From the NYT 'Magazine article "Down the Breitbart Hole", which profiles Breitbart's editor in chief Alex Marlow:
To the extent that there is a coherent ideology behind Breitbart, we’ve also done a crummy job of figuring out what it is. A good place to begin is with Andrew Breitbart, whose foundational philosophy is pretty thoroughly detailed in his autobiography, ‘‘Righteous Indignation.’’ A lot of the book is your run-of-the-mill memoir, with stories from his childhood in suburban California, but the conceptual core of the book comes in Chapter 6, in which he argues that America was permanently transformed by the arrival of a handful of German philosophers in the 1930s.
I won’t delve into all the twists and turns in this theory, but the underlying contention is that a few refugee intellectuals from the Frankfurt School — Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse — were lucky enough to escape the Nazis for sunny California, and being constitutionally incapable of happiness, promptly began complaining. Their grousing and moaning and general sourpuss disposition soon filtered into academia, Hollywood and the media, then into the upper echelons of American snobbery, a.k.a. the Democratic Party. So today you have, per Breitbart, a ‘‘Democrat-Media Complex’’ whose principal aim is to disparage everything quintessentially American, by which he really means Americana — think Norman Rockwell archetypes and whatever social conventions they imply. This is extraordinarily reactionary stuff, but not especially political in the sense of electioneering. Andrew Breitbart was never as interested in backing candidates as he was in attacking the media and entertainment industries for corroding American traditions. When people asked Breitbart why he wasn’t more involved in electoral politics, he liked to say that if you could reorient news and entertainment, the rest would follow. ‘‘Politics,’’ he often said, ‘‘is downstream from culture.’’
I think that Breitbart is right that politics is downstream from culture, and that politics is now largely a function of the tribal rifts that are currently rending American society. Norman Rockwell's was not everybody's America, but for a while it functioned to define a kind of center that shaped the American social imaginary. That social imaginary of America produced iconic TV shows in the fifties and early sixties like The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver, but also shows in the 2000s like The Gilmore Girls. The Gilmore Girls might be a little edgier, but it plays from that same basic archetype, and its popularity is linked to a nostalgic fantasy for the kind of American neighborliness and eccentric characters that are right out of Rockwell. The kind of thing that "real Americans" hate is the kind of proto-nihilism of Quentin Tarantino, or snarky, debunking of SNL or shows like 30 Rock.
The Rockwell archetype in GG to provides a kind of infrastructure that allows for a variety of different behaviors that would have been considered transgressive in the fifties and sixties, but it still defines a center that most middle Americans recognize and can feel comfortable with. My guess is that Breitbart would see The Gilmore Girls as norm-affirming rather than norm-destroying. What they resist is the attitude among cultural elites that debunks or mocks the role the Rockwell archetype has played in American society. That's why critical theory and the Frankfurt School is seen as the enemy. It has played, in the minds of people like Breitbart, this norm-destroying, debunking role that has infected higher education. So let's defund higher education.
Every society goes through periods when the norms change, and it's disruptive and painful for many people to have to go through that. But no healthy society is set in amber, and this is really what the Breitbart fantasy will not accept. Nevertheless for people to accept something new, they have to understand how it's a net positive for them. And that's the problem, because for the people who are attracted to Breitbart, the changing of the norms in American society in the sixties and seventies feels like a zero sum game in which changes that benefit some people have come at a cost to them. And it's just human nature to resent that and the forces that effected that.To expect people who feel that they are paying this price not to resent it is patronizing and naive.
But an aggravating factor that came with the changes in he sixties and seventies was the debunking and de-legitimizing of institutions that might have helped people make the transition. The center disappeared, and people started migrating toward groups that were considered extreme when Norman Rockwell center prevailed. And now we have an American society where there are no clearly understood commonly shared norms that define the center, and the result is the fiasco we see unfolding before us in the White House.
All the French nonsense of about how all metanarratives are illegitimate is counterproductive. There has to be a legitimating narrative, but it has to work for most people. The Norman Rockwell narrative didn't do that, and it can't do that now. A new narrative that defines the center has to be developed, or, I would argue, our open, democratic society will not survive. If the cultural Left doesn't accept the possibility of a grand narrative that works for the whole country rather than just for the top twenty percent, the people at Breitbart and elsewhere will develop a narrative for the bottom eighty percent that will win by default.
This is importatnt to understand, because the next several decades are going to be a fight to determine who defines the central, norm-defining American narrative. The idea that we should celebrate diversity is important but secondary to defining some kind of basic norms that everybody agrees on, because we are now witnessing what happens when there are no norms that define a center that everybody agrees are 'normative'.
Oprah for president in '20? She probably comes the closest to anyone I can think of who defines a possible American healing center. She's not qualified, clearly, but if Trump, Bush 2, and Reagan have proved anything, being qualified is not as important as symbolizing something that Americans feel comfortable with.
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