Pumping Irony

By Andrew Sullivan

Behind the celebrity factor, behind the recall circus, lies a tantalizing possibility. In his unique blend of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a genuinely new kind of politician, one that both parties have lamentably failed to provide in the past couple of decades. In our political wars, he's a synthesis. In our culture wars, he's a truce.

In some ways, the culture wars in this country for the past couple of decades have been about the 1970s. The sexual and cultural revolution of that decade symbolizes for one side all that has gone wrong with America, and for the other, much that has gone right. We have lurched back and forth in reaction to this--with the multiculti left on one side and the religious right on the other, and the rest of us uncomfortably in between, longing for some kind of synthesis, some way out and forward.

Arnold taps into this. He is, after all, the ultimate creature of the 1970s. If you don't believe me, go rent Pumping Iron, the extraordinary documentary of Schwarzenegger's rise in the nascent bodybuilding culture of the time. He took a minor and largely derided sport and made it a world-wide sensation. And he extolled its pleasures and reveled in its vanity. He said he used to compare a good workout in the gym with an orgasm--and on Oprah! You can see frames of him smoking what looks like a big fat joint after a contest win. You can view Mapplethorpe-like photographs of him in the nude. You can see his complete ease in the bohemian subculture of Muscle Beach.

And then in the 1980s and 1990s, his movies created almost a parody of the Rambo-esque Reaganite action figure. Schwarzenegger took the genre, amped up its testosterone and then finished it off with a huge and merry dollop of irony. He was one of the first major movie stars who winked at the audience, understanding that they too were intelligent enough to see through the pyrotechnics and absurd dialogue to be amused by the pure entertainment of the spectacle. In his first two careers, Arnold deeply understood both the bohemian and conservative aspects of the popular culture of which he was a part. He immersed himself in them and helped bring them together.

Do you know of any other politician like that? One of Arnold's predecessors as Governor, Ronald Reagan, was a child of the popular culture. But he belonged to an earlier generation; he never made fun of himself as a movie star (that was left to others). And in office, his occasional appeal to movie references--"Go ahead, make my day"--was uneasily balanced by a moral Puritanism that helped cement a post-Dixie South into his coalition. Clinton tried to make himself look hip. But he always seemed suppliant to Hollywood, as if he were trying to be cool by association, never quite escaping the nerd from Arkansas within. Arnold, in contrast, is a complete creature of the pop culture, aware of its internal contradictions and happy to play with them.

The fact that he is a Republican makes his former bohemianism all the more salient. If such a pleasure-loving person were a Democrat, the Republican right would attack him with the venom they reserved for Clinton. Indeed, some Republican scolds like Alan Keyes chastised Schwarzenegger last week for being on the "evil side" in the culture wars. But when left-wing feminists tried the right's anti-Clinton tactics on Arnold--making much of the last-minute flurry of accusations of sexual misconduct--they sounded bitter and not a little hypocritical. In their scolding of the big-grinned Arnold, they seemed as uptight as the far right and were rejected by the post-Clinton electorate. So Arnold snuck through the left-right paradigm with the dexterity of a well-honed deltoid flex.

Schwarzenegger represents a cultural politics that is missing in America: culturally liberal on issues like sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, fiscally conservative on taxes and spending, and hawkish on foreign policy. He is neither the interest-group drone of Democratic establishment nor the dour scold of the Republican base. He's the kind of guy who watches the same movies we do, who's both larger than life yet in touch with the cultural air we all breathe. He's an immigrant who doesn't alienate any region of the country, and a conservative who, one suspects, has a gay friend or two and isn't freaked out about it. That kind of complicated but real candidate has been my dream for most of my adult life. He may, of course, not turn out to be an effective Governor. But by being Governor at all, he has changed our political culture for good. And made the possibility of less-polarized politics a little bit larger than it used to be.