"Dispatches From the Culture Wars"

What the tone-deaf Democrats are missing. An excerpt from Danny Goldberg's new book.

Jun 17, 2003 | It may seen a little ridiculous for someone like me, a guy in the music business, to be criticizing the Democratic party and the American left, but I'm sick and tired of watching the ideas that I believe in lose political ground. Like other people in my field, I've been able to meet many of the intellectual and political leaders whose beliefs I share. I usually come away inspired by their policy ideas and deeply depressed by blind spots that doom those ideas. A political ideology whose purpose is to help and empower ordinary people is often directed by leaders and strategists to whom the public is an alien beast and to whom young people seem to be, astonishingly, irrelevant.

Even though majorities of the American public regularly tell pollsters they want national health insurance, tighter gun control, better pay for schoolteachers, energy independence, and stronger environmental regulation, advocates for these causes seem unable to translate this public support into political results. Not only has the Democratic party grown considerably weaker over the past few decades, but mainstream Democrats have moved steadily away from progressive causes. The 2002 election was merely the latest example of Democrats walking away from millions of their supporters and potential supporters, supposedly for politically pragmatic reasons, but with toxic political results.

The weirdest thing about the political shift to the right is that it has occurred during a time when virtually every cultural battle in America has been won by the left. People who have fought for abortion rights, free speech, gay and lesbian rights, and racial equality can look at a country transformed in their image. Yet most leaders in the political left and the Democratic party have profoundly mixed feelings about their cultural allies.

People in the entertainment business, especially the music business, are linked in the public mind with profound cultural changes over the last several decades. So, without ever planning it that way, I've become an enemy in the "culture wars," not only in the minds of conservatives but to many Democrats and others on the left whose policy goals I passionately support.

I have been in the music business for more than thirty years as a PR guy, a personal manager, and for the last decade as a record company president and owner. I have worked with rock legends such as Led Zeppelin, Neil Young, KISS, REM, and Nirvana, with pop icons such as Diana Ross and Madonna, with politically committed musicians like Joan Baez, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and Steve Earle, and with gangsta rappers, singer-songwriters, boy bands, heavy metal icons, classical tenors, country divas, jazz masters, and critical darlings, as well as with such counterculture icons as Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Cornel West.

I am 52 years old, a "baby boomer" and an "aging hippie." I am also a businessman. I live in New York now, which is where I was born, but for most of the 1980s I lived in Los Angeles, and when I visit there I am still a "Hollywood liberal," working at times with such conservative targets as Norman Lear, Barbra Streisand, and Jane Fonda.

I am an activist as an avocation. Except on issues that pertain to my business, I am certainly no expert. People in the entertainment business who support causes do so primarily as cheerleaders, sometimes as fund-raisers, and occasionally to help frame and transmit messages for their side.

What exactly is "my" side? In previous eras there were more clear-cut definitions of what "left" and "right" were. Today there are dozens of variations. On economic issues I'm a typical liberal. Having run my own businesses and having worked for big corporations, I have a basic belief in capitalism, but I think that government, representing the collective will of the citizens, has a special obligation to balance out the excesses of the marketplace. I wouldn't mind paying higher taxes to have national health care, better paid schoolteachers, smaller class sizes in public schools, and more jobs programs to help get people out of poverty and help average-income people deal with their lives more easily.

It seems to me that many Western European countries have been better at supporting people on the low end of the economic spectrum than Americans have, and the extent of poverty in America seems immoral to me given our country's wealth. Although I've never been a member of a labor union, I believe they should be stronger. Corporations have so much power that it seems healthier to me for there to be a strong counterweight on behalf of workers. I also think our country should be more generous with foreign aid given the immense poverty around the world.

Conservative rhetoric that implies that private charities can replace government doesn't ring true to me. I know that governments tend to be inefficient, but there are some things that only government can do, such as build highways, protect the environment, provide police protection, etc. The environment is an area where it's particularly important for government to enforce the public interest when it clashes with the economic interest of businesses.

And by the way, there's plenty of corruption and inefficiency in the business world as well. I'm fascinated by the antiglobalization movement and I suspect that important moral leadership will emerge from there, but I'm not particularly sophisticated about many of the underlying issues.

Although some of the artists I've worked with have been involved with a wide array of issues and I try to read on a variety of topics, my primary interest is American culture and my primary field of activism has been about individual rights. It drives me crazy, for example, that the United States has so many of its citizens in prison, most of them for nonviolent crimes. Many of the people I know both in the business and in the political worlds would have spent time in jail if these laws were enforced against everyone.

I am an ardent civil libertarian and have been an officer of the American Civil Liberties Union since the mid-1980s. The ACLU was started in the 1920s as an advocacy group for the Bill of Rights with special emphasis at that time on the right to unpopular criminal speech in the wake of people who opposed World War I. During World War II the ACLU defended Japanese Americans who were interred by the Roosevelt administration. The ACLU has been involved with many landmark legal cases, including the court decisions that legalized abortion, that banned prayer in public schools, that gave accused criminals the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney, and virtually every case in which the government has attempted censorship of the arts.

It was the latter area that drew me to the ACLU when the music business was attacked, but I soon found myself enthralled with the organization's deeply idealistic vision of democracy, and it's the one political place where I've been involved as a participant as well as a supporter.

A belief in progressive economic policy doesn't automatically go with a commitment to civil liberties. For example, there are many left-wing Catholics who favor making abortion illegal. There are progressive college professors who favor "speech codes" on campus. There are members of "identity groups" representing the interests of gays and lesbians, feminists, African Americans, Jews, and so on who support boycotts of media offensive to some members of their groups.

I am an absolutist on free speech. I believe strongly in protections for those accused of crimes. I am against the death penalty, I am prochoice, and I am in favor of affirmative action to get racial minorities and women into positions that have been historically closed to them. Having been associated with the ACLU as an officer since the mid-1980s, I am often getting into arguments with progressive friends who disagree with the ACLU on one issue or another, none more than the organization's belief that many campaign finance laws such as McCain-Feingold interfere with freedom of speech. (The ACLU supports complete public financing of political campaigns as the solution to this problem and I agree.) Paradoxically, there are numerous conservative libertarians who agree with the ACLU on these issues but with whom I personally disagree on a wide array of economic issues.

Similarly, foreign policy in the post-Cold War period does not lend itself to traditional left-right divisions. I don't know much more about foreign policy than what I read in the newspapers, so I'm not inclined at this juncture to give a shopping list of every superficial foreign policy opinion I've ever had, but growing up during the Vietnam War has certainly made me suspicious of convoluted government rationales for military action. However, I am not a pure pacifist and I agree there are rare occasions when killing people with the military is the least bad course of action.

There are millions of people who share this set of beliefs. My lament is that the political culture whose role it is to advance the progressive agenda has grown increasingly elitist, snobbish, and removed from huge chunks of the American people, including most young people. This cloistered retreat is responsible for twenty years of regression for progressive policies after decades of progress during most of the twentieth century. There is no one reason for the disconnect between progressive politics and young people and much of Middle America, but I think that my own experiences in walking between the worlds of politics and entertainment can shed light on some of the neuroses that have made the political left far less popular than the ideas it champions.

Although I've supposedly been in the middle of one, I've always found the phrase "culture war" bizarre, especially as it applies to entertainment. No one ever talks about a culture war in the music business. We talk about "great records" and about "hits." We talk about "artists" and about "fans," and we talk about the ways to connect those two groups: radio, record stores, TV, concerts, press, and recently a lot about the Internet, CD burning, and new economic models. And we talk about how much money everyone risks and everyone makes. We don't think of ourselves as being at war with anybody, except maybe metaphorically with one another. We just want to get our ideas and products out. If people don't like them or want to criticize them, no problem. No one has ever suggested passing a law mandating exposure to dirty movies or rap music or beatnik poetry, nor boycotting retailers that choose not to carry R-rated videos, nor "shaming" people in bow ties who want to return to the culture of the good old days.

Having been a teenager during the Vietnam War, I have connected rock and roll with politics as long as I can remember. By the 1970s, after attaining enough success in the music business to be able to help political causes I believed in, I began by working with rock artists who did benefits for environmental groups. I later got involved in e$orts to prevent a Reagan-era war in Central America. It never occurred to me that the way I made my living would itself become a political issue, but in 1985, when I read of Tipper Gore's efforts to intimidate record companies into instituting a ratings system for lyrics, I felt compelled to defend my colleagues in the music business and the adolescents who loved and helped create the culture that was under attack. Since then, a substantial amount of my activist avocation has focused on the intersection between popular culture and politics.

This book is a memoir based on fifteen years of experience at that intersection. At every place in the ideological spectrum, from moderate Democrats to movement radicals, again and again, in dozens of different ways, my experience is that the left avoids reaching out to large masses of Americans. For example, as I was finishing this book, journalist Jack Newfield told me he had just had lunch with a senior Democratic campaign advisor whose clients had included Senator Charles Schumer. When Newfield referred to Eminem, whose rap album is by far the most successful recording in the United States this year and is filled with political references, the political maven look puzzled and confessed he had never heard of Eminem. Similarly, I was recently on the phone with one of New York's most progressive congressmen who had never heard of Russell Simmons, the rap producer who has become one of New York's leading black activists.

If one is a classics professor or art critic, there is nothing wrong with having tunnel vision and an aesthetic or philosophy that ignores popular taste and trends. Such independence of thought can be a virtue in those professions. But for the vocation of politics, the goal of which is to move majorities to support policy goals, such parochial myopia is outrageous. Without mass public outreach, politics, especially progressive politics, cannot succeed.

Next Page: Most Americans share liberal values -- but the Democrats' "liberal snobbery" have let the other side prevail

• View blog reactions