious impulses, from the rock-influenced “Velvet Revolution” that helped fell European Communism to the covert rock concerts of twenty-first-century Iran and Cuba.
I am not suggesting that conservatism should become less conservative. On the contrary, I am suggesting it more enthusiastically embrace the nation it already defends. You want to sell conservatism to youth, not just here but around the world? Don’t just sell them peace and security, sell them adventure and risk, of which America once offered plenty.
As National Review’s Helen Rittelmeyer urges me to remember, punk is not just individual freedom and easygoing fun but also a toughness that comes from accepting consequences. She relates the third-hand anecdote of a punk who was elbowed in the face at his first concert and then picked up by a concerned stranger—who did not say “Maybe you can sue even though you knew what you were getting into” but rather “You okay? You able to walk? Good, then get back in the pit and punch somebody.”
Maybe conservatives can eke out a few razor-thin electoral victories now and then by, say, co-opting the Dems’ love of Medicare or by sounding tougher on a given military issue. But if they really want to win the larger culture war, they need to make the case that an entire forgotten strand of this country’s DNA makes us freedom-loving first and foremost—and regulatory not at all. Kids already know instinctively that they can socially organize more efficiently with electronic media, such as Facebook, than by appealing to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant or by petitioning a Congress member to form a committee. Why not reposition ourselves as the philosophy that speaks to their market-like intuitions and socially organic institutions?
When Michale Graves, the lead singer of the seminal punk band the Misfits, spoke to a gathering of the New York Young Republicans shortly before Bush’s reelection (inspiring me to recruit Graves later for one of the monthly debates at Lolita Bar I host on the Lower East Side), he made the point that America producing a band like the Misfits and a flamboyant singer like him would not seem at all incongruous to the rest of the world, including the many immigrants eager to become part of the United States. This kind of creativity, freedom, and borderline insanity is precisely what the world expects of us—and is the reason that substantial portions of the world’s young, in particular, still love us, despite the best efforts of socialist intellectuals and fundamentalist cretins. You don’t see people who want the freedom to form and enjoy punk bands flocking to Riyadh or Tehran to do it—save to subvert those places from within.
And heretical as it would sound to most punks, it is not just our freedom that makes them possible but also our prosperity and relative comfort. Suburban 1980s youth listening to New Wave songs—essentially punk made palatable by fusion with disco—were exhilarated by themes of alienation and despair even while continuing to get decent grades and reluctantly mow the lawn. Call it hypocrisy, if you like, but it’s not such an unhealthy balance.
Freaky-sounding music or odd clothing are not what conservatives who understand America should be fighting. The taxes and regulations that leave us with fewer such wild and unpredictable choices are the real enemy, and they are formidable, requiring our undivided opposition—requiring, indeed, an upsurge of political fusionism in which Americans of all stripes realize how alien these socialist institutions are in a nation built by freaks and mavericks.
I have thus far addressed conservatives, urging them to think a bit more like punks—but I should also address punks, if any are reading this, and urge them, if they have the courage, to think just a bit more like Republicans. You probably think of yourself as a skeptic, perhaps an “iconoclast” —maybe even something of an anarchist. Traditionally, this attitude among punks has meant opposition to consumer culture and advertising. But how well would big government hold up under even a moment of Nietzschean doubt?
If TV is lying to you with its advertisements, what on earth is the government doing when it promises to end poverty or racism? A truly skeptical member of the counterculture should be embarrassed to support politicians who say they can spend our money more effectively than we can—or make us freer with their Byzantine regulations. Surely one can be a punk without thinking that socialist planning would be more liberating than much-maligned suburbia—or that people are made better able to function as fearless individuals by campus speech codes, which were largely fashioned by Leftists (such as the ones I encountered at Brown University, in between living in suburbia and living in Manhattan).
Take a moment away from hating conservatives to remember another of your historic foes: the hippies. Not all countercultures are equal, and it’s easy to forget in the fluid, mix-and-match twenty-first century that there were once battle lines drawn between the punk and hippie subcultures (lines that began blurring together in the grunge culture of the 1990s). Though I’d like nothing more than to see all of America’s subcultures, the latter-day hippies included, turn against government, there are lessons to be drawn from the reasons punks hated hippies.
While the hippies fancied themselves foes of the Establishment, they whined—as some now do from positions within the Establishment—for government to refashion the world to their liking. If only we all believe hard enough, all of us together in a big happy circle, anything is possible, thought the hippies, including a world without evil or an economy without money. Punks, blessed with greater hindsight, greater cynicism, and a healthier dose of aggression, realized that wishing, chanting, and protesting don’t necessarily make something so. This is always the first step toward political and philosophical maturity: seeing that reality contains limitations—laws of economics, logic, and science—that cannot be defied willy-nilly.
Punk was, in part, an effort to come to terms with a world that frustrates unrealistic, unworkable plans. Indeed, Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols blamed the socialism-induced poverty of early-1970s England for spawning punk—and it took a good deal of its inspiration from the mean streets of New York City during that time, when proto-punk bands such as the Ramones were performing at the club CBGB’s.
I ask you to recognize in government’s attempts to plan the economy and the culture—and, in recent years, even the weather—another shiny-happy-utopian pile of nonsense. On their (all too rare) good days, at least the Republicans try to shrink government. If we could shrink it to nothing, we’d be making real progress. At the very least, no anarchist—and no one enamored of spontaneous cultural experimentation—should be allied with the bland, boring leviathan in DC, or its tendrils in every state and town in America.
After all, as a punk—or a conservative, or both—you know you can do things for yourself without waiting for orders and assistance from local authorities. Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for yourself and others willing to interact with you to mutual benefit. True punks have long known—as members of any vibrant subculture do, to some extent—that you can’t wait for the whole world (or even a democratic majority) to catch on to a good idea if you want to see it enacted. You need to do it yourself: DIY, as the punks say for short.
The Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman was beloved on the Right. His son, guided by the same free-market principles, is an anarchist. His grandson, equally market-oriented, is an avid participant in the annual Burning Man festivals held in the desert in Nevada by body-painting, often drug-addled performance artists and sculptors—and he is working on a project to build boats and artificial islands that will function as free sovereign nations. Some might think this is an odd, radical-sounding way for the grandson of Milton Friedman to spend his time, but, obviously, I say: What could be more American than that?
It’s with good reason we are more inspired, for example, by the Wright Brothers building their own airplane than we are by Congress deciding to funnel billions of dollars from innocent taxpayers into the maw of Lockheed Martin or Boeing. The best way to make the world a better place—and to protect our rights—is to keep government out of the way, a principle understood, in different, fragmented ways, by conservatives like Reagan, who vowed to get government off our backs, and by any punk who’s been hassled by cops for dancing in a bar that has no cabaret license (as now happens in New York City with some regularity).
The nation that produced the Ramones and the Misfits, each with at least one conservative member, does not naturally await subsidies and legal decrees. Rather than conservatives running a few more senior citizen focus groups or opinion polls—and struggling, if we’re lucky, to get from 46 to 51 percent in the next general election—I suggest we remind Americans who they are, which is a rather unruly and creative bunch of risk-takers. The current period of town hall tumult, not so unlike the days of the Sons of Liberty during the Revolution, is the perfect time to do it. This country carries the potential to become a very different place almost overnight, history suggests—indeed, to do so again and again, and without waiting for approval from Washington.