Part two in a two-part series

What if the advent of liberalism is not really the cause of the red state/blue state American culture war? What if American liberalism was adopted as a newer form of traditional conservative co-optation, a way for white people to attempt to deal with their cultural self-loathing by escaping from their own criticism?

Some things to consider: The Western, white, male perspective is the implicit target of Deconstructionist criticism. But most foundational Postmodern critics and many (not all) humanities professors are still white and a significant percentage of them male. President Bush is constructed to be the arrogant, ignorant, white, supreme-arch-nemesis of all that is Liberal. But most Democrats and almost all Democratic political candidates share more similarity than difference with Bush, being usually white, male, and middle-to-upper class.

Long before anyone mainstream in America cared about identity politics, white kids had been having this long-term love affair with black culture, a history that includes the co-option of Jazz and Blues, Elvis, and Johnny Cash, among others. Functionally for white people, it may be that the hippie movement predates any concern with identity politics. Look at photos from Woodstock and commune experiments: These weren't angry, marginalized minorities, they were recently straight-laced white kids that had a problem with the culture of their parents on a number of levels.

Then, after all of our parents returned to mainstream culture after their short-lived hippie vacation, they became the "oppressive authoritarians" and our generation developed its own reactionary culture (though it happens to be pretty mainstream itself ever since capitalism figured out that “alternative” is a market too).

Here we are in 2006 and conservative kids have two options: Stay in the conservative fold or seize your moment to run into the arms of The Other. Because it’s still just as hip to be un-white, to be anti-consumer, to read Marx, to listen to M.I.A., to wear dreadlocks or something, to dive into these things at least during a phase in life. Even the significant portion of college-age kids who stay conservative still dance to Jamaican dancehall on the weekends and blast Outkast on their iPods. It's almost entirely unavoidable: Co-optation of "the other" (esp. black culture) is nothing less than a coming-of-age ritual in our country for every generation since slavery ended (and perhaps before). (See this page of a related interview with John McWhorter that Davis brought to my attention).

Moving closer to home, the Christian microcosm of all this is conservative Evangelical kids who react against their parents by becoming liberal (or libertarian) Christians and getting involved in social justice and multiculturalism and international aid, trying to read and apply a wider section of their Bibles, if only because it was the opposite of the preceeding generation’s user-friendly prosperity gospel. And when reading the red letters, they saw that it said community was important, that poor people matter, and, like, something about Feminism.

I admit that I fit in somewhere along these lines: I question authority. I have been known to rage against the machine. And I generally think I'm right.

But putting the rightness or wrongness of liberalism (or Liberation theology) to the side, the important, self-analytical question that I am asking myself right now is about the origin of my embrace of it: I'm concerned that the core of this for me may be significantly reactive in nature. Not every Christian who cares about social issues was introduced to those issues reactively (some had liberal parents, of course), but it seems undeniable to me that many were introduced in this way, many more will be, and even the most authentically liberal Christians are powered by at least a strain of reactionary belief.

So while I am personally committed to thinking outside of “the box” and especially inside the gospels, I think it’s pretty important for myself and every Christian who finds their identity anywhere near the category of the “alternative" to consider the specific origins of their personal party platforms.

Being reactively-motivated is not something you or I should take lightly: At the very least can easily render anyone self-righteously asinine and likely to sell out. But it’s ultimate threat to white, American Christians is that it will put pride, generational issues, and our ever-present white identity crises before the gospel in our hearts and actions.

I hope that Jesus’ core values continue to permeate my life and those of my fellow Christians. (As a matter of fact, I hope His values permeate everyone's lives). I hope that they outlive and erode mere reactionary sentiment. If they do, I am confident that self-loathing will necessarily be dissipated and the passing on of culture between generations will start to become more harmonious, a process of growth rather than one that is cyclically dissonant.