The Sexual Revolution and American Empire

In his Republic, Plato has Socrates argue that wars have their origin when disordered desires seek new lands to conquer that will enable those ever-expanding desires to be satisfied (which can’t happen anyway).

Andrew Bacevich provides a panoramic analysis of post-WW2 US foreign policy in light of this insight, with special attention to demonstrating the link between the transformation of the meaning of freedom and imperial expansion. Oh, it’s not just the lefties who promoted the sexual revolution, it’s also the right who’s complicit with their promotion of the consumer society. Don’t forget it was George W. Bush who told Americans to go shopping after 9/11. A snippet:

During the same postwar period, but especially since the 1960s, the nation’s abiding cultural preoccupation focused on reassessing what freedom actually means. The political project was long the exclusive preserve of the Left (although belatedly endorsed by the Right). From the outset, the cultural project has been a collaborative one to which both Left and Right contributed, albeit in different ways. The very real success of the political project lies at the heart of the Bush administration’s insistence that the United States today offers a proper model for other nations – notably those in the Islamic world – to follow. The largely catastrophic results of the cultural project belie that claim.

The postwar political project sought to end discrimination. The postwar cultural project focused on dismantling constraints, especially on matters touching however remotely on sexuality and self-gratification. “Men are qualified for civil liberty,” Edmund Burke once observed, “in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their appetites.” In the aftermath of World War II, Americans rejected that counsel and set out to throw off their manacles. Freedom came increasingly to imply unfettered self-indulgence.

The Left contributed to this effort by promoting a radical new ethic of human sexuality. Removing chains in this regard meant normalizing once viewed as immoral, unnatural, or inconsistent with the common good. On the cutting edge of American culture, removing impediments to the satisfaction of sexual desire emerged as an imperative.

Laws, traditions and social arrangements impeding the fulfillment of this imperative became obsolete. As a direct consequence, homosexuality, abortion, divorce, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and children raised in single-parent homes – all once viewed as problematic – lost much of their stigma. Pornography – including child pornography – reached epidemic proportions. Pop culture became a titillating arena for promoting sexual license and celebrating sexual perversity. And popular music became, in the words of cultural critic Martha Bayles, a “masturbatory fantasy.”

Some Americans lament this revolution. Many others view it as inevitable or necessary or positively swell. Regardless, the foreign-policy implications of the sexual revolution loom large. The ideals that President Bush eagerly hopes to propagate throughout the Islamic world – those contained in Jefferson’s Declaration and in the Bill of Rights – today come packaged with the vulgar exhibitionism of Madonna and the debased sensibility of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Note, however, that the metamorphosis of freedom has had a second aspect, one that has proceeded in harmony with – and even reinforced – the sexual revolution. Here the effect has been to foster a radical new conception of freedom’s economic dimension. Increasingly, during the decades of the postwar boom, citizens came to see personal liberty as linked inextricably to the accumulation of “stuff.”

Here, the enthusiasm for throwing off moral chains came from the Right. The forces of corporate capitalism relentlessly promoted the notion that liberty correlates with choice and that the key to human fulfillment (not to mention sexual allure and sexual opportunity) is to be found in conspicuous consumption – acquiring a bigger house, a fancier car, the latest fashions, the niftiest gadgets.

I came to this essay, published in 2006, via Patrick Deneen, who linked it on the occasion of learning of the death of Prof. Bacevich’s son who is serving in Iraq. More commentary and tribute to Bacevich over at NLT.