K ITSCH

PEDAGOGY AND POPULAR CULTURE

VOLUME 3
GARLAND REFERENCE LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
VOLUME 1146
P EDAGOGY AND P OPULAR C ULTURE
SHIRLEY R.S TEINBERG AND JOE L.K INCHELOE, SERIES E DITORS

AMERICAN EDUCATION KITSCH

AND C ORPORATIONS From Education to Public
The Free Market Goes to School Policy
by Deron Boyles by Catherine A.Lugg

POPULAR CULTURE
AND CRITICAL P EDAGOGY
Reading, Constructing,
Connecting
edited by Toby Daspit
and John A.Weaver
KITSCH
F R O M E D U C AT I O N TO
P UBLIC POLICY

BY
C ATHERINE A . L UGG

F ALMER P RESS
A MEMBER OF THE T AYLOR & F RANCIS G ROUP
N EW YORK AND L ONDON
1999
 Dedication
To Nathen E.(Doc) Jones
A Most Wise and Wonderful Teacher

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

Copyright © 1999 by Catherine A.Lugg

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the

Library of Congress

Kitsch: from education to public policy/by Catherine A.Lugg.

ISBN 0-203-90505-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-90598-9 (Adobe eReader Format)

ISBN 0-8153-2595-9 (Print Edition)
Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Chapter 1
Kitsch 3
Chapter 2
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 13
Chapter 3
Kitsch and Leadership 53
Chapter 4
Kitsch and Social Policy 75
Chapter 5
Resisting and Subverting Kitsch 103
Chapter 6
The End? 117

Index 123

v
Acknowledgments

Some scholarly books cover the darndest topics, and this is one of
them. The idea for examining Kitsch, education, and public policy
sprang forth in the summer of 1995, when I was a newly minted Ph.D.
Underemployed, almost completely bored off my rocker, and looking
for something to do, I asked Joe Kincheloe if I could sit in on his
graduate class on Power and Curriculum. He graciously allowed me in,
and I spent the rest of the summer rapidly broadening my theoretical
horizons and intellectually sparring with most everyone in the class. It
was truly a “mind-expanding” experience.
At the time, I was reading Murray Edelman’s From Art to Politics,
which contained an intriguing section on Kitsch. Drawing on my
background in educational policy and history, and my earlier life as a
musician and blending in what we were examining in Joe’s class, I
briefly sketched a paper linking Kitsch with education, politics and
policy making. Joe believed that I was on to something and encouraged
me to transform the entire enterprise into a book. The rest is my (and
to some extent, his) fault.
Between that summer and now (August 1998), both the book and I
have undergone a few transformations. Along the way, I have received
assistance and encouragement from numerous individuals. Special
thanks to all of my friends and colleagues from Penn State, including
William Pencak, Henry C.Johnson, Jr., William Lowe Boyd, R. Andrew
and Elizabeth Lugg, and Julie Weber. Since relocating to Rutgers
University, I have been blessed with two wonderful intellectual
playmates, James R.Bliss and William A.Firestone. They good-naturedly
read and commented on numerous (and at times, insufferable) drafts.
H.Scott Kynrim has been my longtime political partner in “crime,” and

vii
viii Acknowledgments

he helped me keep the project focused. Lee Carpenter has been a

fabulous editor, gently cleaning up occasionally sloppy prose and
muddled thinking. Mark R.Costello, Timothy L.Short, KT Scott, Ruth
Slotnick, and Michelle Kneissl all provided me with friendship and
much laughter throughout the writing process. And finally, special
thanks to Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg for keeping the faith in
this project and occasionally giving me a much needed prod.
KITSCH
CHAPTER 1

Kitsch

Those who find the word “orphanages” objectionable may

think of them as 24-hour-a-day preschools.
—Charles Murray1

In early 1995 the new Republican Speaker of the House of

Representatives, Newt Gingrich, proposed a radical retrenchment of
the U.S. welfare state. Much of his argument was based on the claim
that private charitable agencies were far more capable of ameliorating
societal ills than was the federal government. To bolster his rhetorical
point, Gingrich cited the effectiveness of Boys Town in helping
troubled children. But the “Boys Town” Gingrich invoked was not the
Catholic charity in Nebraska but a sentimental movie made nearly
sixty years ago. While a very small proportion of the U.S. populace
was familiar with the actual institution—thanks to television—most
were aware of the movie and the syrupy emotions it engendered.
Blithely ignoring a host of structural and brutal economic inequalities
that endangered so many American children, Ging ric h neatly
substituted a cor ny cultural symbol for historical reality and
subsequently attempted to build political support for his controversial
welfare policy proposals. Put differently, the honorable Speaker was
indulging in what can be termed “political Kitsch.”
Political Kitsch is a type of propaganda that incorporates familiar
and easily understood art forms (Kitsch) to shape the direction of
public policy. Kitsch is something readily accessible in everyday life—a
condensation symbol or referent that draws on a given history and
culture and carries both information and emotional significance.

3
4 Kitsch

Kitsch can be disturbing occasionally, but is more likely to reassure and

comfort the observer. Clues to the admittedly obscure origins of the
term are found in the art world.2 The German word implies an artistic
creation that “makes use of refuse taken bodily from the rubbish
dump.” 3 Kitsch also has been described as “art that sentimentalizes
everyday experiences, or that appeals to beliefs and emotions
encouraging vanity, prejudices, or unjustified fears and dubious
successes.” 4 Manufacturers of Kitsch are aware of a given audience’s
cultural biases and deliberately exploit them, engaging the emotions
and deliberately ignoring the intellect. As such, it is a form of cultural
anesthesia. This ability to build and exploit cultural myths—and to
easily manipulate conflicted history—makes Kitsch a powerful political
construction.
Its facile use of symbolism also gives Kitsch immense political
utility. Kitsch can simultaneously provide psychological comfort and
reinforce a host of national mythologies. It has an immediacy that art
must avoid. Art creates a sense of distance between the viewer and the
object, whether the object is music, painting, sculpture, theater, and so
forth. This distance requires the viewer to span the expanse, following
subtle cues in making the aesthetic leap.5 This expanse can become a
gaping chasm to those accustomed to routine patterns and forms,
easily disconcerted by unexpected twists and turns along a given
ar tistic path. What makes Kitsch “Kitsch” is its simplicity and
predictability. There are no aesthetic leaps and very few, if any,
surprises. For example, in most movies and television shows we expect
that the “good guys” will “win,” whatever that means. Many people
become irate when the plot turns out otherwise, with some individuals
taking great pains to denounce those programs that deviate from the
path of Kitsch, as menacing to the moral (i.e., political) fiber of
American society.
Art is inherently political because artists build on and play with
their audience’s sense of history, culture, and reality.6 In addition, art
often portrays relationships that exist among individuals, groups, and
inanimate objects. Rather than representing reality, “art creates realities
and worlds.”7 It is important to make this distinction between what is
art and what is “real.” Art invades a person’s sense of self to literally
play with their mind. Weaving through a person’s consciousness, art
occasionally teases, reaffirms, jolts, disturbs, challenges, and pulls
threads of deeply held convictions and beliefs. Art exploits various
Kitsch 5

cultural norms through a creative use of symbolism to provide the

audience with differing perspectives and insights. It radically shifts and
abstracts perception. Some art is, by design, profoundly offensive to
pedestrian sensibilities, yet by artistic merit, it is great art. A review of
Dadaist paintings and Frank Zappa’s early compositions reveals they
deliberately mixed and distorted symbols, which provide the audience
with vastly altered perceptions of twentieth-century bourgeois
culture.8 That both genres simultaneously tweaked the political status
quo lent credence to the charges of subversion.
Art engages both the intellect and emotions by shifting a person’s
sense of reality. For this perceptual shift to occur, artists must step
away from the conventionally constructed political categories of
reality, redolent in simplistic symbolism, to create works of art. 9
Because artists consciously construct a multitude of realities, they can
subver t what were once considered hard-and-fast categories of
acceptable social and political behavior. Notions of “acceptable” and
“unacceptable” mix quickly. Their subversive power makes artists (and
their creations) potential threats to a given political regime. In
authoritarian countries, great artists tend to face coercion, repression,
imprisonment, and, on occasion, death, as was the case in the Stalinist
Soviet Union. 10 In more democratic settings such as the United States,
rancorous debates swirl around government funding for the arts, and
what various art forms reveal about the nation’s supposed moral
health. Typically, social conservatives declare that government has no
business funding either “offensive” ar t or a seemingly endless
collection of thoroughly debauched artists.
Yet, when charges of fueling moral turpitude are leveled, it is not the
work of art itself that defenders of tradition find threatening to their
sense of order, but the political implications behind “subversive” art. They
should worry because art must disturb and intrigue in order to provoke
both curiosity and emotion. Good art becomes politically subversive by
playing, however subtly, with our sense of what is “real.” What social
conservatives wish to fund differs profoundly from, and perhaps is
antithetical to, genuine art. Like their old communist antagonists, the
keepers of “American traditional values” long for docile propagandists to
create politically comfortable and useful Kitsch.
Kitsch differs from art by being a powerful political construction
designed to colonize the receiver’s consciousness. As such, Kitsch is
the beautiful lie.11 It reassures and comforts the receiver through the
6 Kitsch

exploitation of cultural myths and readily understood symbolism. 12 But

Kitsch neither challenges nor subverts the larger social order because
it must pacify, not provoke. The political status quo must be
legitimated and upheld as morally superior. In a more obvious political
setting, a veritable pastiche of Kitsch is presented to the American
public every four years in the form of the grand and glorious
presidential campaign. Candidates are “sold” to a television public
through a carefully tailored and sophisticated use of political Kitsch.
Additionally, various national symbols and genuine art forms can be
woven together in the hopes of plying patriotism for electoral triumph.
Art can be colonized to function as political Kitsch since it provides
readily identifiable images that can subsequently be employed to
soothe a wor ried populace and sell a given product including
presidents (for example, see the 1992 Clinton campaign’s use of
Fleetwood Mac). Rock music seems particularly vulnerable to political
Kitsch, thanks to the enormous economic buying power of the baby
boom generation coupled with a sentimental longing for their “good
old days” (the 1960s and 1970s). One example of this “Kitsching” is
the advertising campaign for Chevy Trucks, which has Bob Seger’s
ballad “Like a Rock” playing in the background The function of this
colonized music is to peddle pick-up trucks via a not-too-hip but
familiar macho symbol to aging (sagging?) baby-boomers. 13
Other examples of political Kitsch abound, thanks to public
schooling, mass marketing, the ubiquitousness of television, and, to a
lesser extent, popular movies. 14 Television programs such as “The
Lawrence Welk Show,” “Father Knows Best,” and “Leave It to Beaver”
and the film Forrest Gump are obvious Kitsch, playing to down-home
American cer titudes. They have more to do with evoking and
manipulating comfortable myths dear to the hearts of many Americans
(including white supremacy, the moral goodness of patriarchal
households, the power of vague Protestantism, and the inherent
nobility of the monied classes), than they reflect actual individual or
collective experiences.
While the first three examples are almost undeniably Kitsch, due
largely to the passage of time, the inclusion of Forrest Gump may
provoke some protest. Gump contains numerous aspects of Kitsch, but
one is particularly striking. Unlike the title character, real-life “gumps”
were almost instant cannon fodder for the Pentagon during the
Vietnam War. By the late 1960s, the U.S. military deliberately
Kitsch 7

recruited men with sub-normal IQs, some as low as 62, for the
Southeast Asian meat grinder. Hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with
warfare and despised by their comrades-in-arms, most of these men
were quickly slaughtered. 15 Forrest Gump provides a stunning contrast to
reality by invoking the ancient myth that simple nobility of character
was needed not only to survive (even if shot in the buttocks) but to
triumph.16 One is left with a very distorted notion of the Vietnam War
and of military selection, giving a lie to the notion of “the best and the
brightest.” Real-life “gumps” died quickly and deliberately. In addition,
this cultivated belief in the nobility of war—even the wrenching
Vietnam War—was played to great rhetorical effect by President
Ronald Reagan to build support for highly controversial foreign and
domestic policies. The “noble cause” is another form of political
Kitsch, creating and reinforcing myths while at the same time limiting
the terms of acceptable debate.
As noted before, political “Kitsch” depends upon easily invoked
cultural symbols to address complex political dilemmas and limit
analysis. On first blush, Kitsch would appear to lend itself well to
political conservatives, yet self-declared radicals and even nominal
liberals (or moderates) also find it very useful in shaping and limiting
the terms of discussion. In an article entitled “The Bob Newhart Test,”
columnist Meg Greenfield establishes a method of determining the
relative value of federal programs based on a comedy routine by Bob
Newhart. As she explains, “Newhart could expose the essentially crazy
nature of any cherished national custom, institution or idea simply by
causing it to be explained in its own ter ms to someone who
presumably had not heard of it before.” 17 Greenfield’s unstated
assumption is that while her readers may be unfamiliar with Newhart’s
specific monologue on this topic, we’ve all seen “The Bob Newhart
Show.” The “Bob Test” provides Greenfield with a method of “reducing
overelaborate subjects to their true outlines.”18 It offers an end run
around all of that messy social scientific data supposedly clogging our
public policy debates.19
But does it? It can be argued that the “Bob Test” flunks as a possible
public policy tool thanks to its inherent “Kitschiness.” Bob Newhart,
the real human being, has made a very profitable career by appealing to
white, straight, middle-class Americans, adroitly playing off a host of
their cultural assumptions. Newhart portrays the supposedly gentle
goof, the nice guy who spends his life endlessly trying to figure out
8 Kitsch

how to deal with difference. He doesn’t have to reject his sense of

power or entitlement; he merely assumes an updated comic version of
the “White Man’s Burden” that has been a staple of American
television sit-coms since the 1950s. By focusing on the “quirkiness” of
other people rather than his own assumptions, Newhart sets himself up
to be the prototypical nice guy, ostensibly liberal, just trying to cope
with social change. Ultimately, however, he misses the point and so
does Greenfield. If Greenfield thinks the “Bob Test” is an elegant and
appropriate policy tool then other models should also suffice; such as
the “Whoopi Goldberg Test,” “Pee Wee Herman Test,” or the “Susan
Westenhoffer Test.” Yet, it is doubtful that Greenfield would find these
nearly as amenable.
This power of Kitsch, the use of mundane, corny and “safe” art (and
the symbols therein) to shape and limit the public policy arena is the
focus of this book. In the United States, appreciation for Kitsch is
cultivated rather early by public schooling—which is free, compulsory,
and, all too frequently, mind numbing. Kitsch is then reinforced
through a host of social, political, and cultural vehicles, perhaps the
most powerful being television. The American public is continually
bombarded with symbolic references via advertising, programming,
and news broadcasts. One cannot help but be impressed by the power
that symbols and symbolic forms have in people’s lives, shaping an
individual’s consciousness and soul and spurring or thwar ting
collective political action. As Murray Edelman has observed, “Symbols
become that facet of experiencing the material world that gives it a
specific meaning,”20 whether or not that meaning is grounded in fact.
Kitsch, like symbols, is a powerful force in our lives.

SOME THEORETICAL CONCERNS

The study of symbolism has largely been the province of philosophy,
theology, psychology, and aesthetics, with research focused on
individuals and their responses. Yet, such lines of disciplinary
demarcation are easily blurred because symbols are also critical to the
political process and have saliency that go well beyond the individual.
Political organizations and activists go to great lengths to coin slogans,
design banners and logos, and compose songs based on readily invoked
(and manipulated) cultural symbolism. Those seeking power need more
than just individual response to attain their political goals. They use
Kitsch 9

symbols to incite massive action or quiescence.21 Obviously, symbols

carry political implications for groups of people as well as for
individuals.
Learning to identify political symbols is the most rudimentary form
of socialization, beginning in the early elementary grades.22 Academic
inquiry into this acquisition was once a rich area. Yet several prominent
educational policy scholars have lamented the dramatic decline in
research addressing political socialization,23 or how individuals learn to
become citizens within a given political system.24 Ironically, research
regarding this question has not diminished as much as the “style” and
focus have changed. Scholars of various disciplinary and theoretical
stripes have concerned themselves with how individuals learn politics
and their respective roles within the political system through a
multitude of educational and, all too often, miseducational sites. But
such research now tends to be framed in ter ms of hegemony,
resistance, and emancipatory praxis rather than civic instruction.
Research examining political socialization has not so much disappeared
as it has been redefined by an explosion of new methodologies and
analytic tools, especially by those who are adherents of critical theory
and/or postmodern critique.
While present-day research is important, a more traditional
historical and policy analytical approach can also yield insights.
Therefore, the conceptual framework for examining the power of
Kitsch is drawn from a variety of thinkers, principally Murray
Edelman, Charles Lindblom and Edward Woodhouse, and Susanne
Langer. This book is particularly concerned with how various symbols
and symbolic forms are used politically to shape and limit the ways of
thinking about the world and how they ultimately narrow public policy
options. I examine how Kitsch is used in the American political
spectacle, how careers can be “made” through the selling of political
Kitsch, and how Kitsch shapes various policy arenas. Ways of resisting
and subverting Kitsch are explored, and the implications for policy
formation and policy analysis are drawn.
With free and compulsory schooling, the majority of Americans are
immersed in Kitsch as children, thanks to the curriculum and practices
of public schools coupled with the power of the ever-changing popular
culture. American children learn at a very young age to salute the flag
and color pictures of George Washington and his cherry tree. Stories
and legends are imparted to children, and emotional connections are
10 Kitsch

carefully built to this supposedly factual information.25 Beginning with

the creation of the nineteenth-century common school, American
education and educators have been committed to teaching one “heroic”
history, consisting of information selected for its moral uplift and
capacity to coerce (seduce?) political consensus rather than for its
accuracy.26 While such practices have been lampooned and lamented by
academics and social commentators since the inception of the common
school, the political power of the “Kitsch” curriculum drives American
political debates involving all policy areas. Simple-minded popular
cultural bromides are invoked across the policy spectrum to justify
budget reductions in education while increasing public spending on
incarceration and military defense. Given the perniciousness of Kitsch
and the power of the electronic media, it has become very fashionable
(culturally popular?) to cut social programs to ribbons in the name of
moral uplift. If Edelman is correct that symbolism and spectacle are
vital to answering Harold Laswell’s question of “who gets what, when
and how,” 27 determining how Kitsch plays a political role can lend
insight into the policy making process.

NOTES
1. Charles Murray, “The Coming White Underclass,” The Wall Street
Journal (October 28, 1993), p. A14.
2. I am using a rather global definition, one that includes all art
forms.
3. Gillo Dorfles, Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (New York, NY: Bell
Publishing Company, 1969), p. 3.
4. Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape
Political Conceptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 29.
5. Susanne K.Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1953), pp. 45–46. As Tomas Kulka writes, “Kitsch
cannot afford to be, and hence never is, confusing.” See Tomas Kulka,
Kitsch and Art (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1996), p. 31.
6. Edelman, From An to Politics, p. 7.
7. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
8. Frank Zappa’s Plastic People is a personal favorite.
Kitsch 11

9. Langer has a somewhat different notion of the artistic distance

from the mundane. See Susanne K.Langer, Feeling and Form , pp. 45–46.
10. Vitaly Shentalinsky, Arrested Voices: Resurrecting the Disappeared
Writers of the Soviet Regime, trans. John Crowfoot (New York: Free
Press, 1996).
11. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of
the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 304.
12. As Langer notes, “The more barren and indifferent the symbol,
the greater is its semantic power.” See Susanne K.Langer, Philosophy in
a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 75.
13. In an interview with The Progressive, social critic (and GM
“fan”) Michael Moore took dead aim at the blatant political and
economic selling out of old rockers. “Bob Seger! Coming from
Michigan, it’s like Seger and [Ted] Nugent. They were like the two
guys, and now look at them. One’s a hack for General Motors; the
other is running around with the Michigan Militia. I mean, Jesus
Christ. I tell you, if I was your age or younger, I’d be so angry at these
boomers. Bunch of losers. Take their classic rock and shove it up their
ass. That’s what I’d do” (p. 42). Scott Dikkers, “Interview with Michael
Moore,” The Progressive, June 1996, Volume 60, Number 6, pp. 40–42.
There is a song by the rock band Jethro Tull (from the 1970s) that
predicted this phenomenon, Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die.
14. While movies have an enormous cultural influence in the lives
of U.S. citizens, I would argue that this is extremely dependent upon
television. Very few movie theaters still exist in either the rural United
States or its distressed inner cities. However, televisions, VCRs, and,
more importantly, video rental stores are “everywhere.”
15. See Myra MacPherson, Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the
Haunted Generation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984); Keith Baker, Nam:
The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There (New
York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1981).
16. This notion of redemption through simplistic nobility is very
ancient. See Thucydides’s discussion of why Athens lost the
Peloponnesian War in, The Complete Wr itings of Thucydides, The
Peloponnesian War (New York: The Modern Library, 1934). For a more
contemporary explanation, see Reed Johnson, “Messiahs Like Forrest
Gump and Nell Comfort Us with Their Redemptive Simplicity,” Detroit
News & Free Press, December 24, 1994, C, 1:1.
12 Kitsch

17. Meg Greenfield, “The Bob Newhart Test,” Newsweek, July 17,
1995, Volume 126, Number 3, p. 66.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, p. 8. It is
interesting to note just how irrelevant good research can be to the
policy making process. For example, President Reagan was known to
reject any information out of hand if it contradicted his ideological
biases. See Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); and Catherine A.Lugg, For God and
Country: Conservatism and American School Policy (New York: Peter Lang,
1996). Carol Weiss, and Charles Lindblom and Edward Woodhouse
have made similar findings. See Carol H.Weiss, with Michael
J.Bucuvalas, Social Science Research and Decision-Making (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980); Charles E. Lindblom and Edward
J.Woodhouse, The Policy-Making Process, 3rd edition (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall, 1993).
21. See Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1964, 1985), pp. 22–43.
22. Fredrick M.Wirt and Michael W.Kirst, Schools in Conflict: The
Politics of Education, 3rd edition (Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing,
1992), pp. 43–70.
23. Ibid.
24. Dean Jaros, Socialization to Politics (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1973), p. 8.
25. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 31–35.
26. The most pungent analysis of this kind of educational/political
indoctrination can be found in James W.Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told
Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New
Press, 1995).
27. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1964, 1985); Political Language: Words that
Succeed and Policies that Fail (New York: Academic Press, 1977);
Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988); and From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape Political
Conceptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
CHAPTER 2

Kitsch and the American

Political Spectacle

Every night on the local news, you and I watch the welfare
state undermining our society.
—Newt Gingrich1

Each fall Americans are subjected to the rigors of the election

campaign: an elaborate, lengthy spectacle, involving anxiety-inducing
diagnoses of the present and dire predictions of the future if we should
vote for the wrong candidate. Political opponents are repeatedly
vilified while candidates shamelessly sell their own unique virtues,
thoroughly grounded in Kitsched notions of “American” values, to a
media audience. The mudslinging is fast and furious as election day
draws nigh, with each respective candidate blaming the other for
flinging the dirt. Concurrently, news stories highlight a disturbing
level of voter apathy and political disenchantment. The “morning after”
analyses decry the negative campaigning and call for a return to a more
civil political discourse, invoking a “good old days” theme. The
inference is that the candidates of old were far more civil, much less
spectacular. Yet, our poll-driven politicians persist in viciously
attacking their opponents as part and parcel of the democratic process.
They persist, in part, because mudslinging, an intensification of the
Kitsched spectacle, works.
The political spectacle that accompanies an election campaign,
however, is not a recent development. A careful examination of U.S.
history reveals it to be a long-standing, if not a fine and rich, tradition.
For example, the 1828 presidential election was one of our nation’s
most rancorous, pitting Andrew Jackson against John Quincy Adams.

13
14 Kitsch

Adams’s supporters charged that Jackson was “a usurper, an adulterer,

a gambler, a cock-fighter, a brawler, a drunkard, and a murderer.”
Jackson’s supporters responded in kind, declaring John Quincy Adams
to be “a stingy Puritan, an aristocrat who hated the people, a
corruptionist who had bought his own election, and a waster of the
people’s money on the White House.”2 In the end, Jackson was more
effective in splattering Adams and soundly trounced him in the
balloting.
A more recent example of effective mudslinging and a
wholehear ted embrace of Kitsch occur red dur ing the 1988
presidential campaign between George Bush and Michael Dukakis.
While the menacing image of Willie Horton flashed across American
television sets, candidate Bush was shown reciting the Pledge of
Allegiance—something almost all American public schoolchildren
do—and making the conservative honor pledge of “no new taxes.” As
a former Navy pilot during World War II (a war hero in the last “good
war”) and as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, he could easily wrap
himself in the flag and ador n himself with assor ted patriotic
trimmings. Bush’s evocation of Willie Horton and his various pledges
(all symbolic), made Michael Dukakis, by contrast, appear to be soft
on crime and liberal (i.e., weak); that is, lacking mainstream political
standards on race. The strategy was a calculated maneuver to defuse
Bush’s highly publicized “wimp factor.” Dukakis campaign officials
responded by placing Dukakis in a tank but that attempt at political
Kitsch proved a dismal failure and only compounded the candidate’s
political woes.3
Yet the Dukakis campaign was steeped in a different sort of political
Kitsch—that of the heroic immigrant. Employing an updated version
of the nineteenth-century Horatio Alger tales (plucky young lads
overcoming overwhelming obstacles on the way to success), 4 the
Dukakis campaign stressed the hurdles Dukakis had faced as the son of
Greek immigrants. Unfortunately for Dukakis, his campaign ignored a
larger cultural and historic issue of nativism, or the distrust of anyone
who was “furrin.” 5 The invocation of this type of political Kitsch
coupled with the successful attacks by the Bush campaign worked
against Dukakis, ultimately por traying him as un-American. In
particular, the Horton smear, with its ever-so-thinly veiled racism, was
just one in a series of tactics in a spectacularly ugly campaign that
involved otherwise unbearably bland contestants. The sheer ugliness of
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 15

the 1988 presidential campaign was and is the larger political point. As
Edelman observed:

The spectacle, in short, is a partly illusory parade of threats and

reassurances, most of which have little bearing upon the successes
and ordeals people encounter in their everyday lives, and some of
which create problems that would not otherwise occur. The political
spectacle does not promote accurate expectations or understanding,
but rather evokes a drama that objectifies hopes and fears. 6

The elaborate political spectacle, complete with Kitsched meanings

and notions of what America is and should be and who are “us” and
who are “them,” made the 1988 presidential campaign exciting. As
with the presidential campaign of 1828, the 1988 campaign was a
carefully constructed spectacle with easily invoked symbolic allies and
enemies.7 What had dramatically changed between 1828 and 1988 was
that the spectacle, traditionally limited to those in immediate
attendance to the event, was now consumed almost daily by a
television audience numbering in the millions.
The sheer omnipresence of television has made the political
spectacle even more carefully constructed and manipulated through
the use of Kitsch. Candidates and elected politicians are carefully
staged and managed, with proper lighting and accoutrements, ensuring
that the correct image is beamed both across the country and around
the world.8 It has become vital that politicians stay “on message,” not
straying from today’s soundbite. In fact, stage-craft can easily be
substituted for state-craft, as was often the case during the Reagan
presidency.9 Perhaps the most important political implication of the
“Kitsched” spectacle is the “consumerism” issue—what the public sees
is not what it is getting. In this chapter, I explore the relation of Kitsch
to the political spectacle by examining the following issues as educative
or, rather, miseducative sites: The News and the An of PRolicy, Kitsch and
Political Ideology, and The Political Power of God.

THE NEWS AND THE ART OF PROLICY

Media organizations routinely trumpet the ostensible objectivity of
their reporting, but this claim is easily contradicted, given the degree
of corporate control over what is determined to be “newsworthy” and
16 Kitsch

what is not. 10 In addition, a major twentieth-century innovation

regarding political control has been that of news management by
political elites. “News” in the information age is a hot commodity, and
the American news media is a for-profit enterprise, whether the
organization is ABC or PBS. 11 Journalists must cultivate good working
relationships with various political officials to maintain their
competitive edge. As Douglas Kellner observed:

Inside government sources are essential to a reporter’s career,

and…the media must cultivate their sources by releasing stories and
information that government officials want released while holding
back information that might prove embarrassing to their sources.12

Walter Karp noted that “the irony of source journalism [is] that the most
esteemed journalists are actually the most servile. For it is by making
themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to their ‘best’
sources.”13 Being the first to break the news, especially national news, is
far more important to the corporate bottom line than being accurate.
Such a commodification, if not outright fetishism, of the news can
provide elected politicians with enormous power in shaping policy
agendas and maintaining political control. This incessant demand for
political news creates a situation ripe for manipulation and distortion,
whether the medium is print, radio, or television. This media
dependency on political elites for their corporate bottom line also
provides the latter with enormous power in shaping public opinion. As
political scientist W.Lance Bennett discovered:

More informed members of opinion samples tend to be more

responsive to cueing from political elites because those elites are
represented in the media. It appears that, far from creating more
sophistication and independence of mind, higher levels of
information lead to greater receptivity to elite propaganda.14

It is more important that news organizations dispense their product

with regularity, regardless of actual content or quality, than to have
nothing or very little to proffer to the public.
One media arena being affected by dubious news quality or value is
presidential reporting. News from the White House usually takes
precedence over that emanating from Capitol Hill—not surprising,
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 17

given the actual and symbolic power of the presidency. This is

especially true of the obligatory shot from the White House run by
television media almost every night. 15 The White House shot also
represents the mutual dependency of the press and presidency on each
other, a dependency that has grown throughout the twentieth
century.16 This provides ample opportunity for the more media astute
members of the executive branch to manipulate the news and public
opinion: in other words, to engage in the art of spin control. By
carefully limiting access to the executive branch, media-savvy White
House officials force news agencies to compete for the most
important tips—or what these officials view as important—and then
“sell” them to the American public. The accuracy of the information
dispensed by a given presidential administration is of less importance
than of scooping the corporate competition. Only the occasional
Supreme Court decision may displace news from the White House in
importance, which is then immediately followed by reaction(s) from
the president.
The art of news management has become more sophisticated with the
explosion of multimedia, especially television. Political leaders and their
handlers/advisors have become increasingly adept in their manipulation
of American political, cultural, and religious symbols as a means of
generating support for their various policy initiatives. Much of what
happens under the klieg lights is managed by unelected advisors,
individuals who are well versed in public relations. Media “photo-ops”
give politicians the chance to blare their soundbites of Kitsched
responses to complex issues. This political spectacle, complete with its
Kitsched symbolism, is more important than the actual content of an
event. As Edwin Yoder observed about the Reagan presidency:

The Reagan years saw the pursuit of political agenda frankly keyed
to visual values. Words and sometimes even facts were at a
discount…. The supreme symbol was the East Room press
conference, where the president approached the waiting reporters
along a long red carpet, as an imperial audience. The settings of
power and authority overshadowed the substance on these relatively
rare occasions. The president’s policy or agenda might appear, at
times, indistinct or muddled. But the symbols of presidential
authority, and the White House itself, were shown to great
advantage.17
18 Kitsch

What could traditionally be termed as public policy has evolved into

something more elaborate, something more dazzling—PRolicy or
Public Relations policy.18 PRolicy deliberately employs vague content
with a dazzling display of Kitsched imagery, such as the flag,
motherhood, and apple pie. The use of PRolicy coupled with the
ambiguities of political news can drastically alter the public’s
perception of the issues actually confronting the nation.19
Another way of thinking about PRolicy is as a form of Kitsched
exhortation from the now electronic bully pulpit. An easy, recent example
is the highly touted (and televised) “War on Drugs,” which focused on
eradicating the use of illegal drugs, although the abuse of legal drugs, such
as nicotine and alcohol, kills far more Americans and, supposedly of
greatest importance to policymakers, costs more money. In the case of
nicotine, the policy inconstancies are highly ironic, given the degree of
federal subsidies for tobacco and the hypocrisy of one particular drug czar,
William Bennett. As columnist Molly Ivins acidly noted:

Alas, the Czar himself is a drug addict. He’s got a three-pack-a-day

tobacco jones he just can’t lick. Happily, his drug has been
legalized. But he knows full well this is not the solution for people
addicted to dangerous drugs. (According to the Surgeon General,
2,000 people in the United States died of cocaine use last year. In
the same year, cigarettes killed 390,000.) 20

Nevertheless, the evils of illegal drug use are presented to a viewing

public in graphic and horrifying detail. In addition, public school
children are indoctrinated through the federal D.A.R.E. program
(drugs are really evil?) and by teachers, counselors, and the local
police not only to recognize illegal substances but to report those
adults they suspect of using. While alcohol abuse is also targeted by
federal agencies, the primary focus of D.A.R.E. is on illegal drugs. In
some instances this training has led children to inform on (denounce?)
their parents, a disquieting notion when recalling that the Communist
Chinese encouraged the same behavior during the Cultural Revolution.
Thanks to the media and public school campaigns, the impression is
that illegal drug use is the sole road to personal (and eventually,
societal) wreck and ruin. 21
That public school personnel willingly (some even enthusiastically)
participate in the D.A.R.E. program is not surprising, given their
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 19

commitment to being a “helping profession.” Teachers, counselors,

administrators, and support staff tend to hold strong convictions about
the welfare of children. But school personnel are ultimately subject to
the demands of the state and federal governments through various laws
and regulations that predetermine what each child “needs.” Ultimately,
then, school personnel are not subject to the actual needs of real
children. As a consequence, children get the “help” they may not need
and that may in fact do them great harm. As Edelman explained more
than twenty years ago:

It is no accident that governments intent on repression of liberties and

lives are consistently puritanical, just as helping professionals exhibit
few qualms about exterminating resistance to their therapies in people
they have labeled dangerous and in need of help. To the inhabitants of
other worlds the repression is a mask for naked power, but those who
wield authority, power is a means to serve the public good.22

The point is not that illegal drug use is without problems or that
symbolic crusades hold no real consequences. 23 On the contrary,
thanks to the War on Drugs, the number of individuals incarcerated for
illegal drug use has exploded in the last fifteen years. Like the
nineteenth-century war on alcohol known as the temperance
movement, people subjected to this heightened surveillance are
disproportionately poor and of minority status. As Edelman explained:

It is not chance that the groups constrained…are also the groups

repressed by society at large or that the “treatment” consists of
either restoring conformist behavior or removing political offenders
from the sight, the consciences, and the career competition of the
conventional. Those who become clients have experienced problems
either because they have acted unconventionally or because they
belong to a category (the young, the poor, women, blacks) whose
behavior is largely assessed because of who they are rather than
because of what they do. As long as they define their function as
winning acceptance for deviants in the existing social structure, the
helping professions can only promote conventionality.24

The Kitsched symbol of the evil “other” is an extremely powerful force

for social control. Thanks to the current cultural war, our prisons are
20 Kitsch

dangerously overpopulated with individuals who, had they abused legal

drugs—especially those festive pharmaceuticals available only to the
affluent—would more likely have been sent to The Betty Ford Clinic.
In the United States, those with health insurance and political clout are
sent to drug rehab; those without either get sent to jail. Children and
adults educated through the power of Kitsched imagery are likely to
support the former strategy without questioning the latter.
The rhetoric surrounding the War on Drugs has been highly
disingenuous because how does a nation wage war against inanimate
objects? Countries wage war against very human enemies, complete
with very real casualties. During the height of this particular “war,”
ABC News held regular updates, parading various “baddies” (the body
count?) across the screen to show how “we” were progressing
(winning?). The emotions generated by such imagery were further
tweaked or Kitsched for political purposes. Many of the televised
parade’s unwilling participants were young African-American males,
although the majority of individuals involved with illegal drugs were
(and are) white. Many white Americans’ prejudices were reinforced,
particularly the notion that young black men were pathological. 25 The
American viewing public eventually lost its burning interest in this
particular social war, thanks in part to the immediate concerns of the
Persian Gulf War. However, the War on Drugs still smolders, and
various Kitsched images of dopers and dealers are hauled out of the
PRolicy box just in time for the November elections. This news-hyped
PRolicy plays to a time-honored election strategy: demonize blacks in
order to win white votes.26 Framed differently, the War on Drugs can
be seen as yet another presentation of Willie Horton.
The phenomenon of public relations techniques substituting for
reasoned public policy while simultaneously becoming political
communication and discourse is reinforced by empirical evidence. The
implications of news management by political elites are profound for
an ostensibly democratic country. As political scientist Marjorie
Randon Hershey found:

With large numbers of citizens’ attention held fast by the spectacle,

more narrow interests can dominate policymaking. The status quo can
be maintained. The process of political symbolism, then, both
preserves and legitimizes the existing allocation of values in the
society. The myth of electoral potency is also an essential ingredient in
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 21

this process. The result is to turn the textbook description of

democracy on its head. Instead of a system in which votes control the
government, it is government that helps shape what voters demand. 27

The easy interaction of PRolicy coupled with the ambiguities of news

reporting provide political elites with enormous power in shaping voters’
preferences. For instance, while one is unable to draw a direct correlation
between the rise of business reporting and the decline of the American
labor movement, the fact that broadcasters focus on business and business
interests (there is no Nightly Labor Report on PBS) helps contribute to an
anti-labor environment.28 In addition, thanks to the chronic economic
unease that began in 1973 with the OPEC oil embargo, Americans equate
their individual fiscal health with that of U.S. corporations, which is not
quite the same thing.29 Workers who demand better salaries and benefits
are now viewed as greedy threats to the nation’s economic well-being.
This power of political elites, including individuals at various levels
of government, to shape voters’ preferences has received an enormous
boost with the emergence of public policy think tanks. Think tanks are
privately funded and ostensibly nonpartisan organizations engaged in
public policy research. Like many academics involved in the policy
arena, think tank “fellows” are committed to shaping both the debate
and the enactment of specific public policies.30 Many lay claim to the
mantle of cool objectivity in their social science research, or, as
William Greider has described, they have the “the ostensible rationality
of disinterested statistics and abstract argumentation.”31 To the general
public, they give off more than a whiff of the academy, and a number
of the think tankers hold doctoral degrees.
But unlike more academically oriented policy researchers, think
tankers employ a high degree of Kitsched symbolism to push their
agendas. In other words, many such organizations and their constituent
members favor PRolicy over policy. Think tanks are miseducative sites
masquerading as educational institutions. Carefully crafted soundbites,
flung with a disarming ease, are injected into actual policy debates. For
example, Heritage Foundation analyst Robert Rector’s remark that
welfare policy should adhere to Saint Paul’s injunction “Those who
shall not work, shall not eat,” was often quoted in 1995. This Kitsched
symbolism appeals greatly to media organizations whose corporate
bottom line depends on keeping the political spectacle churning. As
one former editor at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, observed:
22 Kitsch

It often seems that these large and well-endowed organizations exist for
the sole purpose of providing articles for the opinion sections and op-ed
pages…. I will confess here to a dangerous vice…. I like think tanks,
and mainly for one simple reason: their members know how to play the
game, that is, they know how to be provocative, they can write quickly
under deadline pressure and they don’t mind being heavily edited.32

In addition, most think tankers do a very good job of trotting out their
PRolicy proposals to various “talking-head” television news shows.33 A
case in point is the enormous publicity surrounding the late Richard
Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s book, The Bell Curve. Much of what
occurred was the result of a carefully orchestrated PRolicy blast
designed to fur ther under mine suppor t for affir mative action
programs. Murray paraded the idea of an American cognitive elite
based upon IQ scores on various television programs. Murray,
identified as a “scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute, 34
trumpeted an updated version of the old racist notion that the reason
African-Americans were under-represented in the upper strata of
American society was that they were less intelligent. 35 Ergo, various
federal policies targeted at promoting “affirmative action” were, and
are, suspect. That Murray and Herrnstein could assert this with
supposedly scientific certitude despite overwhelming evidence to the
contrary,36 was indicative of the high Kitsch factor of the book. The Bell
Curve confirmed the lies, upheld by the old symbol of intellectual
merit (IQ tests), that too many white Americans already believed. 37
It is also important to note Murray’s affiliation with the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), an organization not known for conducting
politically moderate research. It seems improbable that Murray would
have issued a statistical tome advancing the merits of affirmative action,
given AEI’s pro-business policy agenda. While think tanks claim to be
nonpartisan in order to maintain their federal tax-exempt status, most
have a pronounced ideological agenda. Some have a very cozy
relationship with either the Democratic or the Republican National
Parties.38 In addition, more than a few have served as employment
agencies for deposed politicians of dubious scholarly merit (for
instance Edwin Meese decamped to Heritage; Dan Quayle went to
Hudson). By employing politicians of some ideological notoriety, a
think tank gains further clout in the political spectacle by managing the
news and, more importantly, by shaping public policy.
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 23

A more immediate example of the power of PRolicy has been the

rise of right-wing talk radio; in particular, Rush Limbaugh’s show,
which is heard by 20 million listeners three hours a day, five days a
week.39 What is fascinating about Limbaugh’s show is the lack of guests
or dissenting opinion. It is a one-man show, with only one legitimate
opinion: Limbaugh’s. There is the rare and properly screened guest,
such as President George Bush in the fall of 1992, and all phone calls
are screened to be either suitably sycophantic or exploitable. As
devoted listener Hazel Staloff explained, “He likes to be flattered by
listeners.” 40
Such careful stage management coupled with a captivating spectacle
for the politically like-minded puts forth one consistent and incessant
message: American conservatives are morally right and everyone else is
morally wrong. Hence, Limbaugh can easily “vilify, demonize and
delegitimize” 41 the political “other.” Feminists become “femi-Nazis,”
environmentalists become “wacko tree-huggers,” and so forth.42 In this
strategy, those with little political power are transfor med into
symbolic cartoons (Kitsch) and then become Limbaugh’s favorite
rhetorical punching bags. Some of his more incendiary comments
include the following:

The poor in this country are the biggest piglets at the mother pig
and her nipples. The poor feed off the largesse of this government
and give nothing back…. We need to stop giving them coupons
where they can go buy all kinds of junk. We just don’t have the
money. They’re taking out, they put nothing in. And I’m sick and
tired of playing the one phony game I’ve had to play and that is this
so-called compassion for the poor. I don’t have any compassion for
the poor.43
Feminism was established so that unattractive ugly broads could
have easy access to the mainstream! Bunch of cows! 44

In these two examples, the Kitsched symbols he evokes are fairly

obvious and rather old. The poor are societal leaches (an opinion
dating at least to the 1890s) and all feminists are ugly and just a wee
bit odd (also dating to the nineteenth century).
Ironically, Limbaugh claims to dispense factual information and the
“real news,” unlike those working in the “liberal media.” In assailing
the veracity of the American media, which is a fair charge on many
24 Kitsch

fronts, Limbaugh portrays his program as the better, moral option. He

is the unvarnished defender of truth.

In this battle for the soul of democracy, it is more and more clear
that the press, which has a designed Constitutional role, can’t be
trusted, cannot be counted on. My gosh, if the press, which is
Constitutionally protected so as to get the truth, is this far off as
often as they are, then is it any wonder that there is a new media led
by me, America’s truth detector?45

However, much of what is dispensed by Limbaugh is old-fashioned,

mean-spirited nativist Kitsch, with more than the occasional blatant lie
thrown in for good measure.46 According to Jeff Cohen, the executive
director for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), “He makes so
many errors that if he actually corrected them like journalists do, he’d
have more correction than show.” 47
Limbaugh’s use of Kitsch invokes a multitude of myths and symbols
dear to many white Americans, especially the ever-anxious angry white
male. In Limbaugh’s political world view (or ideology), women should
be subser vient and sexually available to men, ethnic and racial
minorities should know “their place,” the poor should get off their
collective lazy butts and get a job, and gay men should hurry up and
die.48 America would then return to its glorious (?!) past of Ward and
June Cleaver, of ranch houses, of women in aprons, and of a white,
male corporate elite. But the past that Limbaugh cites, as do the pasts
described by many political players across the political spectrum,
exists only in the minds of the television script writers. 49
Unfortunately, since many of Limbaugh’s outrageous statements go
unchallenged, he and other like-minded individuals made it socially
acceptable to dislike (if not actually hate) whiny liberals, blacks,
women, gays, Mexicans, and so many others. Dressing such animus as
“humor” is part of his personal political spectacle. A devoted following
of “Dittoheads” lavishly praise his political and social commentary and
vote accordingly.50 His considerable PRolicy influence (crude symbolic
manipulation as it can be) was seen clearly in the 1994 congressional
elections, when like-minded conservative politicians embraced and
thanked him for his efforts.51
Limbaugh’s programs are just one example among many of how
entertainment repackaged as news, aided by the skillful presentation of
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 25

political Kitsch, can reshape, however temporarily, the public policy

landscape. In this particular case, Limbaugh limits the terms of
acceptable debate by allowing only his views to be emphasized during
the show. In turn, he guarantees that susceptible listeners will be
entertained, if not dazzled, by the carefully controlled spectacle. This
manipulation of news, or infotainment, contributes to the
expansiveness of the Kitsched political sphere.
With the rise of PRolicy, ostensibly educative sites such as
television reporting and public policy research have been transformed
into spectacular miseducative presentations of Kitsched policy options.
Like generations before them, the acceptance of the Kitsched political
spectacle makes many Americans feel good, lulling them away from
more complex, and possibly painful, policy decisions. The mass media
presentation miseducates and, more importantly, dazzles millions of
viewers while reinforcing dearly held myths and reassuring a worried
populace. Such is the art of PRolicy and the power of Kitsch.

KITSCH AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY

The role of Kitsch in political ideology, like that of PRolicy, is
pervasive and indulged by numerous participants across the political
spectrum. All sorts of tackiness may be found within each belief
system, from Nazism 52 to the latest fusion of critical theory and
postmodernity.53 That wildly divergent ideologies hold political Kitsch
in common is not surprising, given the use of ready and easy
symbolism. Ideology, by utilizing Kitsch, helps structure individual
thinking and action toward working for larger group and larger
political goals. Kitsch provides ideology with a form of intellectual
shorthand. After examining ideology, the discussion then focuses on
the most salient ideological force in the contemporary American
political arena: right-wing ideology.
Political ideology differs from PRolicy in its being the belief
structure or lens through which like-minded participants view their
world and the larger political process.54 It provides an elegant script,
map, or formula for those engaged in the political spectacle.55 Ideology
is similar to the various art forms in that it provides an abstracted
(symbolic) surrogate for reality. Yet, it differs from art in that a
political ideology maintains an articulated and explicit agenda for
shaping reality in the future. It dogmatizes rather than questions. To
26 Kitsch

use former President Bush’s explanation, political ideology is “the

vision thing.”56
Given ideology’s use of symbolism, it is a prime consumer of
Kitsch. In the United States, these Kitsched symbols are learned very
early thanks to the sheer blandness of the public school curriculum.
As described by educational policy researchers Fredrick Wirt and
Michael Kirst:

The curriculum is descriptive, weakly linked to reality, devoid of

analytical concepts except legalistic ones, highly prescriptive in tone
and—as a direct consequence of all this—noncontroversial…. From
the elementary to the secondary schools, instruction proceeds from
indirect and symbolic patriotism to select facts about American
history and government.57

American children learn to salute the flag, sing patriotic songs, and
participate in all sorts of patriotic rituals (Veterans Day, Presidents
Day, even Martin Luther King Day, albeit as a colonized symbol). They
are taught to respect and, more importantly, obey the political
institutions and larger social and cultural norms that guide the country.
Students also learn what their future political roles will be, which fall
largely along lines of race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual
orientation.58 Not only is information imparted regarding American
heroes and villains, but strong emotional bonds are connected among
children, various symbols, and the larger political ideologies.59 The
cultivation of an emotional response to specific symbols, such as love
of country when a child sees the flag, and the larger political
ideologies is important. The embedded emotional messages within
symbols and ideologies discipline young minds and, on occasion,
punish them. 60 For example, a very old method of “discipline and
punishment” within American culture is the playground game of
cowboys and indians. American children quickly learn that those who
have the role of “indian” (nonwhites) are going to lose the game. The
emotions associated with losing are subsequently connected with the
symbol of “indian.” The symbol of “cowboy” (i.e., white and male) on
the other hand, conveys the emotions involved with winning.
While any ideology is grounded in historical and cultural contexts,
it also contains inaccuracies, sweeping generalizations, and distortions
of both history and culture. 61 A specific ideology presents a highly
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 27

selected sampling of past events for current political use, disregarding

those instances that are uncomfortable or inconsistent with the stated
belief system. 62 This is not to imply that political ideologies are
without internal inconsistencies or are even coherent at times. On the
contrary, inconsistencies are merely ignored and irrational thought is
dressed up as being perfectly logical and representing common sense.63
It is the political utility and Kitsch value of the ideals within a
given ideology that matters, not their coherence. Ideologies get to
have their political cake and eat it too, by presenting a short-handed
and very Kitsched view of the world. In addition, a political ideology
constructs a specific vision of what were and are good times and bad
in America, and who are its heroes and enemies. But it also provides
a method or script for ensuring that enemies will be dealt with,
heroes will be recognized, and the good times will roll once again
when specific ideological proponents achieve political power. This
form of intellectual shorthand can be problematic because, according
to Arnold Vedlitz:

Political ideologies and organizations supporting these ideologies

can become important cue givers and direction providers in seeking
to sort out the myriad political choices that face us daily. By
accepting a particular ideological perspective and the groups that
endorse it, we can be spared many of the difficult choices. This is a
very tempting orientation for democratic citizens to embrace,
because to reject it, even in part, requires much extra work and
thought on our part to sort out appropriate policies.64

The American public policy arena is a treasure trove of ideological

thought, particularly the flavor of right-wing political ideals.65 While
there also exists a rich legacy of left-wing thought with its attendant
Kitsched symbolism, 66 it is in bad political odor and currently has very
little influence or relevance in shaping how Americans view their
world or public policy debates.
American right-wing ideology is an amalgamation of European
political thought tempered by U.S. histor ical exper ience.
Contemporary American right-wing ideology is comprised of three
separate and, at times, conflicting central tenets: militant anti-
communism, economic libertarianism, and social traditionalism. 67
Militant anti-communism holds that communism presents the gravest
28 Kitsch

danger to the well-being of American society and that all policy efforts
must be focused on maintaining the military and economic superiority
of the nation. While the roots for militant anti-communism can be
traced to 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution (the first Red Scare), it
gained political saliency with the acquisition of the atom bomb by the
then-Soviet Union (the second Red Scare). 68 The very real threat of
nuclear annihilation lent credence to some of the more hyperventilated
claims of internal subversion and external menace. This fear led to
some of the most repressive acts perpetrated against all sorts of
American political dissidents from the 1940s through the 1990s.69
Despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, this line of
political reasoning has shown remarkable resiliency, evolving into a
more generalized version of “America First!” militarism. As sociologist
Sara Diamond explains, “anticommunism has been a dichotomous and
reactive way of seeing the world: good guys versus bad guys; bright,
true Americans versus dark, suspicious aliens and criminal elements.” 70
The second strand of right-wing ideology is that of economic
libertarianism. As opposed to anti-communism, which is concerned
with the economic and military welfare of the nation, libertarianism
focuses on economic and personal liberty. Grounded in the teachings
of classical economics (especially as presented by the English
philosopher Adam Smith), it holds that a free and unregulated
marketplace will provide the most good for the most people. Many
adherents of this principle grant the market an almost divine role71 and
invoke the mystical power of its “invisible hand” in ensuring a just
society. Consequently, proponents view the appropriate role of
government to be strictly limited, and believe it should not interfere
with these divine workings. In practical political matters, libertarian
thought favors property rights over human rights, and regards notions
of equality and equity with more than a degree of suspicion. 72
Social traditionalism represents the final strand of right-wing
political thought. As opposed to libertarian thinking, which holds
individual liberty to be its primary concern, social traditionalism is
concerned with the social and moral welfare of American society.73
Like their Puritanical predecessors, traditionalists hold human nature
as essentially corrupt and in need of careful regulation. Therefore,
government guided by those social and cultural institutions particular
to the United States should provide the necessary guidance. Religion,
especially as reflected by institutionalized Christianity, is seen as the
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 29

best moral arbiter.74 In addition to Christianity, social traditionalism

looks to history (i.e., Western civilization) for further moral guidance.
The lessons imparted by heroic American figures such as Madison,
Jefferson, and Washington are carefully studied for possible present-
day application.
Yet, the history invoked by traditionalists tends to steer clear of any
unpleasantness or moral ambiguities and must be politically
“conservative.”75 Thus, heroes are presented as unquestionably good
and villains as unambiguously evil, regardless of the actual historical
record.76 Ironically, traditionalists are as flexible with the details of
history as those they demonize for historical (and moral) relativism.
The history embraced by traditionalists reflects their politically correct
line. For example, traditionalists committed to returning religious
practices (vocal prayer, Bible readings, etc.) to public school settings
note that such behavior was allowable in the not-too-distant past. Yet,
historically, such activities were used by the state in the hopes of
“Anglicizing” non-Protestant immigrant children. Traditionalists ignore
the fact that these coerced state-mandated activities “occasionally
triggered deadly uprisings such as the Philadelphia Bible riots of 1843,
in which thirteen people died and a Roman Catholic Church was
destroyed.”77
Within right-wing ideology, there are fundamental tensions
between adherents of libertarian and traditionalist thinking. Whereas
libertarians desire an extremely limited role for government and
thunder darkly about the dangers of legislating morality, traditionalists
endorse a morality enforced by the government, as long as the state is
suitably “Christian.” 78 What once held these two conflicting schools of
thought together was the threat of communism in general and the
Soviet Union in particular. Militant anti-communism provided both
camps with some desperately needed common ideological ground and
even broadened the appeal of right-wing ideology to gather in former
leftists. 79 As conser vative historian George Nash noted, “Both
libertarians and traditionalists discerned in the ‘god that failed’ a case
study for their deepest convictions. Communism was a threat to
liberty and tradition.” 80 This fragile common ground that existed
between libertarians and traditionalists held as long as the Soviet
Union represented a palpable threat to American interests. However,
with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, libertarians and traditionalists
have barely been able to paper over their stark differences.
30 Kitsch

Occasionally, such as at the 1992 Republican National Convention, the

rancor between the two groups has erupted into the open.81
In addition, anti-communism became an ideological lens in search
of a possible target. While the new anti-communists have kept much of
the old militaristic rhetoric (and symbolism), they have yet to find as
potent a symbol as the haunting specter of the Soviet “red” menace.
New targets, such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms,
welfare mothers, and gays and lesbians, were deemed as appropriate
substitutes for diehard anti-communists to wage war against.82 Some of
the more incensed (and incendiary) individuals even took up arms
against the U.S. federal government and formed local paramilitary
groups. The militia movement managed to give their ostensibly
terrorist organizations a sense of legitimacy by invoking the romantic
icon of the revolutionary-era minuteman. As Ray Southwell, one of the
founders of the Michigan Militia, explained:

The lesson…is that you are not in control of your life, your
children, your home. The government is in control…. We are
preparing to defend our freedom…. We have to let the tyrants, the
politicians and the bureaucrats know that we’re taking a stand….
When martial law is declared I’m gonna have my neighbor there
helping me. 83

The militia movement has suffered from a larger credibility crisis

owing to the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City and
the subsequent conviction of two militia members, the Freeman stand-
off in Montana, and the virulently racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric of
many of its adherents. 84 Most anti-communists quickly distanced
themselves from such individuals, perceived to be white,
semiautomatic toting thugs. Never theless, anti-communists have
fiercely clung to their support of the military and suspicion of those
who do not share their hostility toward anything that could be
perceived as “red.”
Each of the three strands of right-wing political thought comes with
the attendant Kitsched symbolism (the soldier, the cowboy, and the
preacher), which interact and, at times, either reinforce or contradict
each other. Militant anti-communism can best be represented by the
symbol of the soldier. The Kitsched U.S. soldier is unquestioningly
patriotic, honest, brave, and true to all he serves. He is, of course a
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 31

HE, and a very heterosexual HE at that. The soldier tends to be white,

especially if he’s an officer—Colin Powell is a stunning exception—
and is some vague form of Christian, typically Protestant. Perhaps the
most consistent representation of this ideology is found in old John
Wayne war movies. 85 Whether fighting evil Nazis, “Japs,” or
“Commies,” John Wayne’s cause always prevails, even if his character
dies at the end of the movie. The United States is shown to be in the
moral right, complete with superior firepower and brave men avenging
all the indignities inflicted on the helpless “others.” That many
Americans identify with this symbol is not surprising, given the sheer
number of men (and women) who served in World War II. That war,
even more so than the Civil War, was a conflict in which at least one
member of each American family participated to some degree.
Subsequently, military service became the essential credential for
political office for well over forty years, ending only with the election
of Bill Clinton as president.
As opposed to the soldier who represents national military
interests, libertarian thought is best exemplified by the Kitsched
symbol of the lone cowboy—a self-reliant, rugged individualist
concerned only with his own matters. Like the soldier, the cowboy is a
white, totally heterosexual male, at his heroic best when he saves the
day all by himself. Community help is scorned or, if accepted, turns
out to be more of a hindrance than a help. Subsequently, governmental
aid is portrayed as wasteful, ineffective, and even harmful.
Yet the familiar cowboy story is another American myth. The
cowboys were not instrumental in settling the west, nor did rugged,
self-seeking males make a significant contribution to its economic
development. In fact, the solitary individual (or family) eking out an
existence on the frontier usually couldn’t make a go of it. The
American west was settled with a great deal of government aid, which
included generous land and cash subsidies, deliberate community-
building efforts, and the forced removal of Native Americans by the
U.S. Army.86 But the cowboy symbol is very powerful in limiting how
Americans view their world, and it is repeatedly invoked in policy
discussions. It is not a benign symbol. As Arnold Vedlitz explains:

The factual errors of this myth are of more than scholarly interest.
The symbols that serve the myth (the Marlboro man, Rambo,
pickup trucks, Dirty Harry, guns, drinking, and smoking) and the
32 Kitsch

macho attitudes held in imitation of these mythical figures (dislike

of welfare recipients, homosexuals, unions, government, women
professionals, and ethnic minorities) have profound policy impacts
on us today.87

If the real story of the cowboy and the Wild West were told, it would
be about people surviving on generous government handouts and the
U.S. government’s direct influence in some of the most minute policy
details. In addition, cowboys would be portrayed not only as white but
also as Hispanic and African-American. And more than a few cowboys
would be gay.88
The final Kitsched symbol employed by right-wing ideology is the
preacher, representing social traditionalism. As with the soldier and
cowboy, the preacher is a heterosexual male, typically white, but on
occasion—and this is a recent development—he can be African-
American. He is some sort of nondenominational Protestant and makes
rhetorical nods toward ecumenism, usually invoking a common Judeo-
Christian religious heritage. However, if suitably prompted, the
preacher will make an anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic statement, easily
disdaining people of other faiths.89 As such, the preacher represents a
thoroughly Kitsched version of Christian theology, complete with
moral smugness and feet of clay.
The Kitsched preacher scans the American social scenery and sees
moral chaos. America has become a sinful nation. He thunders about
rampant teenage pregnancy whic h has been fueled by welfare
dependency; decries the stain of abortion upon the nation; bemoans
the decline of the traditional family, which has been undermined by
militant feminists, gays and lesbians, and no-fault divorce laws;
declares AIDS to be God’s divine retribution against gays; laments that
irresponsible and lazy children menace our safety and our economy;
and, on occasion, denounces unqualified minorities for fouling the
workplace thanks to the perniciousness of affirmative action policies.
The solution to all these ills is for America to return to the “Faith of
Our Fathers,” and a simpler and holier era. Like the cowboy symbol,
the preacher mixes fiction with a good deal of social and economic
anxiety.90 The religious past that is cited never existed. 91 For example,
present-day policy discussions that invoke our pious Pur itan
forefathers fail to mention the zeal with which they flogged and hung
Quakers.92
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 33

These three symbols—the soldier, the cowboy and the preacher—

represent right-wing ideology and play themselves out in a variety of
ways. For example, the soldier remains the most politically immediate
in election campaigns, for it is the unquestionable proxy for leadership
skill, regardless of the candidate’s actual capacity. Hence, Dan Quayle,
a leader of dubious merits and qualifications, proudly cited his
admittedly cushy hitch in the Indiana National Guard. Those with
military service are accorded instant political credibility, so long as
they are male. Those without any record of service, like conservative
commentator Patrick Buchanan, take pains to ensure they are more
gung-ho for the military than John Wayne ever was.93
Thanks to the fall of the Soviet Union and the dwindling number of
living World War II veterans, the power of the Kitsched soldier and the
militant anti-communism he represents, has begun to fade. Some might
expect the cowboy with his attendant independent (and romantic)
imagery to replace the soldier, yet it is the stern preacher who is
becoming the politically more significant of the two. While the cowboy
and the soldier are repeatedly romanticized in movies and various
children’s games, the preacher’s influence has received an electronic
boost, with the rise of the television evangelist, or “televangelist.” 94
This discussion of Kitsch and political spectacle moves on to examine
one specifically abused religious symbol: God.

THE POLITICAL POWER OF GOD

Before moving into the heart of this examination, clarification of some
theological points would be helpful. Discussions of the political symbol
“God” should consider the Christian notion of the triune God—that is,
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. With its
strongest roots in the pantheism of its Hellenistic sources, 95
Christianity does not rebuke monotheism per se, but maintains that
the three (or Holy Trinity) are distinct and yet inseparable: God is the
Father, but God is also the Son, yet God is also the Holy Spirit. Some
Christian denominations take pains to resolve the apparent internal
contradictions and obvious repudiation of Judaism’s understanding of
“G-d” by constructing various affirmations of faith.96 Nevertheless,
such notions can be very confusing for the uninitiated.
For present purposes, it would be helpful to consider God as a
tremendous political condensation symbol: reducing three into one,
34 Kitsch

but remaining three. Of course, “God” (he? she? it?) is frequently

mentioned in contemporary political discourse. “In God We Trust” is
stamped on U.S. currency, and politicians typically end their stump
speeches by requesting that “God Bless America.” Despite the claim of
a common Judeo-Christian heritage for most Americans, this insults
both theological traditions and is a complete distortion of history. It is
the Christian notion of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost that is invoked when “God” is mentioned in the political arena,
and it is the Christian notion of “One Nation Under God” that U.S.
schoolchildren learn when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The U.S.
political “God” is not the Jewish G-d (to do otherwise is blasphemy),
and it is most certainly not Allah.
The symbolic use of God in the political arena has become
increasingly popular with the advent of television in general and with
the rise of the televangelist in par ticular. When television
prog ramming fir st developed in the 1950s, most Chr istian
denominations were slow to recognize the medium’s political power,
and more than a few Christian fundamentalists, who were cultural and
political separatists, viewed it as the devil’s tool.97 Local television
stations were required by the Federal Communication Commission
(FCC) to allocate a certain portion of their public service time to
religious broadcasters. Hence, local and typically mainline religious
denominations used the free air-time to broadcast their services to
local parishioners.98 Televised religious services were largely seen as a
method for reaching “shut-ins” and as being quasi-educational. This
situation changed in the 1970s when fundamentalist viewpoints
regarding both television and political involvement radically shifted.
First, the historically apolitical fundamentalists became increasingly
politicized over issues such as abortion, busing, the possible passage of
the Equal Rights Amendment, the women’s movement, affirmative
action, and the emergence of a gay and lesbian rights movement. 99
Prior to the 1970s, many Christian fundamentalists had even refrained
from voting, much less actively running for office or working in
political campaigns. However, the various social movements were
perceived as threats to their religious tenets. America, in their eyes,
had become a highly secular and hostile country. Involvement in
politics, therefore, became a moral imperative.100 Their new activism
was legitimated, ironically, by Jimmy Car ter who, as both a
presidential candidate and later as president, credited his
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 35

fundamentalist beliefs in aiding his political decision making. 101 The

media spotlight focused upon fundamentalists in a fashion not seen
since the days of the Scopes monkey trial. And unlike the events in
Tennessee, this time much of the initial exposure was highly favorable.
As Carter’s presidency progressed, other fundamentalists entered the
political arena, largely in opposition to his policy making agenda.
According to political scientist Robert Zwier, “their response was to
form groups like Christian Voice and the Moral Majority and to seek
the victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980.” 102
A second change occurred in the 1970s when the FCC allowed
television stations to sell their air-time to religious broadcasters. 103
This opened the door for other entrepreneurial TV evangelists or
televangelists to expand their message to a national audience. Television
was now seen as the medium to deliver salvation. The televangelists
embraced a fundamentalist vision of America, and many were spell-
binding orators, invoking a host of Kitsched Christian icons. In
addition, more than a few were brilliant fund raisers who did not
hesitate to solicit money from their viewers. Many local and mainline
churches were much less aggressive in their fund-raising efforts and
were subsequently pushed off the air. As Francis Fitzgerald observed,
by 1980, “90 percent of all religion on television was commercial, and
almost all of that was controlled by conservative evangelicals.” 104 The
commercialization of religious broadcasting was also a fiscal boon to
local broadcasters who could now meet their FCC requirements and
make money at the same time.
Regarding the political arena, the televangelists moved their
rhetorical focus to include the American political landscape. Many
found it wanting and declared that the forces of evil (and occasionally,
Satan), threatened the very nation. As Zwier noted:

The government and other social institutions had been captured by

the evil liberals, and the nation was dangerously threatened by the
forces of international communism. To save the nation, and by
extension to save God’s plan, these religious groups received a
special calling to work in the political arena. They were to motivate
Christians to vote for Bible-believing candidates. In practice, this
meant that they were to vote for ideologically conser vative
candidates who sought to increase defense spending, to reduce the
role of government in welfare, education, and business, and to
36 Kitsch

impose by law if necessary a personal morality that prohibited

abortions, pornography, drugs, sexual permissiveness, and equality
for women.105

This politicalization of fundamentalist Christian television preachers

(and their followers) became problematic on a number of levels,
affecting their own theological tenets and, perhaps more importantly,
U.S. tax law. As charitable, tax-exempt organizations, televangelists
and their ministries were supposed to maintain a semblance of
nonpartisanship. However, by the late 1970s it was obvious that “most
did not hesitate to use their programs on occasion to promote
conservative or right-wing causes that had no visible connection with
religion.” 106
The most prominent of the early politicized televangelists was the
Reverend Jerry Falwell, an Independent Baptist preacher from Virginia
who hosted “The Old Time Gospel Hour.” He founded the Moral
Majority in 1979, an organization dedicated to ensuring that decidedly
Christian (and for the most part, decidedly fundamentalist) values
would be reflected in public policies at all levels of U.S.
government. 107 The Moral Majority quickly sought like-minded
political activists, typically social traditionalists, to join their cause.
The belief was that a New Christian Right (NCR), composed of
fundamentalist Christians and conservative Mormons, Jews, and
Catholics, would restore moral order to the nation. As Falwell
declared at the time, “We are fighting a Holy War, and this time we are
going to win.” 108
The Kitsched Christian symbolism espoused by Falwell, the Moral
Majority, and the broader NCR was redolent with images of a
Christian (typically Protestant) American nation. Each called for a
return to “traditional American family values” and attacked “Godless
policies” and “immorality.” In the NCR’s vision of the past, the United
States had been founded by heroic and devout Christian men and their
dutiful wives and families. The romanticized version of the Puritans
and Pilgrims was presented to the media electorate, carefully omitting
the fact that the former hung Quakers with zeal, 109 and that the latter
robbed the graves of Native Americans. 110 The founding fathers were
presented as colonial-era Christian evangelists. Yet, with their embrace
of enlightenment philosophy, the founding fathers were decidedly not
Christian, at least not in the fundamentalist sense of the term.
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 37

Never theless, the NCR presented a heroic mythology of an

American nation. The story had a basic outline: Throughout its history,
America had been blessed with many material riches and impressive
military victories, but all of this was now imperiled by a precipitous
national moral decline. Evidence of American decadence was
everywhere: Mandatory busing taking children away from their local
public schools, the unionization of public school teachers, IRS
investigations into the racial policies of fundamentalist academies, the
possible passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, the growing
women’s rights movement, the emerging of a gay and lesbian rights
movement, and, most impor tantly, the changing economic (and
eventually, social) roles of both men and women wrought by
deindustrialization. 111 Such massive social change was reframed in the
most basic of Christian terms: It promoted sin. In particular, the Moral
Majority distilled and condensed the larger anxiety felt by many
Americans of faith regarding the rapid pace of social change into a
larger political agenda, complete with very specific symbolic enemies
and heroes.112 If the early movement had a theme song, it was the old
hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers.” As Ralph Clark Chandler explained
in 1984:

It is the idea of “the army of saints” that accounts in part for the
militarized theology of the new religious right…. The enemy in this
case is clearly human. It is everyone who does not subscribe to the
purposes of the new religious right. In the mentality of militarized
theology, dissent is not merely disagreement; it is evil, sin, and of
Satan. It may be treason. The preachers of the right also declare that
“Christ was a he-man!” Christ saw love as emanating from the
strength of domination and power rather that from weakness and
effeminacy. “Christ was not a lamb but a ram!” It is a short step
from such statements of supermasculinity, with their conviction that
might makes right, to Falwell raising money by selling American
flags from the pulpit, as he did in 1980.113

Falwell’s organization reached its height of political influence in 1981,

at the beginning of the Reagan presidency. Reagan had actively courted
the New Christian Right, promising to return America to the moral
path of God’s chosen country. Candidate Reagan took pains to invoke
the movement’s symbolism, standing up for traditional family values,
38 Kitsch

human life (anti-abor tion), and sc hool prayer. 114 Like many
conservative organizations of the era, the Moral Majority embraced his
candidacy, lending none-too-subtle political support. During the 1980
election, Falwell had admonished his followers and risked his tax-
exempt, charitable status by asking them to “vote for the Reagan of
your choice,” a spectacularly graceless dance around the tax code.115
The Moral Majority was rewarded for its political support when its
former executive director and co-founder, Rober t Billings, was
appointed to a post in the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. 116
But those individuals and organizations who live by political Kitsch
can be thoroughly skewered by political Kitsch. Falwell, by dint of his
television exposure and politicized theological agenda, became the de
facto media representative and symbolic head for all fundamentalist
preachers. He also made some missteps. By invoking such old notions
of America as “God’s chosen nation,” and admonishing his congregants
that “I know why you don’t like the Jew…. He can make more money
accidentally than you can on purpose,” 117 Falwell opened himself to
charges of being, if not an anti-Semite, an updated nativist. His cause
was further damaged when the declaration of “God Almighty does not
hear the Prayers of the Jews” was mistakenly attributed to him 118
instead of to the Reverend James Robison.119
The Moral Majority, in particular, suffered from a grand case of
hyperbole, especially when declaring its political breadth and depth.
According to Ralph Clark Chandler:

Early in 1980 Jerry Falwell claimed that 25 million people watched

his “The Old-Time Gospel Hour” each week, a figure increased by
an aide to 50 million. Arbitron figures for February 1980 showed,
however, that one could add together the viewers of all sixty-six
syndicated religion programs on television and still not get 25
million, let alone the 50 million, estimated by Falwell and
associates. Arbitron’s calculation of weekly audience size for the six
leading televangelists on the air is as follows: Oral Rober ts
(2,719,250), Rex Humbard, (2,409,960). Rober t Sc huller
(2,069,210), Jimmy Swaggar t (1,986,000), Jerry Falwell
(1,455,720), and James Robison (464,800). 120

Falwell’s political organization had claimed a high degree of

ecumenical support (which included Roman Catholics and Jews) but,
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 39

again, the actual numbers revealed a far different story. According to

social scientists Anson Shupe and William A.Stacy:

First, and perhaps most dramatic, the Moral Majority commands

low support among the public at large. Indeed, Falwell’s detractors
outnumber his supporters two-to-one. A fourth of our sample had
not even heard of the Moral Majority…. Second, on specific issues
such as abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, prayer in public
schools there is no united bloc of supporters, i.e., even among
those who claim to support the Moral Majority there is no
consensus on important issues…. Third, despite claims of Moral
Majority support among all religious groups and expressions of
goodwill to non-Protestants, grass roots supporters of the Moral
Majority are more likely than either neutrals or non-supporters to
agree with anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic statements. This fact is not
a major revelation once the basic fundamentalist Christian
composition of the Moral Majority’s grass roots supporters is
established.121

The Moral Majority also faced other problems. Falwell himself

presented an irresistible target for caricature, given his high profile,
ill-advised statements, and stunning lack of public relations (PR)
sophistication. As David Snowball noted: “The combination of white
soc ks with Brooks Brothers’ suits, a Souther n accent, and a
considerable paunch made Falwell easy to caricature.”122 Liberal and
progressive opponents also keyed into a Kitsched notion of Christian
fundamentalists and quickly portrayed Falwell (and his cause) as a
collection of mean-spirited, knuckle-dragging “goobers,” perhaps
simple-minded but a dangerous threat to basic American liberties.
Such caricatures might have been unfair, but they were highly effective
in raising Falwell’s negatives with the general American electorate.
The easy Kitsching of Falwell and the Moral Majority also helped to
fill the coffers of opposing organizations, such as the People for the
American Way and the Democratic National Party. 123 By 1986, his
organization was in political trouble. Falwell compounded his woes
with his typical overheated rhetoric, blaming “the gays, the Norman
Lears,” and other “enemies of Christ” for his political and increasingly
fiscal travails.124 When the PTL (Praise the Lord) and Jimmy Swaggart
scandals broke in 1987 and 1988, damaging all televangelists, the
40 Kitsch

Moral Majority became a mere shadow of the triumphal organization

that had once led the movement in early 1980s. Politicized
fundamentalism fell further into ill-repute with the collapse of
televangelist Pat Robertson’s bid for the presidency on the Republican
Party ticket. In August 1989, Falwell quietly disbanded the Moral
Majority, claiming it had accomplished its mission.
The incongruous end of the Moral Majority coupled with the
spectacular flameout of the Robertson presidential campaign, 125 led
many political analysts to declare that the New Christian Right was
dead. 126 Yet the claims of its demise were greatly premature, as
witnessed by the current political strength of Pat Rober tson’s
Christian Coalition and other Christian Right organizations. In
particular, the Christian notions of sin and salvation took on larger
meanings within the American political spectacle thanks to the
Kitsched version of Christianity presented by Falwell and his
organization. If nothing else, Falwell’s politicized televangelism
educated millions of faithful “Bible Believing Christians” that they
should violate their basic religious tenets and get politically involved.
In addition, by voting for candidates who garnered the Moral
Majority’s political approval, many devout Christians believed that
they could literally redeem their sinful nation through the power of the
ballot box. This was the lasting political legacy: Politicized Christian
fundamentalists discovered that the Kitsched power of God could
further their own agendas within the larger political spectacle.
The power of the Kitsched American political spectacle as an
educative or, more accurately, miseducative site holds enormous
implications for students of public policy. With various Kitsched
symbols (many learned in public schools) injected into debates,
campaigns, and everyday discourse, politicians and their advisors who
are skilled at symbol manipulation can drastically alter the political
terrain. Entire ideological systems can be constructed by stringing
various, if not disparate, symbols together (i.e., the soldier, the
cowboy, and the preacher). In addition, the sheer omnipresence of
television—be it entertainment, news, infotainment, or religious
programming—guarantees a greater viewer receptivity to Kitsch.
Finally, the emergence of the U.S. Christian Right presents an
interesting study of how various Kitsched Christian imagery shapes
the political sphere, regardless of the abundant theolog ical
contradictions.
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 41

NOTES
1. Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York: HarperCollins,
1995), p. 9.
2. Charles A.Beard and Mary R.Beard, The Rise of American
Civilization (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), p. 552.
3. Richard Ben Crammer, What it Takes: The Way to the White House
(New York: Random House, 1992). See also Douglas Kellner, Television
and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), pp. 148–
58. See also Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda:
The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (New York: W.H.Freeman and
Company, 1991), pp. 28–29. One of the best analyses on the Willie
Horton ad campaign is by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, in Dirty Politics:
Deception, Distraction, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), pp. 16–42; 128–132.
4. Horatio Alger, while a beloved writer of boys’ books, is
historically problematic. Before he was a writer of morality tales, he
had been a Unitarian minister. Alger was defrocked for “gross
immorality and a most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude
than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with
boys.” See Martin Greiff, The Gay Book of Days (Secaucus: Lyle Stuart,
1982), p. 23.
5. See David H.Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right
from Nativism to the Militia Movement, Revised edition (New York:
Vintage Books, 1995). The charge that Dukakis was “a card-carrying
member of the ACLU,” was also steeped in nativism and high degree of
“red-baiting.” To many Americans, the phrase “card-carrying member”
was automatically linked to a different noun, “Communist.”
6. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 96.
7. See Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, pp. 66–89;
Jamieson, Dirty Politics, pp. 64–101.
8. Mark Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan
Presidency (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988). See also Kellner,
Television and the Crisis of Democracy; and Catherine A.Lugg, For God
and Country: Conservatism and American School Policy (New York: Peter
Lang, 1996).
9. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1991); Lugg, For God and Country.
42 Kitsch

10. See William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of the
American Democracy (New York: Touchstone, 1992). While Greider
presents a damning indictment of the cozy relationships that exist
among government, corporations, and news reporting, he omits his
own “sin” in this arena. Greider fails to mention the close financial
relationship between Whittle Communications and Lamar Alexander,
the U.S. Secretary of Education at the time of publication. Whittle was
positioning itself to be a major player in the Bush-era school choice
proposal by developing a system of for-profit private schools. A
number of commentators had noted the apparent conflict of interest
between Alexander and Whittle. While the federal school choice idea
failed to generate any congressional enthusiasm, Greider’s silence on
this specific issue is instructive, given his own connection to Whittle.
He unwittingly documents this in his notes. Greider lists a book that
he published with Whittle Direct Books, The Trouble With Money, (1989).
See p. 420, note number 2 in Greider, Who Will Tell the People.
11. While public television and radio supporters might disagree,
public broadcasting must retain a certain level of market share in order
to appeal to the corporate donors, who are vital to noncommercial,
yet increasingly, commercial public broadcasting.
12. Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, p. 106.
13. Walter Karp, “Who Decides What Is News? (Hint: It’s not
Journalists),” Utne Reader, November-December 1989, p. 62.
14. W. Lance Bennett, “Constructing Publics and Their Opinions,”
Political Communication, 1993, Volume 10, Number 3, p. 107.
15. Laurence I. Barrett, Gambling with History: Ronald Reagan in the
White House (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1983), p. 445.
16. Eugene L.Roberts, Jr., and Douglas B.Ward, “The Press,
Protesters, and Presidents,” in The White House: The First Two Hundred
Years, Frank Freidel and William Pencak (eds.) (Boston: Northeastern
University Press, 1994), p. 126. The management of presidential news
is not always done well. The early Clinton administration was
spectacularly inept in putting its best face forward. It wasn’t until
Leon Panetta, an old Washington hand, was appointed as Chief of Staff
that the Clinton White House became more adept at “spin control.”
17. See Edwin M.Yoder, Jr., “Using the White House,” in The White
House: The First Two Hundred Years, Frank Freidel and William Pencak
(eds.) (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), p. 162.
18. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 27–30.
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 43

19. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, pp. 90–102.

20. Molly Ivins, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (New York:
Vintage Books, 1991), p. 140.
21. See Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War On Drugs and the
Politics of Failure (New York: Little Brown, 1996). “Costly, destructive,
and failing in its state mission, the War on Drugs is government lunacy
beyond the wildest waste-fraud-and-abuse accusations of Rush
Limbaugh and Ross Perot. Yet we soldier on, speaking the language of
war, writing the budgets of war, carrying the weapons of war, and
suffering the casualties of war. We’ve trapped ourselves in a classic
self-fulfilling prophecy. That the merest contact with drugs now may
cost you your job, your home, or your freedom only reinforces our
belief that drugs radiate a supernatural evil like Kryptonite,” p. viii.
22. Murray Edelman, “The Political Language of the Helping
Professions,” Politics and Society, 1974, Volume 4, Number 4, p. 303.
23. Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, p. 336. See also Joseph R. Gusfield,
Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press). The temperance movement is an
example of status politics. By attacking drinking, a fair number of
native-born Protestants who shunned drinking out of religious
conviction could politically demonize immigrant and non-immigrant
Catholics, who could drink, and limit Catholic political and economic
power.
24. Edelman, “The Political Language of the Helping
Professions,” p. 308.
25. Pat Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the
Use and Abuse of Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 240–
61; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992).
26. This is not a particularly recent observation, but the PRolicy
power of racist imagery has intensified. See Hacker, Two Nations; Lugg,
For God and Country; Lillian B.Rubin, Families on the Fault Line: America’s
Working Class Speaks About the Family, the Economy, Race and Ethnicity
(New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 39; Alvy L. King, “Richard
M.Nixon, Southern Strategies and Desegregation of Public Schools,” in
Richard M.Nixon: Politician, President, Administrator, Leon Friedman and
William F.Levantrosser (eds.) (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991);
David O.Sears, “Symbolic Racism,” in Eliminating Racism: Profiles in
Controversy, Phyllis A. Katz and Dalmas A Tayler (eds.) (New York:
44 Kitsch

Plenum Press, 1989), pp. 53–84; Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion:

Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States (New York:
The Guilford Press, 1995); and Joe L.Kincheloe, Shirley R.Steinberg,
and Aaron D. Gresson, III (eds.) Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
27. Marjorie Randon Hershey, “Election Research as Spectacle:
The Edelman Vision and the Empirical Study of Elections,” Political
Communication, Volume 10, Number 3, p. 124.
28. Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, p. 78.
29. See Juliet B.Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected
Decline of Leisure, (New York, Basic Books, 1991).
30. Charles E.Lindblom and Edward J.Woodhouse, The Policy-
Making Process, 3rd edition (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993), pp.
126–38.
31. William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American
Democracy (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 300.
32. Ibid.
33. Lugg, For God and Country, p. 28.
34. Ernest R.House and Carolyn Haug, “Riding The Bell Curve: A
Review,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Summer 1995,
Volume 17, Number 2, pp. 263–72; Stephanie Coontz, The Way We
Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic
Books, 1992).
35. Shipman, The Evolution of Racism; Hacker, Two Nations.
36. See Joe L.Kincheloe and Shirley R.Steinberg, “Who Said It
Can’t Happen Here?” in Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined, Joe
L.Kincheloe, Shirley R.Steinberg, and Aaron D.Gresson, III, (eds.),
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 3–47.
37. Catherine A.Lugg, “Attacking Affirmative Action: Social
Darwinism as Public PRolicy,” in Measured Lies: The Bell Curve Examined,
Joe L.Kincheloe, Shirley R.Steinberg, and Aaron D. Gresson, III (eds.)
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 374–76. See also Michael
Lind, Up From Conservatism:Why the Right is Wrong for America (New York:
Free Press, 1996), pp. 196–99.
38. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 19–20; Sara Diamond, Roads to
Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States
(New York: The Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 210–11; Frances Fox Piven
and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare,
Updated edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), pp. 369–70. Ed
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 45

Meese, in particular, notes the help the Heritage Foundation lent to

the early Reagan administration. See Edwin Meese III, With Reagan: The
Inside Story (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992), pp. 59–60.
39. “Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America,” produced by Stephen
Talbot, written by Peter J.Boyer and Stephen Talbot, Broadcast
February 28, 1995, WGBH Educational Foundation, 1995.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid. The comment was made by Paul Begala, a Clinton advisor.
42. “Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America;” John M.McGuire,
“Truth Detector’ Steps Up to Take on Limbaugh,” St. Louis Post-
Dispatch, August 14, 1994, C, 9:1; William Rentschler, “Who Asked for
Your Opinion,” Chicago Tribune, February 24, 1995, 1, 15:2.
43. While not a par ticularly dispassionate presentation, Al
Franken’s book is very helpful in providing original quotes. See Al
Franken, Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot (New York: Delacorte Press,
1996), p. 15. In reference to this quote, these were brave words for a
man who was once “on” unemployment.
44. “Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America.”
45. Franken, Rush Limbaugh, p. 9.
46. “Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America;” Ray Perkins, Jr.,
“Limbaugh’s Logical Laziness,” Christian Science Monitor, August 1,
1995, 18:2.
47. “Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America.”
48. “Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America;” James P.Pinkerton,
“Finally, A Voice for Martyrs on the Right,” Los Angeles Times, May 4.
1995, B, 7:5; David Remnick, “Day of the Dittohead: Rush Limbaugh
Entertains, But His Mean, Conspiratorial Message Has a Serious
Future,” Washington Post, February 20, 1994, C, 1:1.
49. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and
the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
50. “Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America.”
51. Frontline: Rush Limbaugh’s America;” Edward Epstein,
“The Mouths That Roared,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 25,
1994, S. 1:1.
52. For a discussion of Kitsch within the Nazi movement, see
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern
Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 304. “Nazism was the ultimate
expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent.
Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death.
46 Kitsch

The Third Reich was the creation of ‘kitsch men,’ people who
confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and
who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of
criticism, difficulty and insight.”
53. Maria Ettinger, “The Pocahontas Paradigm, or Will the
Subaltern Please Shut Up?” in Tilting the Tower: Lesbians Teaching Queer
Subjects, Linda Garber (ed.) (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 51–55.
54. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 9–11.
55. Kenneth M.Dolbeare and Patricia Dolbeare, American Ideologies:
The Competing Political Beliefs of the 1970s (Chicago: Markham
Publishing Company, 1971), pp. 3–4
56. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 9–11.
57. Fredrick M.Wirt and Michael W.Kirst, Schools in Conflict: The
Politics of Education, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: McCutchan Publishing, 1992),
p. 55. James W.Loewen attacks this more directly. See Loewen, Lies My
Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, (New
York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 9–27.
58. Cameron McCarthy and Michael W.Apple, “Race, Class and
Gender in Amer ican Educational Researc h: Toward a
Nonsynchronous Parallelist Position,” in Class, Race, & Gender in
American Education, Lois Weis (ed.) (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1988), pp. 9–39. While McCarthy and Apple omit any
mention of sexual orientation, given the rancorous policy debates
surrounding Outcome-Based Education (OBE) and curriculum
content, orientation should not be ignored. See William Lowe Boyd,
Catherine A.Lugg, and Gerald L. Zahorchak, “Social Traditionalists,
Relig ious Conser vatives, and the Politics of Outcome-Based
Education: Pennsylvania and Beyond,” Education and Urban Society,
May 1996, Volume 28, Number 3, pp. 347–65.
59. Arnold Vedlitz, Conservative Mythology and Public Policy in
America (New York, Praeger, 1988), p. 10.
60. Vedlitz, Conservative Mythology, pp. 6–7; for a broader
discussion, see Murray Edelman, “The Political Language of the
Helping Professions,” Politics and Society, Fall 1974, Volume 4, Number
4, pp. 295–310; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
61. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York:
Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1979), p. 469.
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 47

62. Catherine A.Lugg, “Calling for Community in a Conservative

Age,” in Expertise versus Responsiveness in Children’s Worlds: Politics in
School, Home and Community Relationships, Maureen McClure and Jane
Clark Lindle (eds.) (Washington, DC: The Palmer Press, 1997), pp.
101–10.
63. Ideological inconsistency has been the bane of the modern
conser vative movement since 1945. See George H.Nash, The
Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (New York: Basic
Books, Inc. Publishers, 1976), p. 179. Cleavages have waxed and
waned, sometimes exploding into the open, such as during the 1992
Republican convention. See Lugg, For God and Country, p. 16.
64. Vedlitz, Conservative Mythology, p. 153.
65. See Diamond, Roads to Dominion; David H.Bennett, The Party of
Fear: The American Far Right from Nativism to the Militia Movement, Revised
edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
66. John Patrick Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New
York: W.W.Norton, 1992); Richard Brosio, A Radical Democratic Critic of
Capitalist Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 547–622.
67. See Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement, p. xii; Jerome
L.Himmelstein, “The New Right,” in The New Christian Right, Robert
C.Liebman and Robert Wuthnow (eds.) (New York: Aldine Publishing
Company, 1983), p. 15; Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement,
Revised edition (New York: Twayne Publishing, 1993), p. 7; Diamond,
Roads to Dominion, pp. 8–9.
68. Bennett, The Party of Fear, pp. 183–98; 273–331.
69. The fear of communism led to heavy FBI surveillance of any
group perceived to be “subversive,” especially those espousing greater
civil right protections for African-Americans, Hispanic Americans,
women, and gays and lesbians. See Loewen, pp. 224–8; Amy Swerdlow,
“Ladies’ Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace versus HUAC,” in
Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S.Women’s History, Ellen Carol
DuBois and Vicki L.Ruiz (eds.) (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 403,
406; Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal
Rights, 1945–1990, An Oral History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)
pp. 71, 91, 97; Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1993),
pp. 80, 83, 114, 134–35, 177, 180, 242–44, 279; and Larry Gross,
Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 180.
70. Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 9.
48 Kitsch

71. One of the most striking critiques of economic metaphysics is

presented by Sir Alexander Gray, in Adam Smith (London: The
Historical Association, 1948).
72. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 12–13.
73. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement, pp. 18–19.
74. Ibid., pp. 58–60.
75. Ibid., p. 205.
76. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 9–27.
77. Lugg, “Calling for Community in a Conservative Age.” See
also Bennett, The Party of Fear; Joel Spring, The American School: 1642–
1993 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994); and Carl F.Kaestle, Pillars of
the Republic: Common Schools and American Society (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1983).
78. David Barsamian, “Politics of the Christian Right: An
interview with Sara Diamond,” Z Magazine, June 1996, Volume 9,
Number 6, pp. 36–43.
79. See Diggins, The Rise and Fall of the American Left, p. 238. “The
Old Left died when communist Russia failed to fulfill its prophecies.”
80. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement, p. 128.
81. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 11–16; see also Bennett, The
Party of Fear.
82. Bennett, The Party of Fear; Diamond, Roads to Dominion; and One
Nation Under God, a film by Teodoro Maniaci and Francine M. Rzeznik,
3Z/Hourglass Productions, Inc., 1993. As gay activist Michael Bussee
states in the film, “I really think sometimes gays are the new
Communists…. We’re the evil now, we’re the ones trying to destroy
the fabric of America.”
83. Bennett, The Party of Fear, p. 456.
84. The defendants in the Oklahoma City bombing, with their
strong links to the Michigan militia and its ideology, undermined
political support for the militia movement.
85. A favorite and little-published photograph shows John Wayne
in espadrilles and very short shorts.
86. Coontz, The Way We Never Were, pp. 73–76.
87. Arnold Vedlitz, Conservative Mythology, pp. 7–8.
88. According to author Harry Otis, “Nobody new much about the
gay life outside of the cowboys, and that was natural to them. It’s
never been brought out, but they were definitely gay.” See Before
Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community, produced by
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 49

Rober t Rosenberg, John Scagliotti, and Greta Schiller. Before

Stonewall, Inc., in association with Alternative Media Information
Center, 1984. There is also an early movie with a gay cowboy, The
Soilers (1923) by Hal Roach. See Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet,
Revised edition, (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1995), pp.
25–26. A clip from this movie also is presented in the documentary,
Before Stonewall.
89. Such narrow sectarianism has been the bane of the modern
religious right. See Bennett, The Party of Fear, and Diamond, The Roads
to Dominion, but also Anson Shupe and William A.Stacey, Born Again
Politics and the Moral Majority:What Social Surveys Really Show (New York:
The Edwin Mellen Press, 1982) pp. 91–96.
90. Lugg, “Calling for Community in a Conservative Age.”
91. Coontz, The Way We Never Were, pp. 93–121 in particular.
92. Sidney E.Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 178; for a discussion of
the violent nature of European Christianity, see Loewen, Lies My Teacher
Told Me, pp. 32, 34.
93. Liberal and progressive political pundits typically have a
rhetorical field day with this. As Molly Ivins observed, “only if you are
a veteran or a war-monger are you fit to be president.” Molly Ivins,
Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 62.
See also Franken, pp. 54–55; and Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of
Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (New York: Harper
Perennial, 1990), pp. 251–57.
94. Frances Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through
Contemporary American Cultures, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p.
124; Winthrop S.Hudson, Religion in America, 3rd ed. (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981), pp. 450–53.
95. Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan (New York: Random House,
1995); Hyam Maccoby, The Myth-Maker: Paul and the Invention of
Christianity (New York: Harper and Row, 1986).
96. The most complete explanation of the Christian Triune God is
found in “The Creed of Saint Athanasius” (Quicunpue Vult):

…we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity,

neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.
For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son,
and another of the Holy Ghost.
50 Kitsch

But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-equal.
Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy
Ghost.
So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost
is God.
And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.

It is the most elegant explanation of the polytheism embedded within

mainstream Chr istianity, while still cling ing to the claim of
monotheism. Quotations from The Book of Common Prayer (1979), pp.
864–65.
97. Dallas A.Blanchard, The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Rise of
the Religious Right: From Polite to Firey Protest, (New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1994), p. 103.
98. Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill, p. 124.
99. Jerome Himmelstein, “The New Right,” in The New Christian
Right, Robert C.Liebman and Robert Wuthnow (eds.) (New York:
Aldine Publishing Company, 1983), p. 28. James A Speer, “The New
Christian Right and Its Parent Company: A Study in Political
Contrasts,” in New Christian Politics, David G.Bromley and Anson Shupe
(eds.) (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984), p. 20; David Snowball,
Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the Moral Majority (New York:
Praeger, 1991), pp. 41–42; Hudson, pp. 450–53.
100. Robert Zwier, “The New Christian Right and the 1980
Elections,” in New Christian Politics, David G.Bromley and Anson Shupe
(eds.) (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984), p. 187.
101. Ibid., p. 176. See also Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D.
Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American
Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), p. 132.
1 0 2 . Z w i e r, “ T h e N e w C h r i s t i a n R i g h t a n d t h e 1 9 8 0
Elections,” p. 176.
103. Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill, p. 124; Bennett, The Party of
Fear, p. 382.
104. Fitzgerald, Cities on a Hill, p. 125.
1 0 5 . Z w i e r, “ T h e N e w C h r i s t i a n R i g h t a n d t h e 1 9 8 0
Elections,” p. 175.
106. Hudson, Religion in America, pp. 449–50.
Kitsch and the American Political Spectacle 51

107. David Snowball, Continuity and Change in the Rhetoric of the

Moral Majority (New York: Praeger, 1991), p. 19.
108. Bennett, The Party of Fear, p. 395.
109. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, p. 178;
110. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 83.
111. Himmelstein, “The New Right,” p. 28; Speer, “The New
Christian Right and Its Parent Company,” p. 20; Snowball, Continuity
and Change, pp. 41–42; Hudson, Religion in America, pp. 450–53;
Diamond, Roads to Dominion, p. 166.
112. See Edelman’s discussion of the construction and uses of
symbolic enemies and leaders. Edelman, Constructing the Political
Spectacle, pp. 37–89.
113. Ralph Clark Chandler, “The Wicked Shall Not Bear Rule: The
Fundamentalist Heritage of the New Christian Right,” in New Christian
Politics, David G.Bromley and Anson Shupe, (eds.) (Macon: Mercer
University Press, 1984), pp. 44, 46.
114. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 197–206.
115. Chandler, “The Wicked Shall Not Bear Rule,” p. 55.
116. Fred S.Rosenau, “New Faces in New Places,” Phi Delta
Kappan, September 1981, Volume 63, Number 1, p. 6. See also Anne
C. Lewis, “Despite Conservative Appointments, ED May Save Itself
After All,” Phi Delta Kappan, September 1982, Volume 64, Number 1,
p. 3. “A graduate of Bob Jones University, he led the fight of the
Christian Right activists against Internal Revenue Service regulation of
segregated schools.”
117. Bennett, The Party of Fear, p. 389.
118. Snowball, Continuity and Change, p. 22.
119. Bennett, The Party of Fear, p. 388.
120. Chandler, “The Wicked Shall Not Bear Rule,” p. 56.
121. Shupe and Stacey, Bor n Again Politics and the Moral
Majority, p. 45.
122. Snowball, Continuity and Change, p. 23.
123. Bennett, The Party of Fear, pp. 401–02.
124. Ibid., p. 402.
125. Ibid., pp. 414–15.
126. Ibid., pp. 405–07, 413–15; Diamond, Roads to Dominion, pp.
249–50.
CHAPTER 3

Kitsch and Leadership

Politics is just like show business.

—Ronald Reagan, 19661

Given the pervasiveness of Kitsch within American culture, it is no

wonder that both actual and would-be leaders embrace Kitsched
proposals that are vivid in imagery and weak in detail. 2 Lyndon
Johnson declared “War on Poverty,” and a scant twenty years later
Ronald Reagan declared a “War on Dr ugs.” Despite the vast
complexities of the respective issues, both presidents offered easily
consumable PRolicy visions of a strife-free America to the television
electorate, refraining messy and horrendously complex social issues in
the most simplistic military terms. Poverty and drugs became symbolic
(and easily Kitsched) enemies of the American people. This does not
imply that such “wars” had no real-life consequences. On the contrary,
both served to regulate individuals deemed to be in need greater
control and to buy broader political and social quiescence. 3 This
strategy is characterized by Murray Edelman as:

…the dramaturgical poses of public officials and politicians who

display “courage” and “toughness” by requiring others, who lack
political clout, to suffer in dubious wars that arouse popular
enthusiasm in their early stages, or by espousing draconian criminal
penalties that have no effect on the incidence of crime, except,
perhaps, to increase it through their example of injustice and
violence.4

53
54 Kitsch

To declare that either war failed to eradicate these particular social

ills misses the political point. In many ways the campaigns largely
succeeded, but not in the manner in which they were presented to the
viewing public. Most importantly, the sheer Kitschiness of both the
“War on Poverty” and the “War on Drugs” gave their respective and
embattled presidents a PRolicy focus and much needed political
breathing room. For Johnson, the public’s attention was briefly
diverted away from the growing crisis in Vietnam; for Reagan, the
widening Iran-Contra scandal was diluted.
The skillful use of Kitsch provides those engaged in the televised
political spectacle an enormous amount of instant credibility and
power.5 Yet political leaders aren’t the only ones who employ Kitsch.
Various leaders and would-be leaders from all walks of life manipulate
cultural symbols to better their political or professional hands. One
need only to recall that former public high school principal, Joe Clark,
wielded a bat to punctuate his street-level policy point that he was a
strict, old-fashioned disciplinarian. Perhaps not surprisingly, he
received extensive media coverage and, subsequently a movie
portrayal, thanks in large part to the visual image he presented, as a
“take charge” kind of guy. Regardless of Clark’s (or his bat’s) actual
impact on the school, his Kitsched imagery of what it means to be a
school principal quickly became movie fodder.
Those particularly adept at reinforcing deeply held American
cultural myths (for example, America as God’s chosen country—
“Manifest destiny”) wield enormous power in shaping “who gets what,
when, and how.” This does not imply that successful pitchers of Kitsch
go unchallenged. However, they do achieve and maintain power with
greater apparent ease than those who fail. The discussion of Kitsch and
public policy now turns to an examination of “leadership,” which is
followed by an examination of how two politicians, Ronald Reagan and
Bill Clinton, have attempted to use Kitsch to their political advantage.

LEADERSHIP
America loves a leader, a person (typically, an Anglo male) 6 who will
take charge of any situation and “turn challenging opportunities into
remarkable successes.”7 Leaders are portrayed as decisive, insightful,
competent, highly personable, and yet forceful when situations merit
it. 8 They are also powerful condensation symbols, live composites of a
Kitsch and Leadership 55

given society’s history, cultural norms and expectations, political

ideologies, ideals, and prejudices.9 In the media age a leader is a hero,
be it Gary Cooper playing Sergeant York, Sylvester Stallone playing
various “Rambo” incarnations, or Ronald Reagan playing himself. 10
Contemporary leaders draw on the Kitsched imagery surrounding
“leadership” and then manipulate both the symbolism and how they
themselves are presented to the viewing public. Thanks to the power of
television leadership is a carefully scripted drama, complete with
heroes, suitable anti-heroes, and villains. 11 As Murray Edelman
observes:

In the age of mass communications dramaturgy has become more

central and the pattern it assumes more banal. The leader must be
constructed as innovator, as accepting responsibility for
governmental actions, as possessing qualities that followers lack, as
successful in his or her strategies in contrast to the mistakes of
earlier leaders, and, when unsuccessful, as the victim of insuperable
obstacles placed there by adversaries or enemies.12

Public schools and the media play a large role in defining just who (and
what) a leader should be. Although the standard leadership literature
goes to great lengths to claim anyone can wear the mantle of
leadership (if properly trained), 13 the broader American political
culture neatly dispenses with that myth. Between the Kitsched public
school curriculum, which focuses on “heroic American history,”14 and
various television shows and movies that spin heroic tales,15 we are
bombarded with very specific images of who “leaders” actually are.
Real leaders are white males, preferably Anglo and Protestant, lacking
facial hair, tall, and with business and/or military experience.16 And
they darn well better be straight.17 For all of the real political and
economic advances made by everyone else who falls outside of this
narrowly constructed category, the obstacles to leadership are
substantial but not insurmountable.18
While Kitsch aids the definition of leadership, leaders also use Kitsch
to solidify their position with the electorate and followers. Leaders are
skillful negotiators of society’s complexities, wielding Kitsch to cut
through modern and postmodern ambiguities. More cunning leaders also
employ Kitsch to neatly deflect some more obvious paradoxes involved
with their positions. As stated earlier, it helps to be male if one wishes to
56 Kitsch

be accorded a measure of instant credibility regarding one’s leadership

ability. Yet politically ambitious women have attained certain levels of
leadership by a strategic use of Kitsched imagery. For example, Phyllis
Schlafly, a longtime foe of the feminist movement, an anti-ERA activist,
and a herald trumpeter for traditional values, is of course deeply
nontraditional. Earning her law degree in the 1950s, when women were
vigorously discouraged from pursing advanced degrees (through social
pressure and outright discrimination),19 Schlafly has had a long career
working for various conservative causes since the 1960s. She now heads
her own political organization and think tank, the Eagle Forum, and is
part of the “Old Guard” of the U.S. political right.20
The paradox is this: if she actually lived her politics, Schlafly would
be a grandmother, quietly tending to hearth and home, far away from
the media spotlight. Schlafly has managed to adroitly skirt this stunning
incongruity by invoking the rubrics of “Traditional American Values”
for appropriate female behavior while displaying the proper leadership
traits, which are male. She cannot afford to be perceived as “female.”
According to Edelman, those:

who refuse to act chauvinistically are likely to be defined as weak,

ineffective and vulnerable to attack. Chauvinism therefore helps in
some measure to protect leaders from opposition. It frees them
from constraints and it cultivates hubris….21

In a patriarchal culture, Schlafly has been accorded a degree of

leadership and political credibility that has never been granted to her
ideological opponents. The supreme irony is that Schlafly benefits to a
greater degree from the women’s movement than do most American
women. Schlafly’s political career (like Jeane Kirkpatrick’s) also belies
the current professional leadership literature’s embrace of more
feminist (or even feminine) forms of leadership.22 While these styles may
well be more socially desirable, the overwhelming power of “Kitsched”
leadership provides a formidable deterrent to their widespread use.
The fact that leaders employ Kitsch does not imply that they lack
leadership skills. To the contrary, most leaders are extremely talented
and more than merely technically competent in fulfilling institutional
and political agendas. Yet it is important to recognize that Kitsch both
shapes the craft of leadership and our perceptions of who and what
leaders are and what they can do. A significant portion of leadership is
Kitsch and Leadership 57

concerned with image management, and more astute leaders have

“handlers” who ensure that their boss stays “on message” while the
message is reinforced by the proper visuals.23 Such a message is, by
design, a soundbite, an advertisement. The best political advertising
employs easily recognized and simplistic cultural symbolism. Kitsch,
because of its simplicity, is but one tool used by leaders. The discussion
now turns to two pungent examples of Kitsch and political leadership:
Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

AN ACTOR’S LIFE: RONALD REAGAN

Without a doubt, Ronald Reagan was the quintessential American
Kitsch man. As an actor, television ad man for General Electric,
governor of California, and president of the United States, he tossed
numerous Kitsched notions of “America” around with disarming and
charming ease. Depending on what the script (Hollywood or political)
called for, he could play the role of cowboy, preacher, soldier, or
America’s cheerleader-in-chief. Every role included a smile that was
calculated to impress millions of television viewers. Reagan and his
political handlers deliberately mentioned his movie and television
experiences while on the campaign stump. His use of self-deprecating
humor defused the charge that Reagan “was only an actor.” Reagan
beat his political opponents to the rhetorical punch by mocking his
own theatrical background. For example, during his first gubernatorial
campaign when he was asked what sort of governor he would make,
Reagan replied, “I don’t know, I’ve never played a governor.” 24
Yet, there was more than a grain of truth to his quip. Contrary to
the myth cultivated by Reagan’s political opponents, he was a far more
versatile and talented actor than he was given credit for being.
Although Reagan was certainly no Humphrey Bogart, he was good,
credible, and most importantly, believable. He could deliver a political
line in a way that was easily “bought” by the majority of the electorate.
Reagan drew on various cinematic scenes throughout his political
career. According to Reagan biographer and journalist Lou Cannon:

He [Reagan] watched movies whenever he could, and the movies were

the raw material from which he drew scenes and sustenance. He
converted movie material into his own needs. And he remained an
actor as well as a movie goer. He thought of himself as a performer,
58 Kitsch

and he believed that his performances had a purpose. He was an actor,

in the White House and out of it. Acting was what he did best.25

As both a movie and television actor, Ronald Reagan had been typecast
as the heroic American, be it the cowboy, soldier, or nice-guy
hometown boy who makes good (a la Horatio Alger). Later, these
Kitsched notions were easily incorporated into Reagan’s political
vision of what the United States should be as a nation.
These characters were more amenable to right-wing political
notions. As Reagan c heerfully admitted, he originally “was an
enthusiastic New Deal Democrat.” 26 Many of his Hollywood chums had
been deeply involved with progressive politics, and Reagan had been
similarly involved. Reagan recalled that, “I was a near-hopeless
hemophiliac liberal. I bled for ‘causes.’”27 But the Cold War and the
perceived threat of global communism prompted a profound shift in
his ideological outlook. Like many other liberals, Reagan became a
militant anti-communist. As president of the Screen Actors Guild
during the McCarthy era, he was a willing witness to the House Un-
American Committee (HUAC) hearings. He did not publicly “name
names” but neither did he hesitate to privately encourage other actors
to inform on their colleagues. According to actress Anne Revere,
Reagan told her, “It’s so simple. All you’ve got to do is just name a
couple of names that have already been named.” 28 Reagan also
supported the Hollywood blacklist of suspected communists, which
denied some people job opportunities for decades.29
By the early 1950s, Reagan’s own opportunities dimmed as his film
career drew to a close. But unlike those tarred by the Hollywood
blacklist, Reagan quickly found a second career, selling General
Electric’s corporate message for $125,000 a year.30 His contract called
for him to introduce the television program “General Electric
Theater,” star in a few of the productions, and make numerous visits to
GE plants around the country promoting the company’s corporate
line. This experience influenced Reagan in two ways. First, “GE was
known as a conservative and Republican company, and Reagan was
blending in.” 31 Second, “GE’s most important contribution to Reagan’s
political apprenticeship was not built-in appliances but built-in
audiences.”32 Ronald Reagan learned to hone a message, one in which
he increasingly believed, to present to sympathetic audiences. As
Cannon explained:
Kitsch and Leadership 59

The script that emerged from this corporate-sponsored odyssey was

patriotic, antigovernment, anticommunist, and probusiness, and was
homogenized enough that it could be used before any audience
anywhere in the country. It was known as The Speech. While
ostensibly and at first genuinely non-partisan, The Speech was on
the cutting edge of the emerging debate between liberals who
wanted the federal government to become more activist in reducing
social and economic inequities and conservatives who wanted the
government to spend less and leave business alone.33

“The Speech” was modified at will by Reagan to better play to specific

audiences. Typically, he would inject Hollywood references mixed with
homey cultural bromides (such as tales of heroic self-reliance and
volunteerism) to add rhetorical “oomph” to his message. The altered
Speech also became Reagan’s overriding political mantra. By 1980, the
Reagan who had been a New Deal Liberal easily quipped,
“Government does not solve problems, it subsidizes them.”34
Television also shaped Reagan, for it was a media format that he
readily understood. Combined with his GE experiences, Reagan held
an enormous strategic advantage when he later entered the political
sphere. “Few politicians of Reagan’s generation were so thoroughly
well-versed in the techniques of PR. Nor did they easily adapt to,
much less enjoy, the bright glare of the television studio lights.” 35 In
contrast to Reagan’s ease with television, candidate and later president
Richard Nixon fared poorly under the harsh glare. Nixon distrusted
the media and took pains to avoid the klieg lights unless he tightly
controlled the venue. 36 Reagan, on the other hand, reveled in the
spotlight. Unlike Nixon, he also was in a unique position to benefit
from the change in political repor ting triggered by television.
According to journalist Hedrick Smith:

On television, politics becomes seen and presented as cinema: a

series of narrative episodes about political personalities, not an
abstract running debate on policy. To the mass audience, issues are
secondary. The mass audience focuses on the hero, with whom it
identifies unless he does something so outrageous that it falls out of
sympathy with him. Television feels driven to dramatize the news,
to give it a plot, theme, and continuity in order to make it
comprehensible to a mass audience. Television needs action and
60 Kitsch

drama. It needs to boil down complexities. It needs identifiable

characters.37

In other words, television news needs Kitsch. Reagan, with his

substantial theatrical experience, was easily the most capable politician
of his era to meet this need. He reveled in playing the all-American
hero and would remind political audiences that he was the “Gipper,”
the football hero of bygone days. Reagan embodied a seductive mix of
theatrics and mass media that most Americans found irresistible.
Reagan also had the help of longtime aide Michael Deaver. Deaver had
worked for Reagan when he was governor of California, and he served in
the first Reagan administration as deputy chief of staff. As the third
member of the presidential “troika” (the other members were Chief of
Staff James Baker and Counselor to the President Edwin Meese), Deaver
was one of three equals vital to ensuring the administration’s political
success. Yet, Deaver played a very different role from either Baker or
Meese, both of whom were involved in carrying out Reagan’s policy
agenda. In contrast, Deaver held the critical role of PRolicy (public
relations public policy) formation. Considered to be “a public relations
genius, the vicar of visuals,”38 he knew “how to ‘stage’ Reagan—what
lighting, symbols, settings to use—to ensure Ronald Reagan and his
messages would be heard, and, more importantly, felt.”39 It was up to
Deaver to sell both Reagan and his ideas to a televised electorate.
Reagan, through his own and his handlers’ skillful use of Kitsched
imagery, was the telegenic embodiment of conservative ideology and
its constituent symbols. He had played the roles of the cowboy
(libertarian) and soldier (militant anti-communist) in his Hollywood
days and easily wove in references to both in his speeches and off-the-
cuff remarks. Given his divorced status, Reagan was a problematic
preacher (social traditionalist), but he made enough rhetorical gestures
to give the impression that he was on God’s side. For example, in a
March 1981 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a
meeting of serious-minded and politically active social traditionalists,
newly inaugurated President Reagan declared:

We have one agenda. Just as surely as we seek to put our financial

house in order and rebuild our nation’s defenses, so too we seek to
protect the unborn, to end the manipulation of school children by
Utopian planners, and permit the acknowledgment of a Supreme
Kitsch and Leadership 61

Being in our classrooms just as we allow such acknowledgment in

other pubic institutions.40

But given his facility for rhetorical embellishment, Reagan’s need for
meticulous scripting was apparent, particularly after he became
president. He was accustomed to adjusting a given political message at
will to suit the audience, something he had been doing since his GE
days. Yet Reagan’s facile use of anecdotes and very descriptive statistics
tended to far outstrip anything based in reality.41 For example, in a
1981 “Question and Answer” session, he was asked how his
administration viewed mandatory busing for public sc hool
desegregation, a very pressing issue of its day. Reagan’s response is
instructive.

I think this whole thing maybe has grown out of the extent to which
the Federal Government has injected itself into something that
traditionally was believed to belong at the lowest local level, the
school district, that there, where the parents and those hired to
teach their children could get together and work out how they
wanted their children educated. To say nothing of the fact that I
think busing has proven a failure. Now, I support fully the theory
behind busing or what promoted it, the idea of equality of
oppor tunity, no segregation. And yet, we’ve got a reverse
segregation.
I think it’s significant that Mrs. Brown, the woman who brought
about the desegregation of schools with her decision, her personal
story—maybe you’re all aware of it. It’s, I think, very interesting.
When she was a little girl they lived next to a school. But then, in
the racial prejudice of the times in areas in the United States, she
had to walk about 1/2 mile beyond that school to go to the school
that she was permitted to go. And on cold and wet days and so
forth, she told of crying in this long walk when the school was right
next door. So, she—the Brown decision—she started this fight after
she grew up so that her little girl wouldn’t have to do this. And not
too long ago, she said, “What I didn’t have in mind is that my little
girl now is picked up in a bus and taken past the school near our
home and taken to a school several miles away.” And she said, “I
didn’t have that in mind.42
62 Kitsch

Besides the obvious misinterpretation of various U.S. Supreme Court

decisions regarding segregated public schooling, the mandatory busing
to designed alleviate it, and the mistaken notion of rever se
segregation, the “homey” quote attributed to “Mrs. Brown” was
complete fiction.43
But Reagan’s embrace of invented and Kitsched anecdotes wasn’t
particularly news to either reporters or academics. As one presidential
scholar observed, “Ronald Reagan is the first modern President whose
contempt for the facts is treated as a charming idiosyncrasy.” 44
Reagan’s handlers were well aware of his strong penchant for
rhetorical embellishment and justified his behavior as merely an actor’s
prerogative to strengthen a performance. 45 In addition, Reagan’s
nodding acquaintance with factual information was exploited by
members of his own administration. In other words, Reagan also fell
victim to Kitsch.

Reagan was apt to accept as valid any story, statistic or policy

recommendation that squared with his prejudices. He was often an
easy mark for subordinates trying to promote their own agendas,
especially when the agendas were disguised in Reaganesque
phrases.46

Such freewheeling embellishment and manipulated scripting would

have been amusing if they had not had real-life policy implications.
Columnist Molly Ivins described the surrealism of the Reagan-era by
stating “having Reagan for president was like finding Castro in the
refr igerator.” 47 Jour nalist Mark Her tsgaard’s assessment of
Reaganesque pronouncements was far harsher:

The Reagan years seem destined to be regarded as one of the most

fantastic eras in American history, a time when the national political
debate was dominated by a bundle of ideas that almost without
exception were contradicted by objective facts, common sense or
both. In economic policy, there was the President’s confident
assertion that the government could slash taxes and escalate military
spending without bloating the deficit, and that it could cut social
spending without ravaging the poor. In foreign policy, there was the
notion that Nicaragua, a country of some three million
impoverished peasants, posed a sufficiently grave threat to U.S.
Kitsch and Leadership 63

national security to justify the waging of an illegal war that made a

mockery of America’s claim to global moral leadership. Similarly
shallow-brained views prevailed across the entire spectrum of
public policy, from civil rights and the environment to nuclear
weapons, drugs and terrorism.48

Reagan’s fondness for Kitsched political responses became painfully

evident during his second term in office when the Iran-Contra scandal
came to light. When questioned by television reporters in early
November 1986, “Mr. President, do we have a deal going with Iran of
some sort?” Reagan claimed “that the story that has come out of the
Middle East and that to us has no foundation—that all of that is making
it more difficult for us in our effort to get the other hostages free.” 49
Later that month when queried again by reporters he flat out lied
declaring, “We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything
else for hostages, nor will we.”50 But of course the U.S. had traded
arms for hostages. 51 Reagan, whether as an actor or a politician, had
always enjoyed playing the role of the honest hero, the proverbial
straight shooter. He could hardly admit that he had approved of illegal
arms shipments to the much hated government of Iran. Nor could he
confess that he had repeatedly lied about it to the viewing public.
Reagan had told some spectacular fibs throughout his tenure at the
White House, 52 but none as damaging to either his or the nation’s
credibility as this.53
Reagan steadfastly rejected this uncomfortable role of villain and
denied his dealings with a rogue nation even while subordinates were
dismissed, attempted suicide, and were indicted for criminal
wrongdoing and his presidency lay imperiled over the fallout from
Iran-Contra. The entire matter was further complicated by Reagan’s
own befuddled testimony before the Senate’s Tower committee, which
tried to ascertain “What did Reagan know and when did he know it.”
According to Cannon:

…neither (Sen. John) Tower nor his colleagues Brent Scowcroft and
Edmund Muskie knew what to make of Reagan’s performance. They
had not imagined that he would be devoid of any independent
recollection or so mentally confused, and they thought it useless to
question him further.
Reagan’s recollections were useless.54
64 Kitsch

By 1987, Reagan’s presidency was in name only. 55 The Iran-Contra

affair had taken a huge toll on Reagan’s credibility with the nation and
even with his own party. The scandal and his own increasingly fragile
health also exacted a toll upon the man. Reagan withdrew from
governing, content to spend his waning presidential days watching old
television shows and movies. One political commentator noted, “the
sagging synapses of the presidential forebrain,” 56 and even some of his
aides mentioned the possibility of invoking the Twenty-fifth
Amendment—presidential removal.57 With the revelation in late 1994
that Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, much of his
behavior made sense, particularly during his second term. Yet Reagan’s
ardent embrace of “the beautiful lie” 58 of Kitsch allowed him to
complete his second term in office relatively undisturbed by either his
political enemies or a mostly admiring media. 59 His consistent and
sunny promotion of political Kitsch, which had brought him to power,
ensured that he would remain in power, ironically, if only as the
Kitsched version of himself. Jour nalists Jane Mayer and Doyle
McManus concluded, Reagan was “larger than life yet less than
imagined.”60

CAMELOT: KITSCH, KENNEDY, AND CLINTON

One of the most memorable images of the 1992 presidential campaign
was a picture from the early 1960s of a teenaged Bill Clinton shaking
hands with President John F.Kennedy. Unveiled at the Democratic
Par ty’s nominating convention, the photograph was a powerful
condensation symbol for both party loyalists and other Americans
longing for better times, particularly better economic times. Clinton
and his handlers readily invoked the legacy of Camelot:—the Kennedy
legend in which presidential leadership was supposedly exerted with
youth, intelligence, and grace. 61 Suc h nostalgic longings were
reinforced by the phrase “the torch has been passed,” which was a
powerful reminder of JFK’s own political rhetoric. The frequently
displayed photograph was evidence of a supposedly historic link
between the Kennedy and Clinton eras. And that link was Camelot.
Yet Camelot refers both to the Kennedy administration and a
Broadway musical based on the heroic legend of King Arthur and his
court. That symbol of romantic and noble deeds remains ripe for
Kitsching. In the early 1960s, John F.Kennedy used the romantic
Kitsch and Leadership 65

(and televised) symbol of Camelot to bolster support for the space

program and to polish an otherwise highly ambiguous political
record. 62 The Camelot symbolism gained additional power and
poignancy in the years immediately following his assassination,
invoked by all sorts of would-be political heirs to justify a host of
campaigns and legislative agendas.
Clinton’s embrace of the Camelot legacy was perhaps the most
successful attempt to do so in recent memory. 63 He was the first
Democratic presidential candidate since Kennedy to sport a youthful
image and a seemingly effortless charm. That he ran against the charm-
impaired George Bush was also a major bonus. If Bush could candidly
admit he “lacked the vision thing,” 64 Clinton could espouse any number
of visions for the nation, although at times in exquisite and
excruciating detail.65 By evoking the symbol of Camelot while stressing
that he was a “New Democrat” (i.e., neither a liberal nor progressive),
Clinton reassured old-time Democratic party loyalists while he
courted more conservative-minded voters. He also reached out to
younger voters via MTV and various talk shows.66
For Clinton’s detractors, however, the embrace of Camelot (or the
Kitsching of Kitsch) signaled a return to an activist government, the
likes of which had not been seen since the 1960s.67 Clinton’s frequent
claims of being a “New Democrat” were dismissed out of hand. To
Clinton’s conservative political opponents, Camelot and Clinton
represented more than just a return of the dreaded liberals but the re-
emergence of activist gover nment. 68 And Clinton’s seemingly
effortless blending of Camelot with Reaganeque rhetoric and a cunning
use of “talk-show politics” fueled their suspicions of “Slick Willie.”69
The use of Camelot continued into the early days of the Clinton
presidency. Prior to the inauguration, Clinton paid a highly
photographed visit to Kennedy’s grave. The image presented to the
American public was of Clinton, alone but for a solitary white rose,
kneeling before the graveside of the fallen president, with head
bowed. 70 One almost would have thought that Clinton might have
donned medieval armor for the occasion of honoring a fallen liege. A
few days later during his inaugural address he stated, “My fellow
Americans, you, too, must play your part in our renewal. I challenge a
new generation of young Americans to a season of service,”71 language
that again inspired images of John F.Kennedy and a romantic era of
both government and the people “doing good.”
66 Kitsch

The new administration quickly ran into some painful political

realities, however. Clinton’s presidential victory was very slim indeed.
According to Haynes Johnson, “he won with only 43 percent of the
votes and ran behind the winning marg ins of nearly every
congressional member….” 72 Yet, Clinton’s use of Camelot raised
expectations (and fears) that the administration would set an ambitious
social policy agenda. 73 The administration promptly overplayed its
political hand and undermined its fragile support through a series of
missteps and outright blunders.
In particular, Lani Guinier, a well-respected law professor, then at
the University of Pennsylvania, had been slated to be the Assistant
Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice.
Unfortunately, she fell victim to a highly coordinated media smear
campaign that caricatured her academic writings and labeled her the
“Quota Queen.” The administration, sensing the heat, first failed to
adequately defend its nominee and then bungled the entire process of
withdrawing her name from consideration. 74 Central to the debate
were race and gender, two topics the new administration (as “New
Democrats”) was unwilling to address. Guinier also did not meet the
Kitsched definition of a “leader.” As journalist Elizabeth Drew
observed:

A black woman with prominent eyes and hair combed back and
bursting into puffs at the sides, and with a strange name and radical-
sounding ideas, was vulnerable. She was too different. She was
smar t and had a strong personality. She made some people
uncomfor table. The white males who—all the progress
nothwithstanding—still dominated Capitol Hill couldn’t empathize
with her, joke with her. There were no grounds for the easy
exchanges that stood as signs of acceptance into the club.75

By the time her nomination was finally withdrawn, Guinier had been
professionally tarred as a radical “quota queen,” and the administration
looked politically foolish and inept.
Clinton, early into his first term, also enraged key Democratic
congressional leaders (i.e., Senator Sam Nunn),76 with his attempt to
overturn the military’s long-standing policy of barring and dismissing
openly gay and lesbian personnel. Although the policy had been
employed in a highly indiscriminate and arbitrary manner for a period
Kitsch and Leadership 67

of almost fifty years (and had occasionally led to sweeping witch-hunts,

particularly of military women), 77 the gay-ban had the unqualified
support of the military’s top brass.78 The administration was forced to
square off between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a good proportion of
the U.S. Senate. The terms of the debate quickly deteriorated into
“real fighting men” (knights in shining armor?) versus “those with
serious cooties.” A number of distinguished senator s were
photographed touring a navy ship “peering into closely stacked bunks
and at bathrooms, and inquiring solemnly about the number of sailors
per facility.”79 The whole gays-in-the-military issue was one of image
preservation: of maintaining the Kitsched (and very butch) solider/
leader. Once again Clinton and his administration appeared to be
politically foolish and inept.
The political upheavals over Lani Guinier’s possible appointment and
the military ban on gays highlighted the early Clinton administration’s
clumsiness in using political Kitsch. Seared by seemingly unrelenting bad
publicity, Clinton sought out the advice of Reagan-era spinmeister
Michael Deaver. Subsequently, the administration brought in David
Gergen, a columnist with U.S. News & World Report and seasoned regular
on the various “talking head” television news shows to coordinate the
administration’s message. Gergen, a communications expert who had
served in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations,80 was perceived as
a political centrist who would be able to hone the administration’s
message and burnish its public image.
Gergen set about reshaping the administration, both in style and
substance, moving the symbolism and political rhetoric away from
Camelot and towards the icon of “efficient management.” 81 He pushed
for an end to the lingering debate over the military gay-ban, noting
that compromise was better than outright defeat. Clinton acquiesced
to an agreement with the Joint Chiefs and the Congress. The new
policy would be: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The military would not ask
prospective recruits and current personnel about their sexual
orientation so long as the personnel remained silent. While the new
policy did nothing to stop witch-hunts, and enraged Clinton’s gay and
lesbian supporters, 82 it brought the administration some much needed
breathing room from the political poundings it was receiving.
Although Camelot had provided powerful election year symbolism, it
had sorely hamstr ung the administration in its early political
maneuverings. Clinton and his advisors badly overestimated the degree
68 Kitsch

of support such rhetoric and symbolism would engender. In addition,

their early missteps, inconsistent and conflicting policy statements, and
inelegant backtracking further undermined their political position with
Congress and the general public. By the time the Clinton administration
was ready to send its major (and politically risky) policy proposal of the
first term to Congress for consideration (i.e., health care), Camelot and
its attendant Kitsched symbolism were abandoned. The absence of the
romantic and heroic rhetoric (a la Camelot) was incongruous, given the
heady atmosphere in which the proposal had been conceived in early
1993. But the ambitious proposal faced numerous delays and bitter
opposition in making its way to Capitol Hill. By the time health care
reform was fully debated in the summer of 1994, the Clinton
administration shied away from any references to Camelot. They had
proved to be too incendiary for a political opposition already spoiling for
a fight over policy direction and the attendant symbolism.
The Clinton administration’s failure to pass systemic health care
reform marked the end of efforts to expand the U.S. welfare state.
Clinton’s ineptitude also cost the Democrats control of the House in
the 1994 congressional elections, an event not seen since the 1950s.
The Kennedy era and any Kitsched references to it were as dead and
gone as King Arthur and his court. Yet, Clinton did not abandon
political Kitsch per se. After the disastrous 1994 mid-term elections,
Clinton embraced the dominant political ideology and its Kitsched
symbols—American Conservatism—and worked to end “welfare as we
know it.” It would be a striking departure from Camelot.

NOTES
1. Elizabeth Drew, Portrait of an Election: The 1980 Presidential
Campaign (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), p. 263.
2. Murray Edelman made a similar observation over twenty years
ago. “In the symbolic worlds evoked by the language of the helping
professions speculations and verified fact readily merge with each other.
Language dispels the uncertainty in speculation, changes facts to make
them serve status distinctions, and reinforces ideology. The names for
forms of mental illness, forms of delinquency, and for educational
capacities are the basic terms. Each of them normally involves a high
degree of unreliability in diagnosis, in prognosis, and in the prescription
of rehabilitative treatments; but also entail unambiguous constraints
Kitsch and Leadership 69

upon clients, especially their confinement and subjection to the staff and
the rules of a prison, school or hospital. The confinement and constraints
are converted into liberating and altruistic acts by defining them as
education, therapy, or rehabilitation….” See Murray Edelman, “The
Political Language of the Helping Professions,” Politics & Society, Volume
4, Number 3, 1974, p. 299.
3. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The
Functions of Public Welfare, Updated edition (New York: Vintage Books,
1993), pp. 343–99; Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers
and the History of Welfare (New York: The Free Press, 1994), pp. 287–
306; Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 22–43.
4. See Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations
Shape Political Conceptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), pp. 30–31. Emphasis in the original.
5. Catherine A.Lugg, For God and Country: Conservatism and American
School Policy (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 27–30. See also Anthony
Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson, Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse
of Persuasion (New York: W.H.Freeman and Company, 1991), pp. 50–56;
Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, The Interplay of
Influence: News, Advertising, Politics and the Mass Media, 4th edition
(Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 111–52.
6. Jo Ann Mazzarella and Thomas Grundy, “Portrait of a Leader,”
in School Leadership: Handbook for Excellence, 2nd edition., Stuart C.
Smith and Philip K.Piele (eds.) (Eugene: University of Oregon, ERIC,
1989), p. 9. See also Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 37–65.
7. James M.Kouzes and Barry Z.Posner, The Leadership Challenge:
How to Keep Getting Extraordinary Things Done in Organizations (San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publications, 1995), p. xvii.
8. Larry Lashway, JoAnn Mazzarella, and Thomas Grundy,
“Portrait of a Leader,” in School Leadership: Handbook for Excellence, 3rd
edition, Stuart C.Smith and Philip K.Piele (eds.) (Eugene: University
of Oregon, ERIC, 1997), pp. 15–38.
9. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, p. 39.
10. Reagan and his handlers’ adroit use of “hero” imagery to
“snow” the press is detailed by Mark Hertsgaard. See Hertsgaard, On
Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency (New York: Schocken
Books, 1988), pp. 115–23, for one example.
70 Kitsch

11. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Douglas Kellner and Neil Postman all
make this point. See Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception,
District, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1990); Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
12. See Kouzes and Posner, The Leadership Challenge, and Stuart C.
Smith and Phillip K.Piele (eds.), School Leadership: Handbook for
Excellence, 3rd edition. (Eugene: University of Oregon, ERIC, 1997),
for two of many examples.
13. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, p. 40.
14. James W.Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your
American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 1995).
15. Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, pp.
120–21.
16. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 9–27; Edelman,
Constructing the Political Spectacle, p. 62. It could be argued that Bill
Clinton fails to meet the business/military experience criterion, yet
the disastrous Whitewater financial deal can be viewed as a feeble
attempt to gain business experience.
17. There are numerous instances of gay white men desperately
clinging to faux heterosexuality in the hopes of maintaining leadership
positions, be it in politics (Roy Cohn, Robert Bauman, and Terry
Dolan), business (Malcom Forbes), or music (Leonard Bernstein). See
Larry Gross, Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
18. M.Galen and A.T.Palmer, “Diversity: Beyond the Numbers
Game,” Business Week (August 14, 1995), pp. 60–61.
19. Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 186–206.
20. Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and
Political Power in the United States (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995),
pp. 168–70.
21. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, pp. 61–62.
22. There has been the emergence of feminist and/or feminine
leadership literature in the last few years. In particular, see Charol
Shakeshaft, Women in Educational Administration (Newbury Park, CA:
Sage Publications, 1989).
23. Jamieson, Dirty Politics, pp. 203–36.
Kitsch and Leadership 71

24. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 37.
25. Ibid., p. 64.
26. Ronnie Dugger, On Reagan: The Man and His Presidency (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), p. 3.
27. Ibid., p. 5.
28. Ibid., p. 9.
29. See Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (New York: Little, Brown
and Company, 1976). “I had gone from earning a hundred and forty
thousand a year (before the movie blacklist) to fifty and then twenty
and then, almost all of which was taken from by the Internal Revenue
Department…”, p. 134.
30. Dugger, On Reagan, p. 12. Reagan’s salary was quickly raised
to $150,000 a year.
31. Ibid., p. 13.
32. Cannon, President Reagan, p. 89.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p. 90.
35. Lugg, For God and Country, p. 30.
36. Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New
York: Random House, 1988), p. 425.
37. Ibid., p. 399.
38. Lugg, For God and Country, p. 53. See also Bob Schieffer and
Gary Paul Gates, The Acting President (New York: E.P.Dutton, 1989), p.
93; Nancy Reagan with William Novak, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy
Reagan (New York: Random House, 1989), p. 238; Kathleen Hall
Jamieson, Dirty Politics, p. 262; Cannon, President Reagan, p. 53; and
Smith, The Power Game, p. 414.
39. Lugg, For God and Country, p. 53.
40. Ronald Reagan, “Speech to the Conservative Political Action
Conference,” on March 20, 1981. Weekly Compilation of Presidential
Documents, March 23, 1981, Volume 17, Number 12, p. 329.
41. See Herbert Block, Herblock Through the Looking Glass (New
York: W.W.Norton, 1984), pp. 8–26; Molly Ivins, Molly Ivins Can’t Say
That, Can She? (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 104.
42. Ronald Reagan, Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents,
October 26, 1981, Volume 17, Number 43, p. 1162.
43. Lugg, For God and Country, pp. 82–83.
72 Kitsch

44. Attributed to James David Barber. See Hertsgaard, On Bended

Knee, p. 149.
45. Schieffer and Gates, The Acting President, pp. 175–76.
46. Cannon, President Reagan, p. 181.
47. Ivins, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? p. 105.
48. Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, p. 343.
49. Cannon, President Reagan, p. 676.
50. Ibid., p. 684.
51. Jane Mayer and Doyle MacManus, Landslide: The Unmaking of
the President, 1984–1988 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), pp.
271–385.
52. Many of Reagan’s falsehoods were glossed over by the
mainstream press, although he was savaged in more “lefty” publications
and books. See Hertsgaard, p. 343; Ivins, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can
She? p. 103; and in particular, Barbara Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our
Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (New York: HarperPerennial,
1991), pp. 82–85, for an essay entitled “The Unfastened Head of
State—1987.”
53. Cannon, President Reagan, pp. 653–738. See also Mayer and
MacManus, Landslide, pp. 292–314.
54. Cannon, President Reagan, p. 710.
55. Mayer and MacManus, Landslide, pp. 388–90.
56. Ehrenreich, The Worst Years of Our Lives, p. 85; Mayer and
MacManus, Landslide, p. 378.
57. Ivins, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? p. 106. Lou Cannon
retells a similar story but dismisses it out of hand for it “does not
withstand historical scrutiny,” President Reagan, p. 707. Unfortunately
for Cannon, it is his analysis that does not withstand such scrutiny.
58. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of
the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 304.
59. Hertsgaard, On Bended Knee, p. 343. According to Jane Mayer
and Doyle McManus, “The final judgment of the congressional
committees was polite but unsparing. Even the president’s staunchest
defenders said they were profoundly disturbed by what they had
learned. A bipartisan majority concluded that the president had, in
fact, violated his oath of office. Congress had no stomach for the idea
of impeaching Ronald Reagan in the last year of his tenure, but the
committees gently charged him with an impeachable offense all the
same,” Landslide, p. 390.
Kitsch and Leadership 73

60. Mayer and McManus, Landslide, p. 393.

61. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, p. 59. See also
Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, pp. 48–51.
62. Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle, p. 59; Kellner,
Television and the Crisis of Democracy, pp. 97–98.
63. Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 18. See also James B.Stewart, Blood Sport:
The President and His Adversaries (Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 186.
64. David H.Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from
Nativism to the Militia Movement (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 411. See
also Haynes Johnson, Divided We Fall: Gambling With History in the Nineties
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 44.
65. Drew, On the Edge, pp. 18, 65.
66. Johnson, Divided We Fall, p. 44
67. Ibid., p. 40.
68. Drew, On the Edge, p. 60; Johnson, Divided We Fall, p. 40. See
also William Martin, With God On Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right
in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1996), p. 329.
69. Johnson, Divided We Fall, pp. 43–44; Stewart, Blood Sport, pp.
312, 316, 345.
70. Drew, On the Edge, p. 18.
71. Ibid.
72. Johnson, Divided We Fall, p. 55.
73. Ibid., pp. 52–62.
74. Drew, On the Edge, pp. 198–211; Stewart, Blood Sport, pp.
250–51; Johnson, Divided We Fall, pp. 342–44.
75. Drew, On the Edge, p. 201.
76. Johnson, Divided We Fall, p. 55.
77. The gay ban has been used with a great deal of zeal against
military women as a means of keeping the services a male-only
preserve. For example, during the 1980s, under the old gay ban, the
Marine Corps discharged women at seven times the rate of men. See
Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 4–5. See also Alan Bérubé,
Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two
(New York: A Plume Book, 1990).
78. According to Elizabeth Drew, the top military brass
overstepped themselves. “A senior military official said that the Chiefs
had come very close to insubordination on the gays issue and that
74 Kitsch

Clinton should have established his authority over them at the outset.”
See Drew, On the Edge, p. 48.
79. Drew, On the Edge, p. 248.
80. Lugg, For God and Country. See also Drew, On the Edge.
81. Drew, On the Edge, p. 237. “He brought his sense of how to get
things done within a given news cycle—though he wasn’t always
successful at making that happen. And he brought a sense of timing that
helped determine when the President would do or propose certain
things. Gergen had a wisdom that most of the less experienced didn’t
and couldn’t have.”
82. Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to
the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 540–41.
CHAPTER 4

Kitsch and Social Policy

Scientific research confirms that welfare benefits to single

mothers directly contribute to the rise in illegitimate
births.
—The Heritage Foundation1

There is an assumption, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit,

within the mainstream social policy literature that “good” policy
making and policy implementation should be a rational, scientific, and
rather bloodless process, ideally conceived and led by political and
professional elites.2 This belief is rooted in the disciplines of social
science, which guide much of contemporary policy analysis. Like their
compatriots residing in the hallowed halls of science, social scientists
take great pains to appear objective, clinical, and methodologically
rigorous so that their research findings and subsequent policy
recommendations are credible to both the general public and, more
importantly, policy makers.
Such an assumption is problematic on a number of counts. First, the
history of science, social science, and the subsequent policy
for mations, reveals how vulnerable “empirical fact” can be to
capricious cultural and political contexts. 3 Policy analysis and
for mation, like other human ventures, are subject to human
prejudices. Classification of individuals and groups as medically,
socially, politically, or morally deviant (and exactly who is
“redeemable” or who should be subjected to various “cures”) is greatly
influenced by the perceptions of those who have the power to
construct the categories.4 As Edelman notes:

75
76 Kitsch

Categor ization is necessary to science and, indeed, to all

perception. It is also a political tool, establishing status and power
hierarchies. We ordinarily assume that a classification scheme is
either scientific or political in character, but any category can serve
either or both functions, depending upon the interests of those who
employ it rather than upon anything inherent in the term.5

Second, much of the policy making that takes place within democratic
systems has little to do with scientific research or rationality. On the
contrary, it has much to do with power, ideology, prejudice, horse
trading and good old-fashioned “gotcha” politics. Policy makers and
politicians are subjected to re-elections, academics are not.
Consequently, politicians need to cultivate loyal constituencies who
hold similar world views and goals. They may not be particularly
interested in promoting “the larger common good.”6 Academics may
pine for and design coherent policy, but politicians need snappy
soundbite policy ideas (such as “ending welfare in our time”) to ensure
that they stay in power. Consequently, social policy analysis and
formation are highly sensitive to political Kitsch.
Finally, although social science employs some of the same rubrics as
science, it is not “science.” This is particularly evident in social science’s
notoriously low predictive power. Many times, social science functions
not so much as science but as a Kitsched version of science. For example,
in the United States, the chairperson of the Federal Reserve could be
viewed as a postmodern “Oracle of Delphi,” one who peers into assorted
statistical data to predict the nation’s future economic health. These
predictions are generally based on economic theory and statistical
modeling (and contain an air of science), yet such musings run
uncomfortably close to tea-leaf reading, as some professional economists
will cheerfully concede.7 Try as we may, humans cannot predict the future,
be it economic or otherwise, with any consistent accuracy. But many
Americans, particularly those with disposable incomes, want to know
what the economic future holds (even if it is unknowable), and if and
how they should spend their cash. Policy makers also wish to know what
the economic future will be, in order to raise taxes, cut taxes, increase
policy expenditures or reallocate resources. So, with much fanfare and
intensive reporting, scientific-sounding economic prognostications are
met with great anticipation and reverence. Yet, the actual merits of this
national ritual, bolstered by Kitsched science, go largely unquestioned.
Kitsch and Social Policy 77

This discussion of Kitsch and public policy now turns to two of the
most volatile and highly Kitsched areas of social policy: welfare and
public education. Both education and welfare are highly contentious
and emotionally charged political areas because they are concerned
with the lives of children and the poor, two groups who are viewed
with more than a degree of cultural suspicion. The chapter concludes
with a brief exploration of Kitsch and the politics of policy making.

HESTER PRYNNE AND THE POLITICS OF

WELFARE REFORM
She would become the general symbol at which the preacher
and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and
embody their images of woman’s frailty of sinful passion. Thus
the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the
scarlet letter flaming on her breast…as the figure, the body,
the reality of sin.
8
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

One of the most significant accomplishments of the 1996 congressional

session was the retrenc hment of the Amer ican welfare state.
Supporters of federal aid to needy families were stunned by the broad
political support for overturning one of the original (but admittedly
minor) pillars of the New Deal, Aid to Dependent Children (ADC),
which in 1962 became Aid to Families with Dependent Children
(AFDC). Not only was the end of AFDC symptomatic of the fragile
health of the 60-year-old New Deal, but it indicated the power of one
Kitsched icon and how it was manipulated to shape federal policy: the
icon of Hester Prynne.
Both President Clinton and the congressional Republicans had
promised to “end welfare as we know it,” exploiting the historic
discomfort that Americans felt regarding poor single mothers. The
withering scorn heaped on welfare mothers was not a particularly new
phenomenon. Since the late nineteenth century, poor women with
children have been subjected to a level of personal scrutiny by various
governmental and social agencies that most other Americans would
find intolerable, just to receive meager and grudging assistance.9 What
had changed, however, since the 1960s was the intensity of societal
anger directed at poor women in general and poor women of color in
78 Kitsch

particular. Inflammatory racial stereotypes, fanned by ambitious

politicians and sloppy TV news analysis, transformed welfare mothers
into “welfare queens” who leeched off the largesse of U.S. taxpayers.10
Welfare mothers were usually portrayed as young, unwed, African-
American, poor, and having children like rabbits. They were seen by
more affluent Americans as dangerous and “uncontrollable.” In this
environment, politicians and like-minded others had updated the
image of Hester Prynne, the seemingly unrepentant unwed mother, for
current political utility in order to curtail federal aid to the needy.
The plight of the single mother had been a matter of social concern
and a cause undertaken by social reformers during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Spectacular economic expansion and
shifting gender roles made single mothers (and their children) a
particularly vexing social problem. Regardless of race, class, or
ethnicity, these women were typically poor and, far too frequently,
desperately so, with limited options regarding employment that
managed to be both gainful and legal. 11 Unlike their modern-day
counterparts, the vast majority of early twentieth-century single
mothers were widows, with the second largest category being deserted
wives.12
Because the overwhelming majority of late nineteenth-century/
early twentieth-century single mothers were widows or deserted
wives, social reformers were provided with a suitable symbol to rally
political support around: mother as victim.13 In an era dominated by
the cult of motherhood, and of romantic storybook images of home,
hearth and family, the daily plight of single mothers was a stark
reminder of the far harsher economic and social realities that awaited
many women and children if their husbands and fathers should die or
abandon them. Social workers and reformers called for government-
provided “mothers pensions” for single mothers,14 but with important
stipulations. Those women receiving aid would have to be proper
mothers, housekeepers, and exemplars of community moral values.15
Those who failed in their “motherly duties” lost custody of their
children. Ensuring that single mothers were suitably virtuous became
part of the larger political agenda of Progressive-era reformers.
Widows and deserted wives were the deserving poor. Divorcées,
women who had had children with more than one man, and never-
married mothers most assuredly were not. As one social scientist
described an unfit mother in 1910:
Kitsch and Social Policy 79

The father died three years ago, and the mother is a miserable,
incompetent, degraded woman, ill most of the time, without any
moral standards, who, although she has been a widow for three
years, has a child thirteen months old.16

The most regulated aspect of any woman’s life was her sexuality. This
was true for all American women, but single mothers were subjected
to intense personal scrutiny by local social workers and charities who
had carte blanche to the most intimate parts of their lives. Single
mothers’ children were proof enough that these women were sexual
beings, a disquieting notion for the era’s moralists.17 Subsequently,
single mothers by virtue of their low social and political status were,
by definition, morally suspect. 18
Progressive-era women were caught on the horns of a particularly
cruel paradox. Greater general literacy and scientific advances made
birth control possible for many women. Yet the late nineteenth century
saw the banning of birth control information and the criminalization of
abor tion. Access to infor mation regarding reproduction and
contraception was restricted under the Comstoc k Act, whic h
contained harsh penalties for those found in violation of it. 19 “Proper”
women were not sexual. Therefore, any “illegitimate” children were
proof of a given woman’s thoroughly debauched state, and she lost
what grudging aid she received. There were also a host of lesser
offenses. According to the historian Linda Gordon:

Illegitimate children or male friends, alcoholic beverages, boarders,

or alien methods of housekeeping and child care might disqualify a
home. In at least one jurisdiction, eligibility was dependent on the
children getting satisfactory school repor ts. Moralistic and
condescending attitudes, and the assumption of supervisory and
reforming responsibility characterized mothers’ aid designers and
administrators (who were sometimes the same). The conviction of
superiority inherent in this sense or responsibility was equally a
class, ethnic/racial, and religious one. The programs got their start
in big cities, which in this period were packed with immigrants,
often non-Protestant and non-Anglo-Saxon. Many mothers’-aid
advocates hoped to use the promise of pensions as a reward to
immigrant and other poor single mothers who allowed themselves
to be “Americanized” and otherwise reformed. 20
80 Kitsch

The legacy of regulating single mothers’ lives found its way into the
early federal relief programs of the Great Depression and the
subsequent New Deal. Both FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Act-
1933) and ADC (Aid to Dependent Children-1935) contained
humiliating restrictions on mothers’ personal lives in order to qualify
for meager federal aid. In the case of ADC, these conditions were
striking since ADC was part of the larger Social Security Act. 21 Unlike
single mothers, the elderly and unemployed were spared from such
intrusions. In addition, unlike relief for the elderly and unemployed,
ADC depended on the involvement of the forty-eight states for its
funding and administration. While federal legislation was silent about
unmarr ied or never-mar ried mothers, 22 it was the states that
determined who was eligible to receive benefits and who was not. This
included southern states that were not particularly sympathetic to the
plight of poor African-American single mothers. Consequently, “most
of the initial ADC beneficiaries were white, widowed women with
young children.”23
Restrictions on ADC actually increased throughout the 1940s and
1950s, with a good deal of variation existing among those identified as
being suitably moral recipients. Southern states, in particular, used the
“morals code” to force single African-American mothers into low wage
work “either by excluding them from aid or by giving them lower
payments than whites, while threatening to remove them from the
rolls altogether if they…[did] not work.” 24 Although ADC was
technically available to all citizens who qualified (regardless of race), it
largely provided relief only to white mothers.
It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the program was restructured into
AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children), that the complexion
of welfare literally changed. Buttressed by the War on Poverty, millions
of families became eligible. Total enrollment shot up from 7.8 million
recipients in 1966 to 8.4 million the following year.25 And the growing
political power of African-Americans enabled single black mothers to
gain access to federal assistance.26 That the number of African-American
women receiving welfare increased during the 1960s makes a great deal
of sense. They were finally able to receive aid.
However, this change triggered a cultural and political backlash.
Welfare, as such, had always been of questionable political odor. With
the rise of the “Southern Strategy” during the 1968 presidential
campaign, in which coded racial references were employed to woo
Kitsch and Social Policy 81

white conservative voters, welfare became increasingly viewed as a

black program and, by extension, a social problem in and of itself. 27
This notion was bolstered by reports from Daniel Patrick Moynihan
and the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which
noted the r ising number of Afr ican-American female-headed
households and then spuriously linked this rise to the urban riots of the
era. 28 According to the conventional wisdom that prevailed,
uncontrollable (and always morally suspect) females were raising
uncontrollable and dangerous children. The image of Hester Prynne
had been reinvented for political utility. She was now African-
American and instead of a scarlet “A” emblazoned on her breast, a
scarlet “W” would do quite nicely.
Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, benefits were reduced by
both the states and the federal government, typically in the name of
saving tax dollars while providing moral uplift to single mothers. A
number of more entrepreneurial think-tankers (Charles Murray and
Robert Rector, for example), fueled the cost-cutting by claiming that
welfare actually fostered social pathology (illegitimate children). 29
They charged that benefits paid to unwed single mothers gave them
perverse incentives to have additional children. If both the state and
the federal government would reduce the benefits, the rates of
illegitimacy would fall. Poverty, they argued, would disappear.
President Reagan was particularly sympathetic to this analysis and
did much to popularize the notion of “welfare queens.” His favorite
anecdote was that of a Chicago mother who had “80 names, 30
addresses, 12 Social Security cards, and a tax-free income of over
$150,000.”30 That Reagan’s welfare queen was a blatant lie did nothing
to reduce the potency of this time-honored Kitsched symbol. Although
AFDC accounted for only 1 percent of the federal budget,31 Reagan
and other commentators attempted to place the blame for the massive
budget deficits on the greedy and probably irredeemable welfare queen
instead of on highly questionable national economic policies. The
repackaged Hester Prynne told the lies that many white Americans
already half-heartedly believed. They supported reductions in welfare
(AFDC) benefits at a time when the national economy was undergoing
a massive and painful transformation.32
The reduction in benefits was particularly brutal in light of the
rising poverty rate for U.S. children. In 1970, 15 percent of children
lived in poverty, in 1980 the percentage was 18, and by 1993, 22
82 Kitsch

percent. 33 According to sociologists Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein,

“Nearly three decades of stagnant wages, ineffective child support
enforcement, and dwindling welfare benefits have made single mothers
and their children America’s poorest demographic group.” 34 While
African-American children were disproportionately affected due to
institutionalized racism,35 all poor children suffered from the cutbacks.
Nevertheless, by the 1990s, given the abundance of racially coded
messages and the longevity of the “fallen woman” icon, politicians and
commentators from various ideological standpoints attacked welfare.
Former(?) klansman turned-Republican-party-candidate David Duke
placed welfare squarely in the midst of his racist rhetoric. Upon his
election to the Louisiana legislature, he declared:

This isn’t a victory for me, it was a victory for those who believe in
true equal rights for all, not the racial discrimination of affirmative
action and minority set-asides. It was a victory for those who
choose to work hard rather than abuse welfare. It was a victory for
the poor people who want drug dealers and abusers out of the
housing projects and away from their children. It was a victory for
the hard-pressed taxpayer and homeowner…. It was a victory for
the victim rather than the brutal criminal. It was a victory for the
young people of Louisiana who demanded the right to attend their
own neighborhood schools, to be safe and sound there, and to be
educated to the extent of their ability.36

Former Governor Bill Clinton was far more coy, declaring that the
federal gover nment should promote the values of “work and
responsibility.” 37 As historian Linda Gordon noted, such rhetoric
“scapegoats poor and minority mothers by implying that their
problems are caused by laziness and irresponsibility….” 38
In 1992, Clinton had campaigned for president claiming to be a
“New Democrat” and had much success in attacking welfare.39 Once
elected, he did little to change the 60-year-old system but with the
1994/1995 Republican take-over of Congress, Clinton was forced to
honor his earlier rhetoric. Clinton scuttled away from his initial
embrace of activist government (and Camelot) and courted the same
constituency that had swept the “new” Republicans into office in
November 1994. He increasingly drew on the Kitsched rhetoric of the
preacher (see Chapter 2) and repeatedly called for an end to welfare.
Kitsch and Social Policy 83

Missing from the debates, musings, and mutterings about AFDC’s fate
was acknowledgment of its being a small program that had suffered from
decades of cutbacks. In addition, most recipients got off welfare in two
years.40 But given the incessant and overheated political rhetoric, actual
facts about welfare were rarely mentioned, while misinformation—
particularly that generated by the conservative think-tanks41—received a
great deal of political and media play. It was far easier to attack Hester
Prynne than to confront the growing income gap between rich and poor
or the scarcity of jobs for those without college degrees. By 1995, welfare
had escalated into a full-blown moral issue.42 Many Americans believed
that welfare recipients led suspect, even immoral, life-styles subsidized
by those who worked hard and remained virtuous.43 Thanks to almost
thirty years of linking AFDC to racist iconography, welfare “as we know
it” came to an end in August 1996. The federal government would no
longer guarantee even a basic safety net for children in poverty.

THE “PROBLEM CHILD,” “CHILD FIXING,” AND THE

POLITICS OF U.S. PUBLIC EDUCATION
The breakdown of traditional families and the soaring numbers
of children who can be classified as “at-risk” have greatly
increased the need for building collaborative networks
[between public schools and other public agencies] to reduce
the risk factors facing many youngsters.
—Lugg and Boyd, 1993.44

The politics of U.S. public education may well be the favorite contact sport
for Americans. Whether the areas of concern have been personnel, the
curriculum, or student services, all have been subjected to extensive
“tinkering” and, at times, rancorous and hyperventilated political debate.
It is important to recognize that what we “know” about public education
tends to be a volatile mix of cultural mythology and personal experience,
bent and warped by shifting political winds. In other words, our view of
public schools tends to be composed more of Kitsched imagery than reality.
Complicating the issue is the fact that the public school is an institution
that most Americans believe they know the best. Many have reason to
think so: More Americans have attended a public school than have voted,
a crude but telling indicator.45 This belief that “we know our schools” is
both simultaneously correct and mistaken. Most adult Americans have
84 Kitsch

spent twelve years of their respective lives in a supposedly “common”

school, learning “reading, writing, and arithmetic” among a host of subjects
and goals that comprise public education’s societal mission. 46 But these
same Americans’ public education experiences differed (and continue to
differ) greatly along lines of race, class, religion, ethnicity, English language
ability, “disability,” gender, and sexual orientation. In a system of
supposedly “common” public schools, who receives “what” has largely
been pre-determined for well over 150 fifty years.47
Further muddying this picture is the sheer amount of Kitsched
mythology surrounding the public school, which is taught both within
the school and in the larger culture. One claim in U.S. education
mythology surrounds a purported golden age of American public
schooling, where well-behaved, enthusiastic children (read white and
Protestant) were taught by competent, caring teachers to embrace a shared
vision of Western civilization. According to this mythology,48 in the not-
too-distant past everyone learned their social/cultural/ political place,
with the public schools efficiently inculcating these time-honored values.
Discussions surrounding the purposes and ideals to be taught were marked
by civility, rationality, and consensus, with all parties enthusiastically
embracing a common Judeo-Christian heritage. In other words, the syrupy
Kitsched imagery presented in Little House on the Prairie (by both the books
and the television series) was “authentic.”
The conventional wisdom supports the ongoing and powerful
ideological attacks on public education: When we (that is, present-day
grown-ups) were children, we were far better behaved and much
better students than today’s miserable and problematic urchins. In
addition, we had better teachers and administrators. Finally, when we
were kids, getting a high school diploma actually meant something.49
Bolstering this mythology are the myriad of media images in
television shows, news accounts, editorials, and movies portraying
“school life” and “childhood.” Much of what is presented to the
viewing public tends to be grim, however. News por trayals of
“wilding” boys 50 and movies such as Dangerous Minds show children and
minority adolescents in particular, as troubled and occasionally
threatening. They are a potential menace to the social and political
order. 51 In the dominant Kitsched image of public education, the
resounding theme is “what on earth is wrong with these kids today?”
The “problem child” exerts the same influence on education policy
that “Hester Prynne” does on welfare policy—striking an ongoing
Kitsch and Social Policy 85

historical, if dissonant, theme. “Fixing” those “problem children” was a

critical argument in establishing public, or common, schools during
the mid-1800s. Horace Mann, an educational reformer and secretary
of the Massachusetts State Board of Education (1837–1848), took his
readers to the brink of social Ar mageddon in pleading for the
establishment of a common school.

The mobs, the riots, the burnings, the lynchings, perpetrated by the
men of the present day, are perpetrated because of their vicious and
defective education. We see and feel the ravages of their tiger
passions now, when they are full grown; but it was years ago when
they were whelped and suckled. And so too, if we are derelict in
our duty in this matter, our children in their turn will suffer. If we
permit the vulture’s eggs to be hatched, it will then be too late to
take care of the lambs.52

Mann’s strongly stated beliefs that a common school would provide the
glue necessary to build social stability resonated deeply with many
Americans of the antebellum era. According to Mann’s vision, the
schools would properly train children in the ways of industry and
thrift. Through intensive social interaction, children would learn to
respect each other. Mann believed that only in a common school,
where children of all religious and class backgrounds could be
educated side by side, would the foundations for social stability be
established. The common schools were to be the “panacea” for
society’s ills.53 As he wrote in 1848:

It knows no distinction of rich and poor, of bond and free, or

between those who, in the imperfect light of this world, are
seeking, through different avenues, to reach the gate of heaven.
Without money and without price, it throws open its doors, and
spreads the table of its bounty, for all the children of the State. Like
the sun, it shines, not only upon the good, but upon the evil, that
they may become good; and, like the rain, its blessings descend, not
only upon the just, but upon the unjust, that their injustice may
depart from them and be known no more.54

In addition, the common school was to be a Christian institution, for

many nineteenth-century Americans equated morality with Protestant
86 Kitsch

Christianity. Yet, in deference to constitutional (and more importantly,

political) matters, the public school was to be nondenominational. In
Mann’s common school, Bible verses were to be read without
comment.55 The inclusion of the Bible infuriated many Catholics and
some of the more Orthodox Protestants, who correctly viewed such
vaguely touted “Protestantism” as courting Protestant political support
for the publicly funded schools without alienating any specific Protestant
denomination. The overly Protestant nature of the public schools was
also a means of “fixing” the growing numbers of Catholic children, who
were seen as a major problem for the Protestant majority.56
The need to “fix” children took on greater importance after the
Civil War, as massive immigration transformed the American social,
political, and economic landscape. It also forever changed the
“common school.” For the first time in American history, non Anglo-
Saxons dominated some of the larger urban centers. 57 The
demographic shift was perceived as a threat to the WASP (White
Anglo-Saxon Protestant) economic, political, and social order.58 As
Ellwood P. Cubberley, dean of Stanford University’s School of
Education, remarked in 1919:

These Southern and Eastern Europeans were of a very different

type from the North and West Europeans who preceded them.
Largely illiterate, docile, lacking in initiative, and almost wholly
without the Anglo-Saxon conceptions of righteousness, liberty, law,
order, public decency, and government, their coming has served to
dilute tremendously our national stock and to weaken and corrupt
our political life. Settling largely in the cities of the North, the
agricultural regions of the Middle and the Far West, and the mining
districts of the mountain regions, they have created serious
problems in housing and living, moral and sanitary conditions, and
honest and decent government, while popular education has
everywhere been made more difficult by their presence.
The new peoples, and especially those from the South and East
of Europe, have come so fast that we have been unable to absorb and
assimilate them, and our national life, for the past quarter of a
century, has been afflicted with a serious case of racial indigestion.59

One obvious social antacid was the public school, 60 and it was
restructured to cope with these three profound social changes.
Kitsch and Social Policy 87

Compulsory education laws coupled with the dramatic increase in

the school-aged population swelled school enrollments.61 Many urban
areas developed new schools, such as the comprehensive high school
and night school to cope with the demand. Because administrators and
teachers (and, in fact, parents) expected many children to soon be
working in factories, schools were modeled after factories, complete
with bells to signal the start and end of classes. Desks were bolted to
the floor to maintain straight rows and facilitate a sense of order.
Schools were also the institution that would Americanize children
(especially immigrant children). All would be assimilated into the great
social/political melting pot. It was here that children learned English,
American history, and “fine” Anglo-Saxon cultural norms. In addition,
it was important that children (as future workers) learned to be
obedient, orderly, mannerly, and docile, for the captains of the new
industrial order demanded nothing less from public schools supported
by their tax dollars.62 As historian Henry Perkinson observed:

For their own sake and for the good of society the younger
generation had to be constrained. The very stability of democratic
society depended upon their being adjusted to the American way of
life. Such adjustment required a long period of careful training.
There, in order to preserve American democracy the city children
had to be institutionalized, had to be compelled to attend school.63

The public school became society’s great selecting and sor ting
machine, equipping (fixing?) children for their eventual social,
economic and political roles.64 The ideal of a “common” education for
all children was swept away, viewed as socially and economically
inefficient. Standardized testing and curricular tracking became
fashionable as “child fixing” was transformed into a more “scientific”
enterprise. Both were employed to efficiently (read cheaply) select and
sort students into their “proper” vocational or academic curricular
program. That these practices reinforced the inequitable status quo was
seen as socially beneficial. As one commentator of the era noted, it was
“foolish to educate each child to be President of the United States,” 65
stressing that inequalities were natural and schools should “give each
layer its own appropriate form of schooling.”66
Clearly these new “scientific measures” created problems,
par ticularly with the cultural, ethnic, racial, and gender biases
88 Kitsch

embedded in the tests. For example, one promoter, Carl Bringham,

examined the results of various intelligence tests and found that
“Nordic g roups were intellectually super ior to Alpine and
Mediterranean groups, Alpines were superior to Mediterraneans, and
Mediterraneans were superior to Negroes.” 67 By ascribing intellectual
and academic merit (or lack thereof) to class, racial, religious, gender,
and ethnic characteristics, the principal value of the early standardized
tests was in strengthening the established social hierarchy (White,
Anglo-Saxon Protestant, male, with money) during a time of ongoing
social and economic flux.
Yet such impulses to “fix children” also led to honest social reforms,
both outside and within school walls. During this era, crusading
newspaper journalists, known as muckrakers, depicted the dismal
conditions in which many urban children lived. The problems faced by
children were very real, although the problems ascribed as intrinsic to
these same children were socially constructed. For example, Jacob
Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), gave the horrific details of life
(and death) for children in New York City tenements.

Newspaper readers will recall the story told little more than a year
ago, of a boy who after carrying beer a whole day for a shopful of
men over on the East Side, where his father worked, crept into the
cellar to sleep off the effects of his own share in the rioting. It was
Saturday evening. Sunday his parents sought him high and low; but it
was not until Monday morning, when the shop was opened, that he
was found, killed and half-eaten by the rats that overran the place.68

In response to growing urban decay, city school districts pioneered

school lunch programs, added playgrounds, built gyms and shower
facilities, and hired school nurses. Child labor laws were passed and, in
some instances, actually enforced. 69 In addition, various private and
public “child saving” agencies were established, all dedicated to
improving the lives of poor children.
These measures were seen as ameliorating the effects of brutal
poverty on the lives of children without challenging their foundations,
which lay in the political and economic order. 70 As in the case of
welfare for single mothers, such aid came with the attendant social
regulation and close monitoring. A.B.Hollingshead, in his classic study
Elmtown’s Youth, documented just how tightly poor children were
Kitsch and Social Policy 89

monitored in the public school.71 Poor children, like poor mothers,

would repeatedly have to prove their “worth” in receiving public
services.
The need to regulate children, particularly poor boys and their
middle-class playmates, was bolstered by popular media, advice
columnists, and the academic community. According to historian David
Nasaw, between 1901 and 1910:

Every one of the popular magazines ran its articles on these

subjects: Scribners published, “are we spoiling our boys who have the
best chances in life?”; Popular Science, “Difficult boys”; The American
Mercury, “Helpless youths and useless men”; Outlook, “Getting at the
boys,” “Being a boy,” and “Managing a boy”; Lippincott’s, “Moulding
of Men”; Harper’s Bazaar, “Play suits for little boys” and “Please for
the small boy”; and Ladies Home Journal, the most influential of all
the popular magazines and the first to exceed a million in
circulation, “Bad boy of the street,” “How and when to be frank
with boys,” “How I trained my boys to be gentlemen,” How we
trained our boy,” Keeping a city boy straight,” and “What boys my
boy should play with.”72

Social commentators, psychologists, and parents all agreed that

children were passion-driven creatures in need of a firm parental hand.
Girls, too, were in need of strict supervision. As one advice book
counseled in 1900:

Nobody who has to do with a girl of fifteen but has observed her
recklessness as to wraps, her fondness for bonbons, her indifference
to overshoes and thick boots. Here is the bread and butter age,
when she scorns precautions and is averse to the whole machinery
of prudence. With a fatal facility she picks up and adopts the college
slang of her brothers, or the more objectionable catch-words of the
street. She needs constant reminders of her duty to her mother-
tongue even when her home associations are ideal.73

The public school was seen as a critical (but not as the only) social
agency that could strengthen the shaky parental hand. Extracurricular
activities and carefully structured curricular activities were vehicles to
channel dangerous childhood passions.
90 Kitsch

The anxieties of the era were captured (albeit caricatured) in

Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man. Substituting “River City” for Mason
City, Iowa (Wilson’s beloved hometown) in the song “We’ve got
Trouble,” the town is whipped into a frenzy by a con man posing as a
band director, who sees massive juvenile pathology (i.e., problem
boys) just around the corner.

Chorus: Oh we’ve got trouble

Right here in River City.
It starts with P
Which rhymes with T
and that stands for POOL! 74

The “trouble” envisioned by the nervous residents are the possible

“rotten outcomes” wrought by the opening of a pool hall. The panacea
is to establish an instrumental music program (i.e., band) or at least
have the parents buy band instruments and uniforms for their
supposedly “at-risk” boys.75
The Music Man is actually a late-1950s Kitsch vision of the United
States at the turn of the century. River City is a bastion of “traditional”
values, where there is little social, political, or economic dissent and
everyone knows “their place,” especially the children. The story has the
requisite and syrupy Hollywood ending—the con man is caught,
redeemed, and even “gets the girl.” Nevertheless, as corny and
contrived as the musical is, the show does spoof the cultural notions of
“problem child” and “child fixing.”
The notion of children as dangerous “others” in need of “fixing” is a
continuous and discordant theme that is played to the present day. Since
the 1950s, a host of these manifestations can be found in both the popular
culture (movies such as Rebel Without A Cause, Home Alone, and, of course,
Problem Child),76 and various legislative remedies targeting public schools
as the panacea (such as the National Defense Education Act, Elementary
and Secondary Education Act, Goals 2000). 77 While the legislative
initiatives have been touted as enhancing military preparedness, social
stability, and economic competitiveness (respectively) through public
education, each held a component of child fixing.
It should also be noted that some children are perceived as more in
need of the “fix” than others and that, in practice, not all fixes are
equal. One need only consider the disproportionate number of
Kitsch and Social Policy 91

African-American students placed in special education courses to

understand that “help” is highly context dependent. 78 Although the
intent of public schooling is both ameliorative and facilitative (fixing
children and helping them grow), it is, by design, remarkably adept at
reproducing the inequities found within the larger social order. Owing
to the vast differences in social classes, massive residential segregation,
biases within standardized educational measures, and biased teacher
and administrator expectations, the determination of which children
receive what types of education is largely influenced by the individual
student’s race, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and
gender.79
The political Kitsch surrounding U.S. public education helps
solidify inequitable outcomes by reinforcing the belief that public
schools are “fair arbiters” in selecting and sorting students, particularly
those seen as historically needing “the fix.” Hence, many educational
reform proponents can take the supposed moral high ground by
advocating for curriculum frameworks, the alignment of state
education policies, and a restructured governance system, 80 all
intended to improve educational outcomes for all students
(particularly poor and minority children), while at the same time
ignoring the fact that many of these same students attend racially and
economically segregated public schools. The fact that U.S. public
schools have largely resegregated since 1969 seems to escape notice. 81
Contemporary reformers have accepted the old racist notion that
separate public schools are equal schools, something that the U.S.
Supreme Court found to be inherently unequal in 1954.
Ironically, many of the current and rather “mushy” educational
reforms82 just discussed invite attack from the political right, for not
being “Kitschy” enough. In the United States, the Kitsched symbol of
the problem child meets the Kitsched symbol of the golden-era happy
school, best represented by the television show “Little House on the
Prairie.” Proposals that fail to have more than a whiff of “old-time
traditional values” (school prayer, rigid discipline, Anglicization of
“other” students, hyper ventilated competition—i.e., academic
“excellence”) are pilloried. It should be noted that the political right
revels in educational Kitsch. Much of the right’s rhetoric and
educational reform proposals are rooted in the Jeremiad. Like the
biblical prophet Jeremiah, the right thunders about all “those” problem
children running amuck and then attacks the public schools for failing
92 Kitsch

miserably in their redemptive “child fixing” mission. It is an easy

cultural dance for conservative activists to twist the rhetoric of the
“preacher” and employ the basic symbols of social traditionalism to
propel their educational agenda (see Chapter 2).
The most famous (and embarrassing) example of right-wing
educational Kitsch was repeated by pundits William Bennett,
George Will, and Rush Limbaugh. According to for mer
conservative Michael Lind:

In 1994, the press in the United States was suddenly full of

references to two lists of behavior banned in public schools, one
from the 1940s and the other from the 1980s. In the 1940s, it was
said, “the [top] problems were: (1) talking; (2) chewing gum; (3)
making noise; (4) running in the halls; (5) getting out of turn in
line; (6) wearing improper clothing; (7) not putting paper in
wastebaskets.” In the 1980s, however, the major problems were “(1)
drug abuse; (2) alcohol abuse; (3) pregnancy; (4) suicide; (5) rape;
(6) robbery, (7) assault….”83

The media-hyped lists were actually the brainchild of T.Cullen Davis, a

fundamentalist Christian from Forth Worth, Texas, who had a history
of attacking public schools. He fabricated the lists, which were
unfortunately given instant credibility by both conservative pundits
and the mainstream media. Such an outcome indicates the ongoing
power of Kitsch in shaping educational discourse.
Most Americans still believe that many public schools (particularly
urban schools) are dangerous places, filled with problem children in
need of the pedagogical fix. As with welfare policies and practices, the
fact that so many children desperately need aid helps legitimize both
progressive and highly coercive and punitive educational practices.
Educational researcher Richard Brosio describes this as the “Janusfaced
public schools”: Simply put, the public school system promises to
inculcate the fruits of democracy to all Americans while it also largely
reproduces the inequitable status quo.84 Ultimately, the pervasiveness
of Kitsch helps to reinforce the perception that the game is fair owing
to the fact that most Americans have been through the “system.”
For educational and welfare policy analysts, the power of Kitsch in
shaping analysis and policy can be both horrifying and seductive. Both
the “problem child” and “Hester Prynne” are powerful cultural
Kitsch and Social Policy 93

constructions that greatly limit policy options while also providing

political reassurance that various analyses, proposals and policies are
congruent with the broader culture. This is not surprising, as observed
by Lindblom and Woodhouse:

Professional policy analysis tends to end up supporting the existing

social order and its prevailing distribution of privileges and
deprivations. Policy professionals, like all social, physical, and biological
scientists, become dependent on elite grants, take employment with
elites, seek acceptance by elites, identify with elites.85

There are very few rewards—monetary, professional or social—for

those who stray from the Kitsched yellow brick policy road and still
wish to be considered “elite.”86
Yet, there are compelling reasons for straying. As Lindblom and
Woodhouse lamented, “Policy outcomes too often are bizarre or
monstrous—over one trillion dollars expended just in the 1980s on
suicidal nuclear weaponry, medical costs escalating out of control, an
energy non-policy allowing depletion of scare fossil fuels while
warming climate and creating acid rain.”87 The ability of policy analysts
and policy makers to distinguish between what is “Kitsch” and what is
“real” while remaining modest about “scientific” claims may lead to less
surreal policy making.

NOTES
1. As quoted by Randy Albelda, Nancy Folbre, and The Center for
Popular Economics, The War on the Poor: A Defense Manual (New York:
The New Press, 1996), p. 42.
2. For example, see Susan H. Fuhr man’s “The Politics of
Coherence,” in Designing Coherent Education Policy: Improving the System,
Susan H. Fuhrman, (ed.) (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1993), pp. 1–34.
As Lindblom and Woodhouse note, this deference to elites in policy
analysis is deeply problematic for democracies. See Charles E.
Lindblom and Edward J.Woodhouse, The Policy-Making Process, 3rd
edition. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1993), p. 9.
3. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from
Women’s Lives (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 19–50;
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years
94 Kitsch

of the Experts’ Advice to Women (New York: Anchor Books, 1978); Pat
Shipman, The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and
Abuse of Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994); Clinton
B.Allison, Present and Past: Essays for Teachers in the History of
Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1995). For a horrifying example
of the potentially abusive and deadly consequences of
“disinterested” policy research, see Claudia Clark, Radium Girls:
Women and Industr ial Health Refor m, 1910–1935 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
4. Mur ray Edelman, “The Political Language of the Helping
Professions,” Politics and Society, Volume 4, Number 3, pp.
295–310.
5. Ibid., p. 299.
6. This is painfully evident regarding the politics of public school
finance in New Jersey. “The New Jersey case is particularly revealing
because many of the participants in the public debate felt no sense of
shame as they argued to maintain an inherently unequal system of
public education which public money was used to confer private
privilege to students in the well-appointed suburban schools while
basic health and safety standards are routinely violated in their
underfinanced urban counterparts.” See William A.Firestone, Margaret
E.Goertz, and Gary Natriello, From Cashbox to Classroom: The Struggle for
Fiscal Reform and Educational Change in New Jersey (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1997), p. 159.
7. A point made repeatedly by economist and historian Donald N.
McCloskey, in If You’re So Smart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992). Social science claims to be “scientific” because it is “empirical.”
This falls flat as, ultimately, almost all humans are empiricists with the
exception of paranoid schizophrenics. See Neil Postman, Conscientious
Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education
(New York: Vintage Press, 1992).
8. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 79.
9. Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and A History
of Welfare (New York: The Press, 1994).
10. Jill Quadagno makes precisely this point. See Jill Quadagno,
The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994). See also Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein,
Kitsch and Social Policy 95

Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997), pp. 4–5.
11. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History
of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 87–88.
12. Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, pp. 19–23.
13. Ibid., pp. 15–35. See also Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, pp.
82–115.
14. Prior to the passage of the Social Security Act, the largest
federal program for single mothers provided benefits to widows of
Civil War Veterans (USA, not CSA). See Theda Skocpol, Protecting
Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United
States (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1992).
15. Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives; Gordon, Pitied But Not
Entitled; Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and
the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992). Like other single
mothers receiving assistance, Civil War widows had to be “proper”
women. “From the time of the war, pension applicants were allowed to
testify for themselves or find their own witnesses in support of their
applications; for example, neighbors might testify to a woman’s
marriage to a dead soldier, and to her persistent widowed status and
proper sexual conduct after his death.” See Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers
and Mothers, p. 118.
16. Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, pp. 15–16, quoting Sophonisba
Preston Breckinridge, “Neglected Widowhood in the Juvenile Court,”
American Journal of Sociology, 16 (July 10), p. 87.
17. Female public school teachers were routinely fired upon their
marriage, precisely because of their diminished moral status as
caretakers of the public’s young children. See Joel Spring, The American
School, 1642–1993, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993).
18. Edelman, “The Political Language of the Helping
Professions,” p. 299.
19. Coontz, The Way We Never Were, pp. 110–11.
20. Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, p. 46.
21. Ibid., pp. 253–54. See also Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, pp.
119–20, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor:
The Functions of Public Welfare, Updated edition. (New York: Vintage
Press, 1993), pp. 114–17.
22. Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled, p. 281.
23. Quadagno, The Color of Welfare, p. 119.
96 Kitsch

24. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 141.

25. Quadango, The Color of Welfare, p. 121.
26. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, p. 222.
27. Quadango, The Color of Welfare, p. 127. See also Linda
Gordon, “How ‘Welfare’ Become a Dirty Word,” in The War on the
Poor (1996) p. 110.
28. In an odd twist of history, President Bush blamed the 1992
Los Angels riots on the Great Society programs, a laughable premise.
“An astonished Bill Clinton, his Democratic rival in the 1992
president race, scornfully asked why Bush had to return to the 1960s
to find a scapegoat when the Republicans had held the presidency for
20 of the last 24 years.” See Quadango, The Color of Welfare, p. 3. Like
many of the urban riots of the 1960s, the Los Angles rebellion had
more to do the with ongoing police brutalization of the African-
American community than with the supposed parenting practices of
poor single mothers.
29. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy (New
York: Basic Books, 1984); Robert Rector, FYI: Heritage Foundation
Newsletter, February 9, 1995, (Washington, DC: Author) . Michael
Lind presents a cr itique of Mur ray’s “researc h” in Up From
Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Free Press,
1996), pp. 181–83.
30. Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The
Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York:
W.W.Norton, 1991), p. 148.
31. Frances Fox Piven, “Welfare & the Transformation of Electoral
Politics,” Dissent, Fall 1996, p. 62. The budget deficits of the 1980s had
far more to do with the massive spending spree on the military
coupled with an irresponsible tax-cuts and nasty recession. See also
David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed
(New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1986); Kevin Phillips, The
Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan
Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1990).
32. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, “The U.S. and the World Economy in
Transition.” The Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy,
University of California, Berkeley. BRIE Working Paper #22 (July
1986). Paper prepared for the meeting of the Western Economics
Association, Berkeley, CA.
Kitsch and Social Policy 97

33. Albelda, Folbre and the Center for Popular Economics, The War
on the Poor, p. 27.
34. Edin and Lein, Making Ends Meet, p. 4.
35. Albelda, Folbre and the Center for Popular Economics, The War
on the Poor, pp. 26–27; Coontz, The Way We Never Were, pp. 82–86.
36. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction,
and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press), p. 86. As
Jamieson noted, “Unspoken but read by at least some Duke
enthusiasts was the assumption that the hard-pressed taxpayers and
homeowners are white and the welfare abusers, criminals, and
beneficiaries of busing, black.
37. Linda Gordon, “How ‘Welfare’ Became a Dirty Word, in The
War on the Poor: A Defense Manual, Randy Albelda, Nancy Folbre, and
The Center for Popular Economics, (New York: The New Press,
1996), p. 111.
38. Ibid.
39. Elizabeth Drew, On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency, (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 416–18.
40. Albelda, Folbre, and The Center for Popular Economics, The
War on the Poor, p. 60.
41. Piven, “Welfare & the Transformation of Electoral Politics,”
pp. 64–65.
42. Drew, pp. 416–18; Piven, pp. 65–66.
4 3 . P i v i n , “ We l f a re & t h e Tr a n s f o r m a t i o n o f E l e c t o r a l
Politics,” p. 66.
44. Catherine A.Lugg and William Lowe Boyd, “Leadership for
Collaboration: Reducing Risk and Fostering Resilience,” Phi Delta
Kappan, November 1993, Volume 75, Number 3, p. 254.
45. David Tyack and Larry Cuban, Tinkering Toward Utopia: A
Century of Public School Reform (Cambridge: Har vard University
Press, 1995).
46. David F.Labaree, “Public Goods, Private Goods: The American
Struggle Over Educational Goals, American Educational Research Journal,
Spring 1997, Volume 34, Number 1, pp. 39–81.
47. There is an enor mous body of research exploring the
various historical, structural, and persistent inequities embedded in
U.S. public education. The latest and perhaps most poignant
examination is by Jean Any on. See Any on, Ghetto Schooling: A
98 Kitsch

Political Economy of Urban Educational Reform (New York: Teachers

College Press, 1997).
48. Barbara Finklestein, “Education Historians as
Mythmakers,” Review of Research in Education, Gerald Grant, (Ed.)
(Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association,
1992), pp. 255–97.
49. The most biting and data dr iven critique of the myr iad
o f i d e o l o g i c a l a t t a c k s i s by D av i d C. B e r l i n e r a n d B r u c e
J.Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on
Amer ica’s Public Schools (New York: Addison-Welsey Publishing
Company, 1996).
50. See Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were, pp. 232–54.
51. Shirley R.Steinberg and Joe L.Kincheloe, “Introduction: No
More Secrets—Kinderculture, Infor mation Saturation, and the
Postmodern Childhood,” in Kinderculture: The Corporate Construction of
Childhood, Shirley R.Steinberg and Joe L.Kincheloe (eds.) (Boulder:
Westview Books, 1997), pp. 1–30.
52. Clarence J.Karier, The Individual, Society, and Education: A
History of American Educational Ideas, 2nd edition. (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 60.
53. Henry J.Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea: American Faith in
Education, 1865–1990 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).
54. S.Alexander Rippa, Educational Ideas in America: A Documentary
History (New York: David McKay, 1969), p. 204.
55. David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Mangers of Virtue: Public
School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
See also Karier.
56. David H.Bennett, The Party of Fear: The American Far Right from
Nativism to the Militia Movement, Revised edition (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995), p. 56; Allison, pp. 8–11.
57. Bennett, The Party of Fear, pp. 159–82.
58. David Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban
Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Allison, pp.
103–07.
59. Ellwood P.Cubberley, Public Education in the United States: A
Study and Interpretation of American Education History (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Company, 1919), p. 338.
Kitsch and Social Policy 99

60. Catherine A.Lugg, “Attacking Affirmative Action: Social

Darwinism as Public PRolicy,” in Measured Lies: The “Bell Curve”
Examined, Joe Kincheloe, Shirley Steinberg and Aaron D.Gresson, III
(eds). (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 372.
61. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea, pp. 69–76; See also Raymond
E.Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962); Lawrence A.Cremin, Popular Education and Its
Discontents (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
62. David Nasaw, Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public
Schooling in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), pp. 87–104.
63. Perkinson, The Imperfect Panacea, p. 69; see also Samuel
Bowles and Herber t Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist Amer ica:
Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York:
Basic Books, 1976).
64. Tyack, The One Best System; Joel Spring, The American School
1642–1993, 3rd edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1994).
65. Tyack, The One Best System, p. 129.
66. Ibid.
67. Spring, The American School, p. 264; see also Pat Shipman, The
Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science,
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
68. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the
Tenements of New York (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 162.
Originally published in 1890 and viewed as a Progressive-era classic,
Riis’s book reflects the ethnocentrism and religious and racial
bigotry of the era. As Donald Bigelow writes in the introduction,
“one reads that Negroes are ‘sensual,’ Ger mans ‘thrifty,’ and
Italians, ‘swarthy.’ The author places a great deal of emphasis on the
fact that the Chinese are clean but gamblers and that all attempts to
make ‘an effective Christian of John Chinaman will remain abortive.’
As for Jews, he says in many variations that ‘money is their God.’”
See p. xiii.
69. Although attempts were made to limit child labor, it wasn’t
until the Great Depression that the U.S. government took measures to
remove children from the work force. See Gordon, Pitied But Not
Entitled.
100 Kitsch

70. Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America; see also

Ric hard A.Brosio, A Radical Democratic Cr itique of Capitalist
Education (New York: Peter Lang, 1994); Ricka Shpak Lissak,
Pluralism & Progressives: Hull House and the New Immigrants, 1890–
1919 (Chicago: Univer sity of Chicago Press, 1989), Nasaw,
Schooled to Order, pp. 96–98.
71. A.B.Hollingshead, Elmstown’s Youth (New York: John
Wiley, 1949).
72. Nasaw, Schooled to Order, p. 90.
73. Margaret E.Sangster, Winsome Womanhood (New York: Fleming
H.Revell Company, 1900), p. 24.
74. The author, as a former musician, has played in the pit for that
specific show, complete with “Marian the tone-deaf librarian.” In
addition, when living in Iowa, I worked briefly for a tenor saxophone
band [Ralph Zarnow and his big band], arranging unpublished Wilson
sketches. I was not, and am not, a fan of Wilson’s music, although he is
much beloved by lowans. The town of Mason City, Iowa, is currently
raising money for “A Music Man” square in his honor.
75. According to a popular music education legend the Conn
Musical Instrument Company once sold coronets with the following
marketing pitch “If Johnny blows a coronet he won’t blow a safe,” (ca.
1912).
76. See Joe Kincheloe’s “‘Home Alone’ and ‘Bad to the Bone’: The
Advent of a Postmodern Childhood,” in Kinderculture: The Corporate
Construction of Childhood, Shirley R.Steinberg and Joe L. Kincheloe
(eds.) (Boulder: Westview Books, 1997), pp. 31–52.
77. For example, a section of the much maligned “Goals 2000,
Educate American Act,” contained a provision for midnight basketball:
The intent was targeted at “child fixing:”
“The program shall be designed to serve primarily youths and
young adults from a neighborhood or community whose population has
not less than 2 of the following characteristics (in comparison with
national averages):

‘(i) A substantial problem regarding use or sale of illegal drugs,

‘(ii) A high incidence of crimes committed by youths or young
adults.
‘(iii) A high incidence of persons infected with the human
immunodeficiency virus or sexually transmitted diseases.
Kitsch and Social Policy 101

‘(iv) A high incidence of pregnancy or a high birth rate, among

adolescents.
‘(v) A high unemployment rate for youths and young adults.
‘(vi) A high rate of high school drop-outs.’”

From http://www.ED.gov./legislation/GOALS2000/TheAct/ (March

23, 1998). This section did not survive later congressional budget
cutting.
78. This tradition was neatly satirized in John Waters’ 1988 film,
Hairspray. See also Anyon, Ghetto Schooling, p. 95.
79. Bowles and Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America, pp. 48–49.
See also Gary Orfield, “Unxepected Costs and Uncertain gains of
Dismantling Desegregation,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet
Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton
(eds.) (New York: The New Press, 1996), pp. 73–114; Berliner and
Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis, pp. 215–79.
80. Jennifer A.O’Day and Marshall S.Smith, “Systemic Reform
and Educational Opportunity,” in Designing Coherent Education Policy:
Improving the System, Susan H.Fuhrman (ed.) (San Francisco: Jossey-
Bass, 1993), pp. 251–312.
81. A point made repeatedly by Orfield and Eaton in Dismantling
Desegregation.
82. Neither Gary Orfield nor David Berliner and Bruce Biddle see
the contemporary reform movement as capable of addressing the very
real ills within U.S. public education. See Orfield, “Toward an
Integrated Future,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of
Brown v. Board of Education, Gary Orfield and Susan E.Eaton (eds.)
(New York: The New Press, 1996), pp. 331–61; and Berliner and
Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis, pp. 172–214.
83. Michael Lind, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for
America (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 164.
84. Brosio, A Radical Democratic Critique, pp. 1–43.
85. Charles E.Lindblom and Edward J. Woodhouse, T h e
Policy-Making Process, 3rd. ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall,
1993), p. 135.
86. Clarke, Radium Girls, pp. 94–96. From 1918 to 1922, the
Industrial Hygenie department at Harvard University was completely
funded by business and industry grants. This led to a grave distortion of
academic and scientific research. In particular, the department was
102 Kitsch

loathe to antagonize U.S. Radium, although its researchers found that

luminous watch dial-painters were being poisoned by radium-based
paint, a U.S. Radium product. For an examination of the politics of
grant funding in the humanities, see Ellen Messer-Davidow, “Dollars
for Scholars: The Real Politics of Humanities Scholarship and
Programs,” in The Politics of Research (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1997), pp. 193–223.
87. Lindblom and Woodhouse, The Policy-Making Process, p. 150
CHAPTER 5

Resisting and Subverting Kitsch

It takes a village to raise a child.

—Popular African proverb.

It takes the “Village People” to raise a child.

—Gay joke.

By relying on easily recognized art forms and icons, Kitsch reinforces

notions of what and how life “should be.” Complex issues are
radically simplified while the nuances of any given reality are ignored
or dismissed. Kitsch has a ready political utility that other art forms,
especially high ar t, must avoid. The time-honored myths and
stereotypes that it condenses have been woven into the political
discourse and, far too frequently, into public policies. The invocation
of Kitsch legitimizes in the political arena what is commonly
referred to as “common sense,” whether that be the status quo or
something more repressive. Its political use is powerful, seductive,
and warping, both for individuals who manufacture and consume it
and societies.
This was particularly true of Nazi Germany with its rampant
Kitsched symbolism of a noble (?!) Aryan nation composed of blond,
blue-eyed superhumans. Spectacles, pageants, specialized and
elaborate military unifor ms (costumes?), posters, paintings,
architecture, radio programming, and newsreels and film were all
employed as political vehicles to establish and enforce the Nazi
Kitsched reality.1 The Nazi political machine ran on bad art, and lots
of it, to build a monstrous reality. In Ger many, Kitsc h was
everywhere and it was inescapable. As Modris Eksteins notes,
“Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing,

103
104 Kitsch

death-dealing portent. Nazism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the

reality of both was death.” 2
But for all of its very real and deadly power, Kitsch was not and is
not invulnerable. Thanks to its sheer simple-mindedness, it is fairly
easy to identify. Whether functioning as bad art, political discourse,
public policy, or all “at once,” Kitsch is too easy, too convenient, too
simple. 3 Once recognized as such, Kitsch becomes vulnerable to
rejection, distortion, co-optation, and outright parody. For example,
Hitler and his minions provided much satirical, yet deadly serious,
fodder for various artists and political activists, at least those outside
of Germany.4 One need only to recall Charlie Chaplin’s brilliant and
savage parody of Hitler and the various Nazi accoutrements in the
movie The Great Dictator, to note satire’s strength and possibilities in
deflecting Kitsch.
Which brings us to a critical point: Kitsch, recognized as such, can
be resisted and subverted. While political and social commentators
gnash teeth and wring hands over the prevalence of Kitsch and its
various proxies within the contemporary public sphere, 5 others
promptly turn it on its head and use it for their own political purposes.
This chapter turns to an examination of what happens when we resist
and subvert political kitsch.

RESISTING KITSCH
[A]nalysis based on oversimplification is only helpful to
patent medicine hucksters, not to real people.
—Stephanie Coontz6

An important step in diffusing the political power of Kitsch is

resistance. Once Kitsch is recognized its power in the political arena can
be diminished by calling attention to its sugar-coated emptiness. As
Edelman observes:

Its very prevalence makes more authentic images and arguments stand
out when they appear on the political scene. Contrasts become
arresting. After the country had heard from Herbert Hoover during
several years of the Great Depression that prosperity was just around
the corner and the local relief efforts were adequate, Franklin
Roosevelt’s declaration that a third of the nation was ill housed, ill
Resisting and Subverting Kitsch 105

clad, and ill fed and his sponsorship of massive federal relief efforts
were all the more dramatic and all the more refreshing. Optimistic
claims, in the face of incontrovertible proof that they are false, stop
being persuasive and become generally recognized as kitsch.7

Acknowledgment, demystification and old-fashioned idol smashing are

powerful antidotes to a Kitsch-driven political environment.
Stephanie Coontz’s highly detailed debunking of political Kitsch is
chronicled in her book, “The Way We Never Were: American Families
and the Nostalgia Trap.” In her history of the American family, she
smashes popular myths, from the syrupy “Ozzie and Harriet” of the
1950s (Chapter 2) to the menacing “wilding boys” of the late 1980s
and early 1990s (Chapter 10). Armed with a wealth of social science
and historical data, Coontz’s bluntly worded and highly readable prose
slices and dices through much of the angst surrounding contemporary
American society. In the wailing over the supposed demise of the
“traditional family,” various policy prescriptions call for a return to
bygone traditions. However, Coontz notes that selecting a historical
model in the hopes of strengthening families is actually a troubling
package deal. Each era has its own disturbing components that are
usually omitted from present-day Kitsch policy discussions. Far too
many “histor icized” proposals contain more than a whiff of
“presentism,” or the “highly selective sampling of past events
(disregarding those which are ideologically inconvenient) for current
utility.” 8 For example, Coontz notes that in the oft-cited and
romanticized colonial era of pious settlers and their dutiful children:

…spelling and grammar books routinely used fornication as an

example of a four-syllable word, and preachers detailed sexual
offenses in astonishingly explicit terms. Sexual conversations
between men and women, even in front of c hildren were
remarkably frank. It is worth contrasting this colonial candor to the
climate in 1991, when the Department of Health and Human
Services was forced to cancel a proposed survey of teenagers’
sexual practices after some groups charged that such knowledge
might “inadvertently” encourage more sex. 9

Other policy entrepreneurs and social pundits have called for a return
to Victorian-era morality in the hopes of reducing supposed rampant
106 Kitsch

social pathologies.10 Yet this era is similarly problematic for Coontz, as

the mores of nineteenth-century middle-class American domesticity
were built largely on the backs of slave and child labor.11
This tendency in public policy discourse to make the romanticized
past the future cuts across ideological lines. Both cultural
conservatives and social progressives excavate all manner of historical
artifacts in constructing justifications for their pet proposals and
agendas. For example, a leading progressive educational theorist
wrote, “Of primary importance for cultural workers is the need to
resurrect traditions and social memories that provide a new way of
reading history and reclaiming power and identity.” 12 Progressive
traditions, like conservative traditions, are not without ambiguity or
paradoxes. Since the 1980s, there has been much justified lamenting
over the decline of organized labor. Many social commentators have
pined for the good old days, when the U.S. labor movement held
greater political and economic clout. However, it is doubtful that
present-day progressives wish to fully resurrect the traditions of the
labor movement, which in its heyday employed a fair degree of racism
and sexism in building and maintaining support for the cause.
The bad news for peddlers of historically Kitsched policy proposals
is that the past is as horrendously complex as is the present, and as will
be the future. This is not to say that the complexities are the same, for
they are not and cannot be the same from era to era. 13 Each point in
time is comprised of individuals who act with more or less freedom, in
situations specific to a given culture. It’s not that “history will teach us
nothing,” 14 just that those lessons are as complicated and fascinating as
present-day fare. For those who look to history to provide simple
comfort, it can be a fairly frosty place. With the rise of various and
often conflicting histories of the same event, social movement or
individuals, 15 historical-sounding Kitsched proposals can readily be
identified due to their sheer simple-mindedness. For political Kitsch to
work as Kitsch it must avoid complex, painful realities. As with
Edelman’s example of President Hoover’s hopelessly optimistic
prognostications, political Kitsch is hard pressed to withstand even a
cursory factual examination.
Children and adolescents also resist political Kitsch, particularly
within school settings.16 They have a strong sense of when the school,
curricula, teachers, and so forth, do not represent them or work for
their best interests. Students generally understand when they are being
Resisting and Subverting Kitsch 107

fed “fairy tales,” and they quickly let the adults “in charge” know of
their disdain. For example, Paul Willis’s classic study, Learning to
Labour, details how one group of working-class British males formed a
subculture that was fiercely anti-school (as well as racist and sexist).
They taunted their more docile and bookish peers and tortured the
adults in charge. They were successful in maintaining a distinct culture
that resisted school norms and values. Unfortunately for Willis’s
“lads,” their resistance ensured that they would be confined to the
working class, for schooling did hold the fragile promise of economic
mobility and a better life.17
While the “lads” are a strong, if not extreme, example of resistance,
more subtle forms occur daily. A more common form of resistance is
that of “tuning out.” Instead of engaging in open dissent, students ignore
both the adults and the material. One need only examine U.S. students’
responses to history and social studies courses to reach this same
conclusion. High school students, in particular, hate history.18 They view
it as boring and irrelevant, something that is to be endured in order to
graduate but not to be taken too seriously. And what is most despised are
the history textbooks. According to historian James Loewen:

The stories that history textbooks tell are predictable; every

problem has already been solved or is about to be solved. Textbooks
exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might
reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama,
they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything
will turn out fine in the end. 19

In other words, the textbooks are filled with all sorts of Kitsch.
Written descriptions are reinforced with suitably syrupy images. From
George Washington with his mythic cherry tree and that horrible
painting of his crossing the Delaware (going the wrong way!) to
carefully worded passages about the Vietnam War (sans pictures), 20
textbooks paint a happy and heroic portrait of U.S. history. It’s the
sappy story of a united country moving ever forward in social and
economic progress. Conflicts, even the wrenching Civil War, tend to
be minimized, distorted, or omitted.
Yet, Kitsched U.S. history does have a larger political purpose than
simply boring students to tears. 21 Although students (and, by
implication, most Americans) have very distorted notions of their
108 Kitsch

country’s past, whatever notions they do have, they draw on daily. As

the historian Carl Becker observed in 1931:

Daily and hourly, from a thousand unnoted sources, there is lodged

in Mr. Everyman’s (sic) mind a mass of unrelated and related
information and misinformation, of impressions and images, out of
which he somehow manages, undeliberately for the most part, to
fashion a history, a patterned picture of remembered things said and
done in past times and distant places. 22

As citizens functioning in a democratic republic, Americans draw upon

this Kitsched history (complete with suitable images and patriotic
songs) to aid in their political decision making, which includes
ultimately deciding not to participate in the process.
One danger of simplistic resistance to political Kitsch (i.e., “tuning
out”) is apathy. If people believe that history has taught them nothing,
that history and historical understandings have little to do with their
realities, and that present-day issues and conflicts will have happy
endings (or endings that they themselves cannot change or challenge),
then there is no point in getting involved. Kitsch, as an educational and
political symbol, can breed political quiescence.23 Kitsch remains a fine
staple within the political environment because of how well it goes
with our cherished stereotypes. It tells citizens what is familiar, what
they wish to hear and expect—not what they may need to hear. This
was particularly true in Nazi Germany, where most of the non-Jewish
intelligentsia were already disenchanted by the start of the war, yet
they still refrained from actively opposing the regime in any
meaningful way. 24 While they may have disagreed with the regime’s
methods, the intelligentsia, like most ordinary Germans, 25 supported
the Nazi’s Kitsched (and monstrous) ideals.
It seems that resistance as a political strategy has limited potential
for thwarting Kitsch, although it does succeed at times. While the Nazi
example is perhaps extreme, resistance to political Kitsch in the
United States has generally had limited efficacy. For example, the spate
of outstanding analyses of welfare (AFDC, actually) from the 1970s on
did nothing to stem enthusiasm for welfare “reform” during the mid-
1990s. Research was irrelevant in the face of possibly flogging a host of
seemingly unrepentant and “undeserving” Hester Prynnes (welfare
mothers). In addition, the current federal ban on needle-exchange
Resisting and Subverting Kitsch 109

programs to combat the spread of AIDS and other blood-borne

diseases also ignores overwhelming empirical research regarding such
programs’ efficacy. The Kitsched stereotype of the subhuman junkie in
desperate need of a fix dominates the policy discussion. It is irrelevant
that substance abusers who happen to use needles have more in
common with the rest of the population (they also have spouses and
children) than not. Nevertheless, in the areas of politics and policy
making, mere facts, overwhelming data, insightful analyses, active
ignoring, and outright rejection are often not enough to deflect
Kitsch’s seductive power.

SUBVERTING KITSCH
I hate you
You hate me
We’re a dysfunctional family
With a shot-gun blast and “Barney” hits the floor
No more purple Dinosaur!
—Popular anti-Barney song.

If resisting Kitsch proves ineffective, another time-honored method is

subversion, or of appearing to accept Kitsch while using its very
parameters to undermine its power. The anti-Barney song is one
example of subverted Kitsch. The TV show “Barney and Friends” is
wildly popular with very young children, although it sets most everyone
elses’ teeth on edge. The syrupy message is pure Kitsch: “whimsy,
fantasy, unconditional love, and perhaps most important an element of
goodness and rightness absent in our everyday lives.”26 Everyone over the
age of five knows better. Life was, is, and never can be that simplistic.
That the annoying purple dinosaur has been mass marketed as a toy has
also enraged parents and child care-givers who seemingly cannot escape
from “I love you, you love me.” Hence, a spate of anti-Barney songs have
emerged, complete with various violent ends for the dreaded dinosaur.
Barney’s message of simplistic love, a happy world, and buy ME gets
blasted away in a vicious (but funny) parody.
Kitsch, because it is so simplistic, easily lends itself to parody. And
political parody or satire can be deadly. Politicians and their
spinmeisters are well aware of this and take pains to avoid having their
message, policy agendas, candidates, or all of the above become a
110 Kitsch

joke. 27 For example, in 1964 the Goldwater presidential campaign

desperately tried to diffuse the accusation that he was a warmonger,
eager to pull the nuclear trigger.28 This charge was easy to make in
light of his declaration, “Extremism in defense of democracy is not a
vice. Extremism in the defense of liberty is a virtue,” 29 as well as other
assorted incendiary statements. His handlers settled on the campaign
slogan, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” to get voters to examine
their conscience and vote accordingly. They did, and the message was
quickly transformed into, “In your guts, you know he’s nuts.”
Political humor, parody, and satire can quickly shred the emperor’s
Kitsched clothes and, more often, his or her hide. If the satire is
searing, those on the receiving end are tempted to silence their critics.
For example, one well-known political satirist, Michael Moore, hosted
a short-lived but well-regarded television program, appropriately
titled TV Nation. The hour-long show was structured as a typical news
show, complete with stories, factoids, and polls, and brief interviews
with the man or woman on the street (usually New York City). But the
entire show mocked its own format. The stories were news, yet the
process of gathering the story usually became the story, violating a
basic tenet of “objective” journalism. 30 Whether it was storming the
town of Greenwich, Connecticut’s public beaches (which were only
open to residents), sponsoring fund-raisers to help corporations pay
their fines (i.e., “Corp-Aid”), or developing a mascot to fight
corporate crime (Crackers the Crime Fighting Chicken), Moore
embraced an activist form of journalism that he combined with acidic
sarcasm. The show was very edgy and politically brutal, reflecting
Moore’s own philosophies. That Moore repeatedly zinged corporate
America with relish and glee (including GE—corporate parent of
NBC, which produced the show)31 ensured its early demise.
A more specialized form of political parody is camp. Camp, the
self-conscious use of Kitsch, literally turns Kitsch on its head. Yet,
unlike straight-up political parody or satire, camp has long been
attacked for being supposedly “apolitical, aetheticized, and frivolous.” 32
What really annoys many of camp’s detractors—such as Susan Sontag
in a now classic 1964 essay 33—is that camp is gay parody, and as such
has a politics all its own. While some claim that there are multiple
“camps,” as Moe Meyer observes, “There is only one. And it is queer.” 34
Yet even Meyer’s observation is somewhat of an understatement.
Camp is unabashedly queer, unabashedly flamboyant, and unabashedly
Resisting and Subverting Kitsch 111

subversive in its politics. Camp, as a form of cultural politics,

deliberately turns Kitsched straight norms on their head, usually in a
mocking and highly exaggerated manner. More simply, camp is a queer
tweaking and, at times, lampooning of straight culture.
For example, in 1991 the mayoral election in Chicago included a
candidate from the activist group Queer Nation. Joan Jett Blakk ran
for office in drag—albeit trés elegant—and promised to put “camp”
back into “campaign.” While the outcome was marginal electorally, it
did raise visibility for Queer Nation and their issues, far and above
what could have been expected from a more “traditional”
nonmainstream candidacy. Like most marginal campaigns visibility was
the entire political point, which Blakk, no shrinking violet when it
came to the media, easily generated. Given the cultural expectations of
political candidates—that they be somewhat phlegmatic, straight, with
the prerequisite telegenic spouse and children—Blakk’s candidacy
provided a spectacular counterpoint to those expectations. Blakk’s
sheer degree of “otherness” and the fact that s/he dared engage in a
mayoral run, enraged most political powers, including the mainstream
(and assimilationist) gay political organizations who wanted her/him
silenced. 35 By deliberately engaging in artifice (a parody of the
traditional political campaign and traditional political candidates), the
Blakk campaign highlighted just how ar tificial and Kitsch-filled
Chicago politics were.
Besides the various forms of parody that attack Kitsch, there is the
more old-fashioned subversion. This is particularly common in public
schools when teachers, distressed by curriculum requirements that
they consider vapid, teach around or against such Kitsched mandates.36
One example is the problem presented by the topic of Christopher
Columbus. In New Jersey, public school teachers are required to
impar t the heroic stor y of a plucky European explorer who
“discovered” and brought civilization to the New World. More
enterprising teachers quickly dispense with that tale. While ensuring
that students are cognizant of the events and dates that will likely be
on the state test, they quickly move to a fuller exploration of
Columbus, including his extermination of the Arawak Nation. Students
are exposed to more than what the state expects and get a far richer,
more accurate and disturbing picture of U.S. history. One might be
tempted to view such teachers as highly politicized “street-level
bureaucrats,” 37 implementing policies and procedures that appear to be
112 Kitsch

congruent with federal, state, and local mandates but actually subvert
their intent. But unlike the original model of a street-level bureaucrat,
these teachers are not coping with ambiguity of expectations. They are
well aware of the inappropriate and biased curricular mandates and are
carefully (and quietly) subverting them. A few teachers are less
successful in navigating the subver sive line and are fired or
reprimanded for their actions (which are seen as insubordination), but
the more intrepid and stealthy ones tend to prevail.
There are, of course, plenty of other examples of subverted Kitsch
in U.S. culture: ranging from the long-running TV show “The
Simpsons,” to Shirley Jackson’s classic tale of scary traditional
community values in “The Lottery” (ritual human sacrifice builds a
sense of “togetherness”). Even Shakespeare can be read as subversive.
According to Edelman:

Shakespeare illustrates brilliantly the possibility of accepting, even

extolling, established hierarchies and elites while undermining them
through a penetrating portrayal of social institutions, as he does
repeatedly in the history plays, Coriolanus, and elsewhere. 38

The important point is that Kitsch, while abundant in both the

broader cultural and political environment, is not irresistible.
Subverted political Kitsch keeps columnists, comiedians, essayists,
satirists, and political activists all happily employed. The irony is that in
the political and policy arenas one person’s deeply held Kitsched belief
is another person’s punch line. But Kitsch must be recognized as such.
Only then can it be resisted or subverted.

NOTES
1. Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics: How Artistic Creations Shape
Political Conceptions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp.
47–48, 91.
2. Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and The Birth of the
Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), p. 304.
3. A point that Edelman makes. “[Kitsch]…does not postulate an
observer with an active mind….” Murray Edelman, From Art to
Politics, p. 33.
Resisting and Subverting Kitsch 113

4. The response of the non-Jewish ar tistic and intellectual

community to the rise of Nazism wavered between enthusiasm and
ambiguity. As Eksteins obser ves, “The gradual falling-out was
occasioned, however, less by what National Socialism represented as a
general phenomenon than by its treatment of the intelligentsia: the
insolence of party cadres toward intellectuals, their distrust of them,
and their feelings of inferiority toward them.” See Eksteins, Rites of
Spring, p. 327.
5. For example, see Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985);
and Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1990).
6. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with
America’s Changing Families (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 8–9.
7. Edelman, From Art to Politics, p. 32.
8. Catherine A.Lugg, “Calling for Community in a Conservative
Age,” in Expertise versus Responsiveness in Children’s Worlds: Politics, Home
and Community Relationships, Maureen McClure and Jane Clark Lindle
(eds.) (Washington, DC: The Falmer Press, 1997), p. 104.
9. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the
Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 10.
10. For one example of such wishful thinking, see Gertrude
Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to
Modern Values (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
11. Coontz, The Way We Never Were, p. 11.
12. Henry A.Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics
of Education (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 242.
13. See David Hackett Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Towards a Logic
of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970).
14. Sting, “History will Teach Us Nothing,”…Nothing Like The Sun,.
A & M Records, 1987.
15. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and
the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), pp. 469–521.
16. There is an enormous body of literature on student resistance.
For example, see Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (Lexington: D.C.
Heath, 1977); Henry Giroux, Theory and Resistance: A Pedagogy for the
Opposition (South Hadley: Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1983); and
114 Kitsch

Peter McLaren, Life in Schools: An Introduction to Critical Pedagogy in the

Foundations of Education, 2nd edition (New York: Longman, 1994).
17. Willis, Learning to Labour.
18. James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American
History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 1.
19. Ibid., p. 2.
20. Loewen discusses the omission of the most memorable
Vietnam-era pictures from U.S. history textbooks (Quang Duc’s self-
immolation, the U.S. napalming of Kim Phuc, the aftermath of the My
Lai massacre). As Loewen observes, what makes it into the books are
“Uncontroversial shots, for the most part—servicemen on patrol,
walking through swamps, or jumping from helicopters.” See Loewen,
Lies My Teacher Told Me, p. 241.
21. Ibid., p. 295. A particular academic bane for me was music
history, which I found dreadfully dull. It wasn’t until graduate school
(in music), when a colleague presented a paper examining all the
various Romantic-era composers thought to have had syphilis, that
history became absolutely intriguing.
22. Carl Becker, Everyman His Own Historian, presidential address
delivered before the American Historical Association at Minneapolis,
December 29, 1931. In Hist. 502.1 Reader, Spring 1993, The
Pennsylvania State University, p. 243.
23. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1985), pp. 22–43.
24. Eksteins, Rites of Spring, pp. 327–28.
25. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).
26. Eleanor Blair Hilty, “From ‘Sesame Street’ to ‘Barney and
Fr iends’: Television as Teacher,” in Kinderculture: The Corporate
Construction of Childhood, Shirley R.Steinberg and Joe L.Kincheloe
(eds.) (Boulder: Westview Books, 1997), p. 71.
27. Kathleen Hall Jameison and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, The
Interplay of Influence: News, Advertising, Politics and the Mass Media, 4th
edition (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing, 1997), p. 133.
28. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dirty Politics: Deception, Distraction, and
Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 54–56. The
most famous (or perhaps most infamous) ad to emerge from this
election was “Daisy,” featuring a little girl blithely counting petals on a
daisy. She reaches the number ten, which triggers a countdown. The
Resisting and Subverting Kitsch 115

image focuses on her eye at zero and then to a nuclear explosion, with
a Johnson voice-over. It concludes with a “Vote for President Johnson
on November 3” message. Although Goldwater is never mentioned by
name, the implications are clear. By not voting for Johnson one might
well be embracing the nuclear apocalypse.
29. From the CNN Website, May 29, 1998. http://
allpolitics.com/1998/05/29/goldwater.obit/
30. Jamieson and Campbell, The Interplay of Influence.
31. During its first season, “TV Nation” was on NBC; the second
season, Fox.
32. Moe Meyer, “Introduction: Reclaiming the discourse of
Camp,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, Moe Meyer (ed.) (New York:
Routledge, 1994), p. 1.
33. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in A Susan Sontag Reader (New
York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 105–19.
34. Meyer, “Introduction,” p. 5. Blakk also ran for U.S. President
in 1992, and 1996 and is gearing up for a 2000 run.
35. Ibid., pp. 5–7.
36. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, pp. 309–12.
37. Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the
Individual in Public Services (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1980).
38. Edelmen, From Art to Politics, p. 20.
Chapter 6

The End?

I would say that the Iwo Jima memorial is kitsch.

—J. Carter Brown, 19941

In 1998, the publication of J. Carter Brown’s four-year-old comment

triggered howls of outrage from active and former military personnel,
who strenuously objected to his assessment of the World War II Marine
memorial as “low brow” art. Brown, who was chair of the U.S. Fine
Arts Commission, a post he had held for twenty-seven years, and a
former head of the National Gallery (twenty-two years), quickly
backtracked, claiming that his use of the word “Kitsch” referred “to the
popular appeal of the sculpture, which as I say I think is one of the
greatest.”2 Rep. Gerald Solomon (R-NY), a former Marine and chair of
the powerful House Rules Committee, was not appeased and called for
Brown’s resignation. Brown managed to hang on to the appointment,
as he was a well-respected figure in both the ar t and political
communities,3 and the controversy quickly died down.
Yet Brown’s original assessment was (and is) accurate. The Iwo Jima
memorial is Kitsch. An enormous bronze sculpture (the world’s
largest), it is based on a photograph of the second flag raising on
February 23, 1945. 4 (A much smaller flag had been raised earlier in
the day.) The Pulitzer Prize winning photograph was then disseminated
for propaganda purposes during the war as well as serving as news. The
memorial does not encourage the viewer to reflect on the war and its
complexities or to draw various interpretations of the events. Rather it
is triumphal, larger than life, glorifying the U.S. victory in one of the
most bloody battles of the Pacific theater. But the sculpture itself is
bloodless. By comparison, the Vietnam Memorial is art. It triggers a

117
118 Kitsch

host of complex reactions and reflections, some extremely painful for

the viewer, whether one is of that specific generation or not. The Iwo
Jima Memorial works as political Kitsch due to its sheer triumphalism.
One can easily envision the memorial used as part of a political
campaign or as part of a plug for increased military spending. However,
it is doubtful any candidate (or policy proposal) would wish to be
associated with the Vietnam Memorial.
The brief political furor over Brown’s observation had far more to
do with how the Iwo Jima Memorial was designed to prompt an
unthinking patriotic response than for its artistic merits, although the
memorial’s defenders often confused the two issues. Such confusion is
understandable. Americans are encouraged through schooling, mass
media, consumer culture, and the political environment to be ready
consumers of Kitsch. In the case of the Iwo Jima Memorial, its easy
emotionalism has been reinforced by decades of mass-marketed
political hype. Countless pictures of the memorial have been beamed
via television to homes, particularly on Memorial Day and the Fourth
of July, when the John Wayne movie The Sands of Iwo Jima is shown.5 For
many individuals, the memorial has become sacred, and the sacred, by
definition, can’t be tac ky. 6 Hence, when Brown described the
memorial as Kitsch, he was demystifying the easy and simplistic
emotions engendered by the memorial while simultaneously skewering
some “sacred” cows.
As we have seen repeatedly, Kitsch plays an important role in the
U.S. political spectacle and the policy making process. From defining
what (or who) is a “problem” to defining various “remedies” to
determining who is a “leader,” Kitsch shapes perceptions of what is
“real” and what options people have in determining their various
futures. Kitsch is powerful and plentiful within the American political
culture, yet resistible and subvertible when recognized for what it is.
This chapter revisits some of the issues explored, offers some
recommendations for policy analysis, and then draws the discussion of
Kitsch and public policy to a close (but not an end).

KITSCH AND THE POLITICAL SPECTACLE

In the constructed political spectacle,7 a myriad of symbols are bandied
about, some of which are rooted in Kitsch. Kitsch, as a condensation
symbol rooted in bad art, combines elements of history, cultural
The End? 119

mythology, and syrupy emotionalism to shape the direction of the

political environment and possible policy prescr iptions. An
appreciation for Kitsch is cultivated in a variety of educative sites: by
schools, the mass media—including both the entertainment and news
industries—and political elites. From baseball, motherhood, apple pie,
and Chevrolet to “God and Country” and beyond, Kitsch is as
American as Jerry Falwell and Bill Clinton. While political participants
of all ideological stripes invoke Kitsch (and the more intrepid reader
should examine this tome for unintended examples), its use narrows
the range of acceptable discourse and limits policy options. For
example, the invoking and racial transformation of Hester Prynne, the
seemingly unwed unrepentant mother, did much to constrain policy
options regarding welfare and led to its eventual retrenchment.
While admittedly this is an initial exploration of how Kitsch is used
in the political arena, it is apparent that Kitsch is employed regularly
by politicians and other political participants. From the blurring of
policy and PRolicy to the elaborate televised Kitsched spectacles of
political campaigns to the public school curriculum and other
educational policies, all sorts of tacky art references and art forms are
paraded into our political consciousness. Kitsch aides the storyteller 8
by providing a form of rhetorical shorthand. Kitsch works because
most people recognize the symbolic references. But many miss the
point that it is Kitsch, and, by definition, this makes it false.
Yet, for all its emptiness in fact, Kitsched politics and policies have
a very real impact on very real lives. For example, one of the legacies
of the spectacular and televised “War on Drugs” has been the high
incarceration rates of nonviolent offenders, particularly African-
American males.9 By the late 1980s, the United States had a higher
incarceration rate of black males than the openly racist and apartheid
government of South Africa. 10 Although studies (including those
conducted by the federal government) showed the Drug War was
wasteful in economic and social terms, and that the war eroded the
civil liberties of Americans and overwhelmed the court system, and
that it was particularly disastrous in distressed urban areas, facts and
research were (and remain to this day) irrelevant. Once the spectacle
commenced, it has been difficult to end. Too many vested interests are
making money and gaining political power.11 The Drug War, rooted in
bad art, grinds on and on and remains bad public policy, making the
United States both the “Land of the Free” and the “Home of the
120 Kitsch

Jailed.”12 As we have seen in other instances, Kitsch might be syrupy

and easy, but it is far from benign.

CONCLUSION
We now arrive at the point that many researchers dread: the question
of “So What?” Kitsch, as bad art, has an emotional and intellectual
immediacy, that good art takes pains to avoid. It condenses history,
cultural mythology, and emotionalism into a simplistic symbol for
ready and pre-digested consumption by the public at large. Such easy
symbolism quickly works its way into everyday political discourse and,
more than just occasionally, into public policy. Kitsch, once recognized
as such, can be resisted and subverted. Yet Kitsch can and often does
trump actual research in the public sphere, much to the consternation
and embarrassment of policy analysts and other researchers, who are
appalled that such a “cheap” device works.13
Instead of gnashing teeth and rending the garment of social science
“objectivity,” it may be more productive in the long r un for
researchers, particularly those in the disciplines of the social sciences,
to re-examine some of their (our?) assumptions, particularly regarding
the separateness of the art world and the political world. This is not a
new obser vation. Classicists are quick to point out that Plato
recommended that children be exposed to only certain art, due to the
possible influences that bad art could have on the larger political
culture. More contemporary observers, including soldiers of the
Christian Right, postmodernists, and more traditional social scientists,
have also noted the influence art has had on the scholarly disciplines,
politics, and policy making.14 What might be helpful is a recognition
that individuals and groups produce and consume art (on a spectrum
of good to bad), and do so for a variety of reasons, including political
reasons.
Finally, it may behoove researchers of all ideological stripes to be
“artful” in their own writings. As documented in Chapter 2, the reason
that some pitchers of Kitsch (i.e., think tankers) succeed in getting
their views and policy prognostications into the public arena is that
their ptiches are at least comprehensible to mass audiences.15 This is
not, however, a call for serious scholars to scribble anti-intellectual
Kitsch by the truckload. On the contrary, scholars should strive to
have their various tomes meet the rigors of good scholarship and
The End? 121

respectable art. It is not enough to have one’s research published. It

must be read by a variety of individuals, including those engaged in the
political and policy making process. If the writing is graceless,
incomprehensible, and intellectually self-important, friends and family
may be the only ones to take the time to read it. The audience will be
embarrassingly small, and Kitsch will have again carried the day.

NOTES
1. Mike Feinsilber, “Iowa Jima Memorial Defended,” The Star-
Ledger, Wednesday, March 11, 1998, p. 14.
2. Ibid. See also Ken Ringle, “Art Criticism Meets a Few Angry
Marines: Carter Brown Blasted for ‘Kitsch’ Comment,” Washington
Post, March 11, 1998, Section D, p. 1.
3. Richard Paul, “The Big Shoes of J.Carter Brown,” Washington
Post, February 2, 1992, Section G, p. 1; Michael Kilian, “Almost
Perfect: J.Carter Brown Bids Farewell to National Gallery,” Chicago
Tribune, September 3, 1992, Section 5, p. 5.
4. From the U.S. Park Service’s web site. http://www.nps.gov/
gwnp/usmc.htm.
5. Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic discusses how powerful that
movie was in shaping his decision to join the Marines. See Ron Kovic,
Born on the Fourth of July (New York: Pocket Books, 1976), pp. 54–55.
6. While the sacred might not be tacky, all sorts of tacky things are
done to the sacred. Besides Chapter 2 of this tome, see R.Laurence
Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For how war and war imagery
can become sacred, see Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and
History of the Passions of War (New York: Henry Holt, 1998).
7. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
8. For a fascinating examination of the storytelling of
economists, see Donald N.McCloskey, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative
of Economic Expertise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);
and McCloskey, “Some Consequences of a Conjective Economics,” in
Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, Marianne A.
Ferber and Judy A.Nelson (eds.) (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), pp. 69–93.
122 Kitsch

9. Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of
Failure (New York: Little, Brown and Company, pp. 233; 259; 335–37.
10. Ibid., p. 259. One in four African-American males were in
prison as compared with one in sixteen white males.
11. Ibid. pp. 291–310. Such interests include the growing police
state, drug testing firms, and the Drug Enforcement Agency.
12. Edelman, From Art to Politics, p. 115.
13. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the
Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).
14. Edelman, From Art to Politics; McCloskey, If You ‘re So Smart.
15. William Greider, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American
Democracy (New York: Touchstone, 1992), p. 300. See also Kathleen
Hall Jamieson and Karyln Kohrs Campbell, The Interplay of Influence:
News, Advertising, Politics and the Mass Media, 4th edition (Belmont:
Wadsworth Publishing, 1997), p. 133.
Index

Adams, John Quincy, 14 Baker, James, 60

affirmative action, 22, 34 Baker, Keith, 11
African-Americans (blacks), Barber, James David, 72
20, 22, 24, 32, 80–82, 90– Barney and Friends, 109
91, 119 Barrett, Laurence I., 42
Ahlstrom, Sidney E., 49, 51 Barsamian, David, 48
Aid to Dependent Children Baum, Dan, 42, 43, 122
(ADC), 77, 80 Bauman, Robert, 70
Aid to Families with Dependent Beard, Charles A., Mary R., 40
Children (AFDC), 77, 80–83, 108 Becker, Carl, 108, 114
AIDS, 32, 108 Begala, Paul, 45
Albelda, Randy, 93, 97 Bennett, David H., 41, 47, 48,
Alexander, Lamar, 41 49, 50, 51, 73, 98
Alger, Horatio, 14, 41, 58 Bennett, William, 18, 92
Allison, Clinton B., 94 Bennett, W.Lance, 16, 42
American Enterprise Institute, 22 Berliner, David C., 98, 101
American Broadcast Company Bernstein, Leonard, 70
(ABC), 16, 20 Bérubé, Alan, 73–74
Anyon, Jean, 97–98 Betty Ford Clinic, The, 20
Apple, Michael W., 46 Biddle, Bruce J., 98, 101
Arendt, Hannah, 46 Bigelow, Donald, 99
Aronson, Elliot, 40, 69 Billings, Robert, 37
art, 3–6, 103–104, 120 birth control, 79
Arthur, King, 64, 68 Blakk, Joan Jett, 111
Blanchard, Dallas A., 50
baby-boomers, 6 Block, Herbert, 71

123
124 Index

Breckinridge, Sophonisba Civil War, 31, 86, 107

Preson, 95 Clark, Claudia, 94, 101
Bogart, Humphrey, 57 Clark, Joe, 54
Bowles, Samuel, 99, 101 Cleaver, Ward and June, 24
Boyd, William Lowe, 46, 83, 97 Clinton, Bill, 31, 54, 57, 64–68,
Boyer, Peter J., 45 77, 82, 96, 119
Boys Town, 3 Cloward, Richard, 44, 69, 95, 96
Bringham, Carl, 88 Cohen, Jeff, 24
Bromely, David G., 50, 51 Cohn, Roy, 70
Brosio, Richard, 47, 92, 99, 101 Columbus, Christopher, 111
Brown, J.Carter, 117 Comstock Act, 79
Buchanan, Patrick, 33 communism, 29
Bucuvalas, Michael J., 12 Coontz, Stephanie, 44, 45, 48, 49,
Bush, George, 14, 23, 26, 65, 96 95, 97, 98, 104, 105–106, 113
Cooper, Gary, 55
Callahan, Raymond E., 99 cowboy(s), 26, 30, 31–32, 40,
Camelot, 64–68, 82 57, 58, 60
camp, 110–111 Crammer, Richard Ben, 40
campaign(s), 6, 13–15, 32, 34, 54, Cremin, Lawrence A., 99
57, 111, 118 critical theory, 9, 25
mudslinging, 13–14 Cuban, Larry, 97
Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 69, Cubberly, Ellwood P., 86, 98
114, 115, 122 culture, 3, 26, 54, 55
candidate(s), 6, 13, 14, 34, 109–111 curriculum, 26, 55, 83, 91, 106,
Cannon, Lou, 12, 57, 58–59, 111–112, 119
63–64, 71, 72
Carter, Jimmy, 34 Dada, 5
Center for Popular Economics, Dangerous Minds, 84
The, 93, 97 D.A.R.E., 18–19
Chandler, Ralph Clark, 37, 51 Deaver, Michael, 60, 67
Chaplin, Charlie, 104 Diamond, Sara, 28, 43, 44, 47,
children, 3, 14, 18–19, 20, 34, 49, 51, 70
36, 77–83, 104–105, 106 Diggins, John Patrick, 47, 48
problem child, child fixing, Dikkers, Scott, 11
83–92 Dittoheads, 24
Christian Coalition, 40 Dolan, Terry, 70
Christian Right, 120 Dolbeare, Kenneth M.,
Christian Voice, 35 Patricia, 46
Christianity, 28, 33–40 Dorfles, Gillo, 10
Index 125

Drew, Elizabeth, 66, 68, 73, 74, 97 Feinsilber, Mike, 121

Duberman, Martin, 47 Ferber, Marianne, 121
Dugger, Ronnie, 71 Finklestein, Barbara, 98
Dukakis, Michael, 14 Firestone, William A., 94
Duke, David, 82 Fisher, David Hackett, 113
Fitzgerald, Francis, 35, 49, 50
Eaton, Susan E., 101 flag, 9, 14, 18
economic libertarianism, Folbre, Nancy, 93, 97
27–28, 29 Forbes, Malcom, 70
Edelman, Murray, 8–12, 19, Forrest Gump, 6–7
41, 42, 43, 46, 51, 53, 55, Foucault, Michel, 46
56, 68–69, 70, 73, 75, 95, Franken, Al, 45, 49
104, 106, 112, 113, 114, 115, Freidel, Frank, 42
121, 122 Friedman, Leon, 43
Edlin, Laura, 81, 94–95, 97 Fuhrman, Susan H., 93, 101
Edsall, Thomas Byrne, Mary D., fundamentalists, 34–40
50, 96
education, 9, 10, 77 public Galen, M., 70
education, 83–92 Gates, Gary Paul, 71, 72
Ehrenreich, Barbara, 49, 72, 93– gays and lesbians, 24, 32, 34, 37,
94, 121 39, 66
Eksteins, Modris, 11, 45–46, 72, military gay-ban, 66–67
103–104, 112–113, 114 “don’t ask, don’t tell,” 67
Elementary and Secondary General Electric, 57, 58–59, 61,
Education Act (ESEA), 90 110
English, Deidre, 93–94 Gergen, David, 67, 74
Epstein, Edward, 45 Gingrich, Newt, 3, 13, 40
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), Gintis, Herbert, 99, 101
34, 36 Giroux, Henry A., 113
Ettinger, Maia, 46 Goals 2000, 90, 100–101
Goertz, Margaret E., 94
Fairness and Accuracy in Goldberg, Whoopi, 8
Reporting (FAIR), 24 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 114
Falwell, Jerry, 36–40, 119 Goldwater, Barry, 110, 114–115
Father Knows Best, 6 Gordon, Linda, 69, 79, 82, 94,
Federal Communication 95, 97, 99
Commission (FCC), 34–35 Gottfried, Paul, 47
Federal Emergency Relief Act Grant, Gerald, 98
(FERA), 80 Gray, Sir Alexander, 48
126 Index

Greenfield, Meg, 7–8, 11 ideology, 24, 28–33, 76

Greider, William, 21, 41–42, definition of, 25–27
44, 122 Ignatius, David, 21–22
Greiff, Martin, 41 indians, 26
Gresson, Aaron D., III, 43, Internal Revenue Service
44, 98 (IRS), 36
Gross, Larry, 47, 70 IQ, 6, 22
Grundy, Thomas, 69 Iran-Contra, 54, 63
Guinier, Lani, 66 Ivins, Molly, 18, 42, 49, 62,
Gusfield, Joseph R., 43 71, 72
Iwo Jima Memorial, 117–118
Hacker, Andrew, 43
Hairspray, 101 Jackson, Andrew, 14
Harding, Sandra, 93 Jackson, Shirley, 112
Hansot, Elisabeth, 98 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 41,
Haug, Carolyn, 44 69, 70, 71, 97,
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 77, 94 114–115, 122
Hellman, Lillian, 71 Jaros, Dean, 12
Heritage Foundation, 21–22, 75 Jefferson, Thomas, 29
Herman, Pee Wee, 8 Jethro Tull, 11
Herrnstein, Richard, 22 Johnson, Haynes, 66, 73
Hershey, Marjorie Randon, 20– Johnson, Lyndon B., 53–54
21, 44 Johnson, Reed, 11
Hertsgaard, Mark, 41, 62, 69, 72
Hilty, Eleanor Blair, 114 Kaestle, Carl F, 48
Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 113 Karier, Clarence J., 98
Himmelstein, Jerome L., 47, Karp, Walter, 16, 42
50, 51 Katz, Phyllis A., 43
history, 3–4, 9–10, 26, 28–29, 36, Kellner, Douglas, 16, 40, 41, 42,
54, 105–108, 111–112, 120 44, 70, 73, 113
Hitler, Adolf, 104 Kennedy, John F., 64–65
Hollywood, 57, 90 blacklist, 58 Kilian, Michael, 121
Hollingshead, A.B., 88, 100 Kincheloe, Joe L., 43, 44, 98,
Home Alone, 90 100, 114
Hoover, Herbert, 104–105, 106 King, Alvy L., 43
Horton, Willie, 14, 20, 41 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 56
House, Ernest R., 44 Kirst, Michael W., 11, 26, 46
Hudson Institute, 22 Kitsch, 118–121
Hudson, Winthrop S., 49, 50, 51 definitions of,
Index 127

3–10 and political spectacle, 13– Maccoby, Hyam, 49

25 and political ideology, 25–33 MacPherson, Myra, 11
right-wing ideology, 27–33 Madison, James, 29
and God, 33–40 Maniaci, Teodoro, 48
and leadership, 53–57 Mann, Horace, 85
Bill Clinton, 64–68 Ronald Marcus, Eric, 47
Reagan, 57–64 marketing, 6
and social policy, 75–93 Martin, William, 73
welfare reform, 77–83 Mayer, Jane, 64, 72–73
education, 83–92 Mazzarella, JoAnn, 69
resisting, 104–109 McCarthy, Cameron, 46
subverting, 104, 109–112 McCloskey, Donald N., 94, 121
camp, 110–111 McClure, Maureen, 46–47, 113
Kouzes, James M., 69 McGuire, John M., 45
Kovac, Ron, 121 McLaren, Peter, 114
Kulka, Tomas, 10 McManus, Doyle, 64, 72–73
media, 10, 15–16, 17, 18, 23–24,
Labaree, David F., 97 54, 83, 84, 89, 92, 118, 119
Langer, Susanne, 9–11 Meese, Edwin, 22, 44, 60
Lashway, Larry, 69 Messer-Davidow, Ellen, 101–102
Las well, Harold, 10 Meyer, Moe, 110, 115
Lear, Norman, 39 militant anti-communism, 27–28,
Leave It to Beaver, 6 29, 30, 58
Lein, Laura, 81, 94–95, 97 militia movement, 30
Levantrosser, William F., 43 Miller, Neil, 74
Lewis, Anne C, 51 Moore, Michael, 11, 110
Liebman, Robert C., 47, 50 Moore, R.Laurence, 121
Limbaugh, 23–25, 42, 92 Moral Majority, 35–40
Lind, Michael, 44, 92, 96, 101 mothers, single, 77–83, 88
Lindblom, Charles E., 9, 11, 44, movie and movies, 3, 4, 6, 33,
93, 101, 102 54, 55, 57, 64
Lindle, Jane Clark, 47, 113 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 81
Lipsky, Michael, 115 music, 4 rock, 6
Lissak, Ricka Shpak, 99 Music Man, The, 90 author’s
Little House on the Prairie, 84, 91 dislike of, 100
Loewen, James W., 12, 46, 47, Murray, Charles, 3, 10, 22, 81, 96
48, 49, 51, 70, 107, 114, 115 myth, 4, 6–7, 24, 25, 31, 54,
Lugg, Catherine A., 12, 41, 42, 55, 84, 120
44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 69, Nasaw, David, 89, 99, 100
71, 72, 74, 83, 97, 113
128 Index

Nash, George, 29, 47, 48 Piele, Phillip K., 70

National Defense Education Act Pilgrims, 36
(NDEA), 90 Pinkerton, James P., 45
Native Americans, 31, 36 Piven, Frances Fox, 44, 69, 95,
Natriello, Gary, 94 96, 97
Nazis and Nazism, 25, 31, Pledge of Alligiance, 14, 34
103–104, 108, 112–113 Plato, 120
Nelson, Judy A., 121 policy, 3, 7–10, 17, 21, 22, 24,
New Christian Right (NCR), 25, 27, 37, 60, 66–68, 75–
36–37 93, 103–104, 105–106, 118,
Newhart, Bob, 7–8 119–121
news, 15–25, 60, 78, 117, 119 political socialization, 9
Nixon, Richard M., 59, 67 Posner, Barry Z., 69, 70
Novak, William, 71 Postman, Neil, 70, 94, 113, 122
Novick, Peter, 113 Powell, Colin, 30
Nugent, Ted, 11 Praise the Lord (PTL), 39
Nunn, Sam, 66 Pratkanis, Anthony, 40, 69
preacher, 30, 32–33, 35, 40, 57,
Oil Producing and Exporting 60, 82, 92
Countries (OPEC), 21 print, 16
Old Time Gospel Hour, The, 36 Problem Child, 90
Orfield, Gary, 101 PRolicy, 15–25, 53–54, 60, 119
Otis, Harry, 48 Prynne, Hester, 77–83, 84, 108,
119
Pagels, Elaine, 49 Public Broadcasting System
painting, 4 (PBS), 16, 21
Palmer, A.T., 70 public opinion, 16
Panetta, Leon, 42 Puritans, 36
parody, 104, 109–110
gay parody. See camp Quadagno, Jill, 94, 96
Paul, Richard, 121 Quakers, 36
Pencak, William, 42 Quayle, Dan, 22, 32
People for the American Way Queer Nation, 111
(PFAW), 39 Quicunpue Vult, 49–50
Perkins, Ray, Jr., 45
Perkinson, Henry, 87, 98, 99 radio, 16, 23–25
Perot, Ross, 42 Rambo, 55
Philadelphia Bible riots, 29 Reagan, Nancy, 71
Phillips, Kevin, 96 Reagan, Ronald, 7, 14, 15,
Index 129

17–18, 35, 37, 53–55, 57–64, Shentalinsky, Vitaly, 10

71, 72, 81 Shilts, Randy, 73
Rebel Without A Cause, 90 Shipman, Pat, 43, 44, 94
Rector, Robert, 21, 81, 96 Shupe, Anson, 38, 49, 50, 51
Remnick, David, 45 Simpsons, The, 112
Rentschler, William, 45 Skocpol, Theda, 95
Revere, Anne, 58 Smith, Adam, 28
Riis, Jacob, 88, 99 Smith, Hedrick, 59–60, 71
Ringle, Ken, 121 Smith, Stuart C, 70
Rippa, S. Alexander, 98 Snowball, David, 39, 50, 51
Roberts, Eugene L., Jr., 42 social science, 75–76, 105, 121
Robertson, Pat, 39–40 Social Security Act, 80
Robison, James, 38 social traditionalism, 27, 28–29,
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 104–105 32, 92
Rosenau, Fred S., 51 soldier, 30–31, 32, 40, 57, 58,
Rosenberg, Robert, 48–49 60, 67
Rubin, Lillian B., 43 Solomon, Barbara Miller, 70
Ruiz, Vicki L., 47 Solomon, Gerald, 117
Russo, Vito, 49 Sontag, Susan, 110, 115
Rzeznik, Francine M., 48 Southern Strategy, 80–81
Southwell, Ray, 30
Scagliotti, John, 49 Soviet Union, 28, 29, 30, 33
Schiller, Greta, 49 Spear, James A., 50, 51
Schlafly, Phyllis, 56 spectacle, 9–10, 15, 23, 25, 40,
Schieffer, Bob, 71,72 54, 103, 118
schooling, 9, 119 Spring, Joel, 48, 95, 99
public schooling, 6, 8 Stacy, William A., 38, 49
school prayer, 37, 91 Stallone, Sylvester, 55
schools, 119 Staloff, Hazel, 23
common schools, 9, 84–86 Steinberg, Shirley R., 43, 44, 98,
public schools, 9, 18–19, 26, 100, 114
36, 40, 55, 83–92, 111–112 Stewart, James B., 73
Schor, Juliet B., 44 Sting, 113
Scopes, trial, 34 street-level bureaucrats, 111–112
sculpture, 4 Stockman, David, 96
Sears, David O., 43 students, 91, 107–108
Seger, Bob, 6, 11 Supreme Court, 17
Shakeshaft, Charol, 70–71 decisions, 62, 91
Shakespeare, William, 112 Swaggart, Jimmy, 39
130 Index

Swerdlow, Amy, 47 Ward, Douglas B., 42

symbol(s) and symbolism, 3–10, Warsaw Pact, 28
14, 17–18, 20–21, 23, 25, Washington, George, 9, 29, 107
26–27, 31, 36–37, 40, 54, Waters, John, 101
57, 60, 67–68, 78, 92, 108, Wayne, John, 30–31, 33, 48, 118
119, 120 Weis, Lois, 46
Weiss, Carol H., 12
Talbot, Stephen, 45 welfare, 3, 68, 75–77, 84, 88,
Tayler, Dalmas A., 43 92, 108, 119
teachers, 36, 87, 91, 106, 111–112 welfare reform, 77–83
televangelist(s), 33, 35–36 Welk Show, The Lawrence, 6
television, 3–4, 6–8, 14–16, 17, Westenhoffer, Susan, 8
20, 24, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, White House, the, 16–18
53–54, 55, 57, 59–60, 64, whites, 20, 24, 26, 30–32, 55, 80
78, 84, 109, 118 white supremacy and racism,
testing, 87 6, 80, 82
textbooks, 107 Whittle Communications, 41
theater, 4 Will, George, 92
think-tanks, 21–22, 56, 83 Willis, Paul, 106–107, 113
Thucydides, 11 Wilson, Meredith, 90, 100
tracking, 87 Wirt, Fredrick, 11, 26, 46
Tyack, David, 97, 98, 99 Woodhouse, Edward J., 9, 12,
Tyson, Laura D’Andrea, 96 44, 93, 101, 102
women, 24, 37, 56, 77–83
U.S. News & World Report, 67 World War II, 14, 31, 33,
U.S. Radium, 101 117–118
Wuthnow, Robert, 47, 50
Vedlitz, Aronld, 27, 31, 46, 47, 48
Vietnam War, 6–7, 54, 107, Yoder, Edwin, 17
117–118 York, Sgt. Alvin, 55

War on Drugs, the, 18–20, 42, Zahorchak, Gerald L., 46

53–54, 119–120 Zappa, Frank, 5, 10
War on Poverty, the, 53–54, 80 Zwier, Robert, 34–35, 50