Sandra Fluke, Obama Voters, and the Pink Police State

Someday we’re going to look back and realize that Sandra Fluke being praised for arguing that her right to free contraceptives trumped religious freedom was a defining moment in our history. When that day come my friend James Poulos will be hailed as a prophet of the pre-Flukian era. His vision of the emerging Pink Police State not only predicted the rise of the Flukes but helps explain some of the voting patterns we saw in last night’s election. Here is how James explains the concept:

The Pink Police State is a more extreme version of a regime I use to taunt my libertarian friends in my essay on ‘The Sex Vote‘ that’s just been published in Doublethink. I worry, and I think we should all worry, about the way cultural libertarianism is snowballing while the snowball of political libertarianism rolls deeper into hell. I’m aghast at the shrug with which many self-styled libertarians greet massive government, so long as it’s run by people with ‘enlightened’ attitudes about pleasure-seeking. It’s not death to the state these libertarians want, it’s the state as cool parent, with a stripper pole in every pot. I’ve actually had one good libertarian friend argue straight-faced that the solution to the drug problem is a monopoly partnership between Washington and Walmart. Well, with solutions like that, who needs problems? And of course you get that kind of institutionalized approach from fans of legal prostitution. It’s almost as if libertarians are willing to let the state regulate everything so long as everything’s decriminalized.

On top of this, we all know how intimately sex — or at least images of sex and talk about sex, alas — has become a part of everyday life. What gives me fear is the idea, which large numbers of people seem to be buying into, that a growing sphere of libertinistic freedoms compensates (or more than compensates!) for our shrinking spheres of political liberty and the practice of citizenship. You can guess what I think about ‘liberaltarianism’.

That’s the background brief on the Pink Police State, a vision which came to me courtesy of one of the most visionary videos of the 1990s. I’m talking about Marilyn Manson’s “The Dope Show,” off 1998’s Mechanical Animals. I know it’s a bit odd for a conservative cultural critic to praise Manson as a brilliant genius, but before the Columbine aftermath unfairly derailed his career and life Manson was firing on all cylinders, and Dope Shows‘ incredible ‘live performance’ sequence [2:15-3:00], in which an all-male body of riot police wearing head-to-toe pink uniforms are inspired to make out, was deeply prophetic, in an as-yet symbolic way, about the manner in which our manufactured contradictions and desires are apt to show forth in contemporary life.