Nutty Professors 
Hal Foster
- Quick Studies: The Best of ‘Lingua Franca’ edited by Alexander Star
The cultural strategy of the Reaganite Right was prepared as early as 1976 by Daniel Bell in Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Blame the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s – rebellious students, civil rights agitators, wild-eyed feminists – for the grievous decline in public morality, cultural literacy, educational standards and everything else that has gone to hell: blame them and not, say, the cultural contradictions of capitalism. The Culture Wars proper – the assault on multicultural education and identity politics, on feminist gains and gay rights – followed in the 1980s; and as they raged on into the 1990s, it made tactical sense for the Right to train some guns on liberal campuses, for where else (besides Hollywood) were those damn subversives so concentrated now?
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Hal Foster chairs the department of art and archaeology at Princeton.
Other articles by this contributor:
At the Hayward · ‘The Painting of Modern Life’
At the Grand Palais · Richard Serra
The Great US Election Disaster · Hal Foster writes about the 2000 US Presidential Election
Why all the hoopla? · Frank Gehry
It’s Modern but is it contemporary? · The Trouble with MoMA
At the Guggenheim · Russian Art
Bigness · Rem Koolhaas
At the Whitney · Ed Ruscha’s Hollywood Sublime
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