Why conservatives are giving up on the “culture war”
A reader writes:
With respect to the theme of “disengagement” that seems to have taken over VFR for the moment, I would submit that to some extent this is already happening.
The home schooling movement, while lately taken up by all sorts of people, was created and remains largely driven by real conservatives who despair for any serious solution to the problems of the reigning orthodoxy.
Traditionalist Catholics, to take another example, have begun to simply abandon any hope of actually stemming the torrential entropy that has gripped the “post-conciliar” Church, and are either going into schism or congregating where possible into subversive traditionalist “parishes within parishes.”
Because advanced liberalism attacks on so many fronts simultaneously, those with any healthy respect for tradition—or even ordinary cultural sanity—are largely confused and demoralized. Having to defend the principle that marriage is an essentially heterosexual concept is simply too much for many, who withdraw altogether from public life or strike accommodationist postures, as witnessed by the “civil unions” compromise, a crystalline instance of the neo-conservative tendency to believe that liberalism can actually be held at bay and appeased.
I think the dividing line between neo-conservatives and the genuine article is often, though not brightly and distinctly, the line between those who recognize the implacable, voracious enemy of civilization that liberalism represents, and those who still believe that slow, steady concessions will win the day. Not coincidentally, the same people that believe that a relentless, grinding, low-level guerrilla war of rising intensity is a sure sign of victory in Iraq.
For myself, I refuse to entreat with barbarians.
My reply:
Thanks for the good e-mail. This line in particular catches the quality of what has happened: “Having to defend the principle that marriage is an essentially heterosexual concept is simply too much for many, who withdraw altogether from public life.”
Yes. There’s an instinctive revulsion at the idea that one is actually supposed to debate and prove this. So much of the dominant culture is like that, in one way or another. It’s something you don’t want to go anywhere near, even to oppose it.
Much of television for example is so far out, indicating that the people who produce it are so far out, that even protesting it seems out of the question, like getting into a polite discussion with a savage.
Or that NY Post headline I quoted: “SWEAT, FREAK.” Am I supposed to want to open the pages of such a paper? Am I supposed to call the editor of such a paper and protest how sleazy his paper has become? But as is made evident by everything he does, the Post’s editor (Col Allan, another lowlife Brit or Aussy brought in by the Murdochs) has been for a long time way past any shame or standards.
Or the hateful moronic statements that Democrats such as Howard Dean and Sen. Durbin emit every day. Are we supposed to engage in debate with hooligans?
My point is that when the culture and politics have gotten so sick and toxic, any “culture war” breaks down because our side can’t stand dealing with the other side enough to bother fighting against it, at least in any direct sense. Instead, there is silent withdrawal. This could be bad, because it means we’ve ceased opposing the left and so it will keep getting stronger; or it could be good, in that we will increasingly ignore the left (unlike the mainstream conservatives who spend their days and nights reacting obsessively to each latest leftist outrage, even as, in the very act of debating the left, they must, in order to seem “fair-minded,” accommodate the left in all kinds of ways), and, invisibly to the world of headlines, start building something positive apart from the dominant leftist culture, a new culture that may eventually emerge into view and replace it.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 16, 2005 04:00 PM | Send