Book Preface and Blog Introduction: Culture War Is Class War

Class War is disguised as Culture War. The 1%—especially the wealthiest of them, who have been termed the Filthy Rich—foment Culture War among the 99% to distract and cover their real economic motives.

Culture War, Class War —this book and accompanying blog, available for free on this site—explores the resulting cultural divide and how it was instigated and kept alive for fifty years in America by certain elite powers and how and why they choose to benefit while tearing families in two and keeping America paralyzed.

Of course, class war has been going on since the beginning of civilization; it is inevitable with hierarchical societies.

But some eras are more harmonious than others. One might think that enlightened principles of democracy, freedom, and human rights—normally associated with Western societies in recent centuries—had made modern times one of them. One would be wrong.

While the rise of unions in the early decades of the Twentieth Century and the post-Depression initiation and expanse of programs to benefit the common good might have made the America of the Forties, Fifties, and to some extent, Sixties, one of them, that trend in America and that era of relative class peace has been totally reversed. Hostilities have resumed since the Sixties—especially beginning in 1970—until currently there is all-out class war that is becoming increasingly bloody and one way or another is taking a toll in lives of the American people.

This book, Culture War, Class War is about how that reversal happened and what has transpired in the last Fifty years to bring us to this crisis. In particular it focuses on the story not told about that; the story the 1% has made sure you would not hear.

This book, with its accompanying blog, looks into why America’s “privileged class”—its “royalty,” “blue bloods”—started a “culture war” against the middle class, working class, the poor…and the educated, artists, and humanists in the early 1970s. We discover how their fear of Sixties activism panicked them into an all-out assault against elements that threatened their wealth and privilege in all institutions of American society—media, education, medicine, government, politics, publication, religion, especially higher education, and so on—and restructured them for their ends.

We see how this culture war class war continues today: blatantly so in the Tea Party movement, the Republican Party, the Wall Street giveaways at the expense of jobs, tax cuts for the “filthy rich” and corporations, budget battles and cuts in government services and entitlement programs, rampant anti-environmentalism, and anti-minority, anti-immigrant laws and attacks.

For example, we see rabid culture war/class war in the abortion debate; attacks on unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and many other states; ever shrinking civil and human rights, including the suspension of habeas corpus signed by George W. Bush; runaway imprisonment of minorities and free-thinkers through egregious anti-drug and anti-sex/anti-gender laws; indefinite imprisonment without trial and torture of political prisoners; and much, much more.

We saw it in 2010 with politicians like Congressman Barton who kowtow to corporations shamelessly defending British Petroleum from having to pay for its atrocious oil spill. Culture war, class war was visible to all in the candidacy — Republican of course—for the Arizona Senator’s race running on a platform of doing away with Social Security and Medicare.

We have seen it since 2010 in the all-out attack on the poor and middle class by the wealthy 1%, who succeeded in getting an additional half trillion in tax cuts at the end of 2010 from Obama and have been using that money to take away free speech and democracy by clubbing their critics mute in the public arena of discourse and orchestrating the legislative and electoral processes. And we see the fight back from the grass roots in the form of the Wisconsin union uprising and the worldwide Occupy movement. There has been an Arab Spring and an American Autumn to get or restore those basic human rights and move toward economic justice in societies around the globe.

At this very moment, one of the biggest battles to date in that class war is waging in the U.S. presidential election. The 1%, having gained an unfair advantage to use their vast wealth unrestrainedly to further their ends electorally, have managed to pollute the electoral process so much that one of its most visible members—Mitt Romney—has managed to be one election away from being the most powerful person in the world. Amazingly, almost one half the American people do not see how that would be a Waterloo for the forces of the 99% and is ok with that happening. To make things worse, this comes on the heels of the one percent’s ongoing effort to dial back the ninety-nine percent’s ability to have a say in their governing with fantastical redistricting outlines and by limiting and harassing voter participation throughout the U.S. with draconian registration requirements and purging of voter rolls.