Amanda Marcotte in TPM Cafe, in a book club discussion of Nixonland:
People have become more self-referential, in part because of pop bands like Devo that made arty-farty post-modernism the lingua franca of our era. (Devo is particularly useful—it might have puzzled Norman Lear to have people love his show for both sending up and celebrating the Archie Bunkers of the world, but Devo, which cartoonishly loves and loathes the Silent Majority culture, would have been thrilled for such mixed reactions.) Conservatives who go on “The Colbert Report” know they’re being lampooned; they just hope that it manages to sell a few books anyway.
Self-referentiality may make us smarter, but it has an ugly downside, which Devo predicted by making “We must repeat” the 5th plank in their platform. The thing that’s made me alternately panic and laugh darkly during the whole Iraq war debacle is how the memory of the 60s dominated people’s behavior. We romanticize the 60s, and thus people snapped right into the roles written for us in the past: The liberal hawks hiding behind reasonableness, bloodthirsty conservatives who get teary-eyed at patriotic displays, leftist wanks who think protest is a chance at self-expression and can’t stay focused on the topic at hand (bringing “Free Mumia” signs to war protests), and then of course the larger, dare I say silent, majority of war opponents who do stay on message but can’t seem to catch a break to be heard.