WILLIAM PHILLIPS
779
This brings us back to our relation to our country and our cul–
ture. In the realm of culture, as I have suggested, the necessities of
the mass production of art, of critical opinion, of entertainment, of
endless talk about politics and culture, all intertwined, produced a
new kind of kitsch. Kitsch in the past, as Clement Greenberg pointed
out, was simply the imitation of high art for more popular consump–
tion. We now have a constant flow of books, movies, television
shows, art objects, that fit into a new world of predigested cultural
assumptions for large masses of people. We have instant opinions,
instant knowledge, instant art. (I am not talking about genuine folk
art or culture, which, for polemical reasons or because of ignorance,
often has been confused with mass or popular culture .)
Our age, which is nothing if not innovative, also has produced
what might be called "kitsch politics"- a politics that looks like Marx–
ist- or socialist- politics, but is actually a patchwork of seemingly
radical and moral stances and popular causes that is not revolution–
ary or communist but echoes the most fashionable cliches about the
Third World, Israel, liberation movements, peace, and so on. It is
this "kitsch politics" that is largely responsible for the undiscriminat–
ing anti-Americanism and total rejection of our culture as bourgeois,
or masculine, or racist. It is this "kitsch politics" that fails to distin–
guish between the kind of critical nonconformism essential to all
serious art and thought and politics, and the political and cultural
self-hatred that unfortunately has become chic in many enlightened
circles .
We also have a kitsch politics of the Right by neoconservatives
who mix up abortion, homosexuality, affirmative action, and na–
tional security, and who abuse anyone an inch to the left of them.
This is not the politics of earlier genuine conservatives, such as
Burke, or Toqueville, or more recent figures such as Popper, or
Schumpeter, or Churchill.
If,
to paraphrase Dr. Johnson, chauvin–
ism is the last refuge of a reconstructed radical, anti-Americanism is
the last refuge of an unreconstructed one.
Culture, we must remember, is not one thing, like a party or a
movement. It has many levels and facets, and one has to look at each
one separately. But taken as a whole, one has to be as ambivalent to–
ward it as it is towards us. I remember in the thirties when I was
teaching at New York University, the dean declared that a Jew
could not teach English literature, only a Gentile could. He did not
know that writers are both nationalist and internationalist. I, myself,
