Hipublicans

"Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie says he's booked several musical acts to take center stage at Madison Square Garden -- country to classical, blues to punk (hey, it's not your father's party anymore). "

-Washington Times.
(emphasis added)

Anti-modernists of all stripes have a clever tendency to wear modern clothing. Osama bin Laden used satellite phones. Pat Robertson appears daily on the 700 club. Cultural reactionaries of all sorts use the internet. Some even appropriate the cultural clothing of their adversaries.
After all, what is Christian rock? Sure, there are actual, real rock musicians who integrate religious content in their music. U2 is just a prominent example. But is U2 a Christian rock band? No. Christian rock is like any artform perverted to serve an agenda that isn't appropriate to the form. Christian rock primarily represents the agenda of Evangelical Christianity, but this is an agenda very much at odds with what rock and roll is at its roots. Although rock had some of its roots on Gospel music, it is formally and culturally associated with rebellion, sex (does one need to mention that "rock and roll" was a term originally used for coitus?), and drug use, all of which stand in opposition to the tenets and strictures of evangelical protestantism.
The appeal of Christian rock is that it attempts to lend modernity and cultural breadth to a subculture sorely in need of same. One of the primary facets of evangelical and other rigid forms of American protestantism is an iconoclasm in the classic sense and a desire to avoid the worldly. Christian rock is part of an attempt to make forms of christianity more seductive to a populace otherwise heavily exposed to worldliness by making these forms more closely resemble that of the outside world. Home schooling as an industry is another attempt- an organized and mainstreamed retreat from the wickedness of modern society.
Likewise, selecting punk music for the Republican National Convention is expression of a similar impulse. Like so many aspects of the conservative movement (and there can be no doubt, notwithstanding the prominent placement of cultural moderates like Schwartzenegger and Giuliani {though anyone so delighted to play Jesse Helms as cultural commissar is suspect on this account} at the Convention, the Republican Party is now a wholly owned subsidiary of said movement), this is an attempt to disguise its pale homogeneity in a rainbow costume. Republicans filled the stage at the 2000 convention with the faces of blacks, asians and hispanics for the very same purposes.
Punk rock is a nebulous artform, but it is hardly ideally suited for the Republican party. Punk rock and punk culture has long been associate with politics, but its politics tend toward the leftist, even the radical leftist. Exceptions may be made for skinheads. Punk is a subculture or family of subcultures that enshrines nonconformism (although this sometimess results in a physical conformity- you can often spot a punk a mile away) and tends to reject conventional boundaries (Straight-Edge culture imposes boundaries, but these are hardly conventional). This hardly makes it an ideal soundtrack for the party of trickle-down economics and the Federal Marriage amendment. Punk is only inserted into the Republican Convention in order to make it seem "cool." I suppose the party of Brent Bozell, Dennis Hastert, and William F. Buckley needs all the help it can get in this regard.
Now, in the beginning of this entry I linked the Republican Party with anti-modernism. This is clearly not entirely accurate. There are large swaths of the Republican Party that can in no way be described as anti-modern. Neoconservatives may often be mad and carry bizarre assumptions about the world, but they are not by definition anti-modern. For many neoconservatives and some of their movement conservative compatriots, anti-modern sentiments seem forced, the result more of message-discipline than personal conviction. Ann Coulter, for example, has no problem self-justifying her own unwed promiscuity, but she communicates all the cultural-reactionary pieties when necessary. Another faction within conservatism that lacks an anti-modern agenda (at least in intent) is the economic libertarian wing. Grover Norquist's aims, though, if actualized, might result in the demolition of the modernist program, are far from the backward-looking program of Pat Robertson et. al. Whether the Republican Party can be seen, in aggregate, as anti-modern or not, they have as one of their best tools the cynical appropriation of cultural particles that, in their original state, would doubtless work against them.
They can only win if the forces of cultural modernism lose. It is unwise to look at the problem of creeping cultural backwardness in a manner that ignores modern society's greatest assets and instead unthinkingly employs the strategies of the last war. This begins by identifying and redefining one's threats not as they have become so successful as defining themselves, but as the culturally sterile, fear-driven, power-hungry, no-fun, boring louts they are. If we do this, it hardly matters if they bring the pro-Bush version of the Dead Kennedys on stage.

Note of course that one of the cleverer ways in which the right has diminished liberals and those left of center in general is characterizing us as no-fun, Politically Correct man-hating lesbians and tree-hugging scolds. Americans are a self-contradictory lot. We may not like our 11 year old kids dressing like Britney Spears or smoking weed, but we have a pretty strong libertinish don't-tell-me-what-to-do impulse that tends to function pretty well when we aren't being manipulated into fearing for our lives. Find a way to convince America that the Republicans want to spoil its good time, and you're already halfway there.