It’s been a decade since Andrew Breitbart shufffled off this mortal coil, but he left behind an enormous legacy on the right side of politics. As one of his former colleagues, David Cole, argues, while there is still much of Breitbart’s legacy that’s a positive, there’s also a couple of millstones. After all, the world has moved on in the last ten years, while Andrew Breitbart is frozen in time. A great many on the right are making the mistake of staying loyally frozen with him.
Breitbart was a man of his time; much of what he advocated wouldn’t fly now. For example, his strategy of “giving as good as you get” (i.e., leftists call you a Nazi, you call them a Nazi back; they say “fuck you,” you say “fuck you” back) only worked when social media didn’t play favorites, when, generally speaking, right and left could post equally.
As the Freedom protesters have learned the hardest way, the right (or anyone labelled, fairly or not, “right”) simply can’t get away with what the left can. The left, as The Daily Blog’s Suzie Dawson recently wrote, can burn, behead and hang politicians in effigy all they like, and the media won’t bat an eye. A single protester in Melbourne carried a mock noose and the fainting fits were heard from the newsrooms to halls of power. Feminist protesters hung a row of mock severed penises from nooses in Canberra last year: silence. Anti-carbon tax protesters in 2011 waved a single placard caricaturing Julia Gillard as a witch, and the media are still yammering about it.
It’s not fair and we all know it — and there ain’t a damn thing we can do about it. Everyone not-far-left just has to put up with sitting at the back of the bus.
Speaking of which…
Breitbart also pioneered the “Democrats are the real racists” talking point. I always knew this would spell trouble for the right, long-term. Because implicit in that “dunk” is the belief that it’s the duty of both parties to root out “racists.” That’s a narrative that should be challenged, not furthered. Screaming “Democrats are the real racists” doesn’t bother leftists; they’re just happy you’ve joined the hunt (back in May 2011 Breitbart told CBS News that his ideal GOP presidential ticket would include two black people, because that would finally prove that Republicans aren’t racist).
Yeah… how have black Republicans been doing, again? Are the left being nice to Ben Carson, Candice Owens, Condoleeza Rice, or Larry Elder?
But Cole argues that Breitbart’s biggest own goal — one that many conservatives are still kicking to this day — was being the accidental midwife of Woke-ism. If Hollywood and Wall Street are beating us over the head with every woke idiocy from Cancel Culture to transgenderism, it’s because Breitbart told them that “politics is downstream from culture”.
His mantra (the “Breitbart Doctrine”) […] emboldened Hollywood execs, actors, musicians, ad agencies, and corporate PR flacks to think they have way more influence than they actually do. If you tell those half-wits that their movies, TV shows, and commercials alter the course of human events, they’ll act the role.
They already believed it, of course: screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd reminisces that the makers of M.A.S.H. were utterly convinced that they were born to shape the opinions of middle America. Norman Lear believed it too, with his tendentious, preachy sitcoms.
And then a conservative comes along and tells them that they were right, all along.
You do realize that “politics is downstream from culture” is incompatible with “go woke, go broke,” right? They can’t both be correct. If “downstream from culture” were true, the NFL would be doing gangbuster business since it went woke and Gillette would’ve quadrupled its profits with its “shaving tranny” commercials.
But that didn’t happen, because more often than not, pop culture doesn’t set trends, it follows them. Or, to be more precise, it follows perceived trends, as job-insecure network and studio execs scurry around trying to latch onto the “next big thing” (and usually, they get it wrong).
As Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi put it, Hollywood has no idea why people like some things and not others, so they created a pseudoscience, “marketing”, and pretended that they do.
These people aren’t “masterminds.” They bluff for a living. But boy, do they love hearing that they “influence culture.” It feeds their egos, staves off their insecurities […] The Breitbart Doctrine gave artists an overblown sense of their own importance. These people aren’t sending ideas downstream; they’re downstream themselves, sucking up the jetsam.
As Cole cautions, this isn’t about bashing Breitbart when he’s not around to defend himself. The point is to realise that nobody is right about everything, and, more importantly, that times change. “Terrible are the faithful disciples of great men,” wrote H. G. Wells. Because great men are always men of their time. Some things may be close enough to eternal truths, but much that applies in one time doesn’t apply in others.
Andrew Breitbart innovated new media and helped keep morale high during the Obama years. So say a prayer for a good man, and move on.
Takimag
