Grossberg - Caught in the crossfire: kids, politics, and Americas future

Caught in the Crossfire

Cultural Politics & the Promise of Democracy

Henry A. Giroux, Series Editor

Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11
by Paul Street

The Terror of Neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy
by Henry A. Giroux

Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and Americas Future
by Lawrence Grossberg

Reading and Writing for Civic Literacy: The Critical Citizens Guide to Argumentative Rhetoric
by Donald Lazere

Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life, Second Edition
by Henry A. Giroux

Forthcoming

Reading French Feminism
by Michael Payne

Listening Beyond the Echoes: Agency and Ethics in a Mediated World
by Nick Couldry

CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE

Kids, Politics, and
Americas Future

LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

First published 2005 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2005 ,Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grossberg, Lawrence
Caught in the crossfire: kids, politics, and Americas future / Lawrence Grossberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-59451-112-8 (hardback: alk. paper)ISBN 1-59451-113-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. ChildrenUnited StatesSocial conditions. 2. YouthUnited StatesSocial conditions. 3. ConservatismUnited StatesHistory20th century. 4. Religious rightUnited States. 5. Right and left (Political science). 6. United StatesSocial conditions1945 7. United StatesPolitics and government20th century. I. Title.

HN65.G763 2005
305.235097309045dc22
2004029727

ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-112-7 (hbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-113-4 (pbk)

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

To my mother, Miriam Grossberg.

To some of the most amazing teachers one could hope for:
Richard Taylor, Hayden White, Loren Baritz, Gerald Ramsey, and especially Stuart Hall and James W. Carey.

To all the kids who have trusted me over the years.

And to my son, Zachariah, and his generation, in the hope that we will begin to earn their trust.

Why shouldnt truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Mark Twain

If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are heading.

Ancient proverb

This book tells a story about American politics and Americas future. Its starting premise is simple. Many people seem to be unhappy with the future that they see emerging out of the political struggles of the past fifty years.

Like all stories, it starts with a particular scenario. A different opening might have led me into a different story, but I believe the ending would be the same. I enter the story of the struggle for Americas future with its kids. Nowhere are the consequences of these political struggles more shamefully visible than in the changing place and treatment of kids in American society during that period. And so, that is where I begin. I hope that Americans still care enough about kids that they might be willing to have a conversation about politics and the future for the sake of the kids once more.

At a time when political books are driving a boom in the publishing industry, this book is, I hope, unlike most books on offer. It is not a scholarly book but draws upon my academic work in cultural studies. It is, various publishers tell me, too long and too complicated, but I refuse to believe that public discussions about the state of the nation and the world have to be conducted through oversimplifications. The human world is complicated, and I have attempted to find a form that embraces complexity in accessible ways. It is not always and everywhere about changing capitalism, or morality, or the culture, but about the society taken as a fragile whole. Moreover, unlike many current books, it focuses on the historical forest rather than the electoral Bush. It focuses on a long-term struggle between new conservatives and progressives/liberals.

This book was started long before the elections of 2000 and completed well before the elections of 2004. It is not a book about the elections or the Bush presidency. Yet I do think it offers some insight into the politics of George W. Bush, the Republican victory, and the apparent polarization of the nation around the elections. I did not plan it that way. (I even cut a long discussion of George W. Bush.) This book would locate the elections in a longer and larger view of American history, rather than assuming that it was about either a single issue (e.g., religion and morality) or a laundry list of issues and campaign problems that somehow add up to an explanation.

Since its beginnings, America has believed it was somehow uniquedifferent from Europe, unencumbered by European history and therefore able to embrace its modernity without owing a debt to the past. At first this exceptionalism and modernity were lived through a particular political systembuilt on notions of republican freedom. But this definition of America failed, ending up in the Civil War. From the late nineteenth century on, the United States built a different sense of itselfthat is, as the champion of freedom, science and technology, democratic compromise, and so on. Much of what we have taken for granted about what modern life is like in America, and, therefore, about the meaning of being Americanmost of the assumptions, values, and institutions that we think of today as liberalismwere forged out of struggles and compromises in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These assumptions, values, and institutions include consumer and corporate culture, the nuclear family built around the special place of children who come to represent the future potential of society, public schools, public health, images of the state as having responsibility for its citizens, secularism, democratic compromise, many of the interpretations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, compromises by which capitalism and labor would eventually cooperate for the national good, and so on. This understanding of American society, and this image of the United States as the most modern of nations, was most visible between the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society of the 1960s.

As early as the 1950s, this vision of America began to be challenged by groups on both the left and the right. In the 1960s, both the antiwar counterculture (which renounced that vision of America) and a new conservatism (which, unlike any other conservative movement before it, was not opposed to capitalism or modernity) mounted explicit and public attacks on the liberal understanding of the nation. If that dominant vision had been built through many and often fragile alliances, the new conservatives forged their own new alliances.

For the past thirty years, we have been caught in the middle of this revolution. This book tries to describe some of the forces, groups, agendas, and visions involved in the struggle and some of the already visible changes it is producing. I believe the trauma of 9/11 magnified the sense that we needed a new sense of ourselves as a nation and has, as a result, speeded some of these changes along. I believe the current split in the American polity and the victory of conservatism has to be located in these larger shifts. While it can be said that the new conservative alliances are winning, the victory is not yet sealed, and the outcome remains, I believe, too close to call.