The Grateful Dead Has Perfect Answer To Our ‘Culture War’ Woes
Let there be songs to fill the air
Every spring, I always find myself on a Grateful Dead kick. It must be the warm weather, the longer days, the promise of summer adventure. Sand on your feet. Ice-cold beer in hand. I’m not even old yet, and here I am about to wax nostalgic: the music reminds me of a summer in my teenage years, when I ditched my iPhone and social media, started a “band” with two of my friends, and learned to play a shoddy “cover” of “Eyes of the World.” My friend on guitar was actually a gifted musical wizard, without whom the cover would have sounded truly atrocious. My other friend, a rhythmic greenhorn, played the drums in a manner reminiscent of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. I, too, stumbled through a stripped-down bass line that had been modified for a guitar goober like myself. I came away from the experience with slightly more self-awareness, a better appreciation for true musical talent, a highly coveted line for future first dates – “I was in a band once” – as well as a love for the Grateful Dead.
Since then, I have encountered a lot of conservatives who also love – revere – the Grateful Dead, even though their music has long been associated with hippies, drug use, and what many would see as the more unsavory elements of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s. You’ll know what I mean when I say this: the Grateful Dead screams “Boomer Liberal.” It screams boomer liberal New York transplant who lives in Vermont, has had both his knees replaced, is slightly brain-fried thanks to the copious amounts of pot he smoked as a teenager, and pretends to care about Black Lives Matter even though he is wealthy and has ensconced himself in a bubble of fellow white, affluent liberals.
There is some truth to this cliche. However, for every boomer liberal ex-hippy Deadhead I have met, I have also met a Deadhead who is clean-cut, religious, prudent, and family-oriented.
Why is this so?
The simplest answer is just that their music is amazing and original, and every human, regardless of their politics, loves amazing and original music. If Vladimir Lenin ever had the opportunity to hear “Sugaree” live in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1977, he might have actually smiled and swayed along to the rhythm. I could see Mussolini enjoying “Friend of the Devil.”
Conservative columnist and longtime “Deadhead” Ann Coulter had another theory that will also ring true with fans on the right. Celebrating Bob Weir’s legacy in The American Conservative after his death in January, Coulter wrote that the Grateful Dead was “supremely American” and a “wildly individualistic and self-reliant” band that successfully dodged the record studio gatekeepers – a move that was “unheard of at the time.”
“No other nation on earth could have produced music like this, a synthesis of blues, R&B, country, folk, rock, even a little jazz,” Coulter said. Weir was also “deeply American, a lover of cowboy culture,” she noted. “In fact, before meeting Jerry, he had worked as a ranch hand in Wyoming. Fortuitously, he spent his evenings in the bunkhouse with the old horsemen, playing guitar as they sang songs.”
Another great answer to this question can be found in an old interview with the now-deceased Grateful Dead bassist, Phil Lesh, conducted by none other than Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson. Carlson, himself a huge Dead fan, asked Lesh why, as other bands grew more and more openly political during the latter half of the 1960s, the Grateful Dead chose not to.
“Because we felt that what we were doing was more — I hate to use that word because it’s almost a cliche — religious,” he told Carlson. “What we were doing was religious in the sense of the word, which means to bind together. We were trying to create a community of spirit with the music and the political harangue … it was just like a cop trying to tell people what to do, legislate morality, or legislate private behavior. It was just anathema to us.”
“But you have these wide-eyed fans who love you,” Carlson replied. “Isn’t it tempting to send a message?”
“The metaphor of the band cooperating and collaborating and being one organism, that’s the message,” Lesh said.
Lesh’s answer might seem hokey in today’s jaded, polarized world, but I find it wonderfully refreshing. But it also reminded me that the Republican Party has all but abandoned this kind of kumbaya, libertarian ethos. Instead, it has embraced its inverse. The people lingering on the fringes of society, like a Dollar Tree cashier with left-wing politics, are treated as existential threats to the country because they made a crass joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Meanwhile, powerful people and powerful entities are given carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want.
Libertarianism has gone out of style in recent years after the rise of Donald Trump. The grassroots Tea Party movement had a nice run before it was co-opted by hedge funders and the GOP donor calls, and ultimately usurped by a “populist” MAGA (which, itself, has also been co-opted). Now, libertarians often are seen as either kooky cranks or – a slightly better insult – naive idealists. In some cases, I think this criticism is entirely warranted. Libertarian calls for legalizing heroin are both kooky and naive, and the belief that deregulation is the silver bullet that will fix every societal ill under the sun strikes me as deluded. On the other hand, libertarians are spot on about foreign policy intervention, and all those incessant “isolationist” smears are not only dumb – no one is calling to end trade or diplomatic ties with other nations! – but also morally bankrupt. Libertarians will one day be proven correct about the sustainability of America’s current debt level.
Political issues aside, I have long admired the general “live-and-let-live” ethos of the libertarian – provided that the behavior does not harm others. Bruce Jenner pretending he’s a woman doesn’t harm the general public; hospital and plastic surgeons enabling the abuse of minors, however, is different. There’s nuance to it, and maybe “live-and-let-live” should be retooled as the Silver Rule: “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.” If the plastic surgeon doesn’t want his teenage daughter to get her boobs sliced off, then he shouldn’t do the same to another man’s daughter. If a young right-winger doesn’t want to get cancelled for making a tasteless joke, then he shouldn’t join the orgiastic cancel campaigns that erupt every so often and target people on the margins who don’t even have real power.
The Grateful Dead’s music reminds me of a more tolerant country that has since passed us by, a time when we weren’t necessarily unified but we still believed in pluralism and a “I’ll mind my business, as long as you mind yours” attitude – and that might be why I love it so much. It transports me out of today’s endless, puerile “culture wars” to a time and place when someone could unironically say “trying to create a community of spirit” and “the metaphor of the band cooperating and collaborating and being one organism” without receiving scorn from mindless partisans on the internet.
We have seen the alternative to this attitude over the past few years – a culture war of all against all, various religious, ethnic, political factions competing for the spoils of federal, state, and local governments, in a fruitless race to the bottom. Phil Lesh and the Grateful Dead, however, had the right idea – maybe more than some conservatives would like to admit.
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