Wednesday, June 08, 2005

In praise of the V-chip

Garance, Matt, and Kevin Drum are talking about whether Democrats should attack popular culture to win the parent vote. If we do it, let's do it with the V-chip.

If you're a recent grownup like me or Matt, you want to gain the political benefits of accommodating parental unease about pop culture while not getting rid of the awesomeness that is Grand Theft Auto. While you don't want to actually do anything that would restrict artistic brilliance and fun, it's important to have some nice legislative proposal you can push to show you're serious. Clinton's support for legislation mandating a V-chip in every TV was a great way to do this. It enabled him to empathize with all the concerned parents while not actually censoring anything. It'd be nice if one of our left-wing policy shops could think up some insignificant but cuddly-sounding proposals so we can do this thing again.

5 comments:

Blue said...

Wait, do you endorse moves like this because empowering parents in new ways is the best way to deal with offensive culture, or because we don't actually want to do anything about culture and this is a way of pretending to do that doesn't actually do anything?

(If latter: yes but it's cynical maneuvering like this that makes the country believe Dems are bad on culture. Say what you believe. Or say what you think sounds good as if you believe it. But for dear lord please don't say "I think this would sound good".)


If former:

Personally while the V-chip isn't as bad as mass censorship, a proper progressive libertarian has no reason to appreciate how parents raise their kids that much more than other institutions. I mean I know plenty of kids with repressive parents who I want to have all the access possible to get information and choices their parents dislike. That's the heart of liberalism.

And like other authoritarian devices, it's still horribly cludgy and ineffective. A very similar but better understood example is web-filterting software. It can't keep porn out, and it frustrates many legitimate sources.

I remember being amused when reading a libertarian angst about what to do regarding home-schooling. On one hand he liked their independence from the government. On the other hand, some of the mindless patriotism they were teaching their kids scared the shit out of him : )

Neil Sinhababu said...

The latter, Tony! And I realize that cynical maneuvering like this makes Democrats look bad. If someday I become somebody people actually listen to, I won't say stuff like this.

Blue said...

I think the V-chip is less worrisome because TV content is much more finite (or rather, polynomially bounded *grin*), and thus the solution "manually label all controversial content" is more plausible. Philosophically it still has the same authoritarian cludginess, and I would not surprised if the authoritarian cludginess inevitably manifests (the core of a respectable libertarian argument, I think).

How much impact do we have? I mean, I'm sure freepers say the same thing about how it's ok if they say bad-PR stuff as long as the candidates don't. Certainly I think Yglesias and Ezra are well read enough that I shudder when they openly discuss cynical motives for Democratic rhetoric. And the degree to which what we say is wide-read enough to be useful to democrats, but won't be seen by non-democrats, I think is small.

But you're right, that would take a lot of fun out of the blogsphere. And I am glad you are honest about where you fell there.

However, I think deontological voters are not entirely fools, and consistently support the Republican party because of more than just easy rhetoric they make. We're called the un-Christian party, but we run just as Christian candidates as they do (an altar boy, a div school grad, etc). The GOP adherence to "family values" always comes with a cost (they always frame it as being opposed to other forces), and the economist in me thinks thats well received.

(I was most amused by one Yglesias post recently criticizing Hilary saying "well yeah, if Hillary IS going to convince values voters, she needs to be criticized by people like me : ) "

Neil Sinhababu said...

Are the semi-libertarians twentysomethings you're talking about parents yet, Justin? The parent vote is what this proposal is about.

There's a proposed reform to the cable laws that'd let you buy only the channels you wanted. Matt has proposed this as a V-chip-like issue. The GOP is against it because the telecom industry is lobbying against it, so we could do the family values thing.

TheJew said...

In Bizarro World, this is how the Bizarro World Democrats handle cultural issues. In particular, this falls under the “family resources” aspect of the triplet: “family resources, diverse ideas, and opposition to crony capitalism”.