Intolerant Alliance

Censors of right and left have been cooperating for years.

Jesse Walker from the March 2001 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

In 1985, Tipper Gore and Susan Baker, spouses of then-Senator Al Gore and then-Treasury Secretary James Baker, founded the Parents’ Music Resource Center, a claque of concerned citizens who just happened to be married to some of the most powerful men in the country. The campaign they launched against pop music cast a contradictory set of images.

For general public-relations purposes, they were a grassroots group of parents concerned about the music their children were being exposed to. When it was time to intimidate the music industry, though, they were a well-connected collection of Washington insiders. If someone compared them to the anti-rock hysterics of the past, they stressed their moderation: They were with-it women who loved the rock’n’roll of their youth and would never dream of advocating censorship. But when the talk turned to What Is To Be Done, legal repression always lurked in the background -- and sometimes the foreground.

Gore’s unintentionally hilarious book Raising PG Kids in an X Rated Society (1987) argues that sound parenting is more effective than government intervention ("Our approach was the direct opposite of censorship"). Then it calls for government intervention anyway -- suggesting, for example, that activists "request inquiries into the license renewals of television and radio stations that violate the public interest by broadcasting excessively violent movies and shows."

Above all, the group was simultaneously left and right, ambidextrously adjusting itself to different audiences. Gore pitched herself as a moderate liberal who was adept with sociological evidence and concerned about feminist issues. Yet her book -- initially published by Abingdon Press, a religious outfit -- includes an entire chapter on the alleged dangers of the occult, complete with such credibility-impairing factoids as this: "According to Mrs. Pat Pulling, founder of the organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, the game has been linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides."

Gore’s jihad peaked with yet another set of Senate hearings, which provoked yet another set of "voluntary" self-regulations -- in this case, the "Parental Advisory" stickers that record companies attach to potentially offensive albums, and which are in themselves enough to get a CD banned from some stores. The PMRC episode has echoes in today’s left/right crusades against Goth rock and gangsta rap -- and, for that matter, against violent or vulgar movies, TV shows, and video games.

Across the Small Divide

Why have social conservatives and social engineers made common cause so often? In a broad sense, the authoritarian left and authoritarian right will cooperate because both are interested in controlling people. But that doesn’t explain why there have been so many times when forces with theoretically opposed goals have embraced the same set of controls.

No answer will be entirely satisfying, if only because the causes themselves emerge in different contexts: What’s true about the enemies of dime novels won’t necessarily be true about the foes of crime comics. One reasonable theory, though, is that the gulf between "progressive" technocrats and "reactionary" conservatives simply isn’t as wide as one might initially assume, even if each side’s sense of self requires it to pretend otherwise. The utopian future imagined by progressives may differ from the utopian past imagined by conservatives, but a liberal or leftist from a wealthy or middle-class background may be as unable as a rich conservative to identify with the reading, viewing, or listening preferences of the less privileged. Class aside, progressives and conservatives are equally capable of unconsciously adopting the larger social prejudices of their times. Witness Wertham’s worries about homoerotic imagery in Batman, a fear expressed when bigotry against gays was rarely questioned.

Even when liberals and conservatives prefer different sacred texts -- social science in one case, the Bible in the other -- they can end up taking similar stances. Both social science and theology are reinterpreted, sometimes radically, from generation to generation, as social mores change. A Christian conservative in 2001 may have more attitudes in common with a secular liberal from the same year than with a Christian conservative of two centuries ago.

One social convention that never seems to disappear is an irrational fear of people different from you, especially if they come from the lower social orders; and with fear, there often comes the desire to remold. The biggest threat to free speech may not be any particular ideology, but the common impulse lurking behind many superficially opposed points of view.