Fighting back against California’s mandatory homosexual curriculum; and, what if we stopped fighting?
(Note: many readers have replied to this entry.)
The Capitol Resource Institute, a social-conservative group that opposed the recently passed measure in California mandating the teaching of the contributions of homosexuals and “transgendered” freaks, is seeking to place a referendum on the California ballot giving voters the chance to reject the measure. So it looks as though that particular battle is not over.
But the forbidden thought occurs to me: is it perhaps time for conservatives to stop fighting so hard against the liberal sickness/evil, and let the liberals have what they want? As long as conservatives keep opposing these evil measures for ever-greater “inclusion,” anything bad that results from them is blamed on the bigoted conservatives who won’t allow enough inclusion, which requires pushing the inclusion even further, until every remnant of conservatism and traditional society is wiped out. So why don’t we just step back and say, “Hey, liberals, you’ve won. We won’t fight you any more. We quit. We’re not going to keep struggling to hold up the remains of the social order that you keep trying to destroy while you demonize us for defending it. It’s your country. Do what you like with it.” If conservatives effectively took themselves off the scene, liberals would no longer have a scapegoat on whom to blame the disasters brought by liberalism. They would be forced to face, without any escape, the consequences of their own beliefs and policies.
I’m not actually proposing that social conservatives execute the John Galt type strategy I’ve just described. But if they did, what would happen?
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Alan Roebuck writes:
Another way to oppose liberalism, especially the enforced approval of homosexuality and other perversions, occurs to me. My two premises here are that liberals have overwhelming power to punish anyone who disagrees publicly (this point has not yet been reached), and the sacred liberal belief that the individual must be free to believe whatever he wants in the privacy of his own mind.
So imagine the following scenario. A non-liberal is being pressured publicly to approve of homosexuality. The liberals are able to bring overwhelming force to bear on him. He responds, publicly, like this:
I know in the privacy of my own mind and heart that homosexual activity is a sin, and harmful to society. But I will keep my beliefs private. Since you are holding a metaphorical gun to my head, I will obey your orders. When ordered to, I will do any of the following: Publicly honor homosexuality. Hire and promote homosexuals. Use the word “gay.” Go through the motions of publicly supporting “gay rights,” including same-sex pseudo-marriage. I will not publicly badmouth homosexuality, unless you ask me what my beliefs are. But in the privacy of my own mind and heart, I will know that you are wrong. I will never agree with you.
[End of scenario.]
Right now, liberals pretend to be open and tolerant. This will force them either to persecute people literally for their thoughts instead of their deeds, thereby ripping off the veneer of niceness that makes them so popular with normal people, or else be forced publicly to tolerate a measure of true dissent.
I’m not calling this the Magic Step that will trigger counterrevolution. Just something to consider.
LA replies:
That’s really interesting.
Nile McCoy writes:
What would happen? Probably a renewal in the push for school vouchers. If enough parents decide to take their children out of public schools, and go the options of either home schooling or private schools, the pressure for vouchers would become enormous, enough that the NEA couldn’t stop it from happening.
LA replies:
The truth is that school vouchers—particularly school vouchers as an escape from tyrannical inclusion policies—are one of the most illusory “conservative” solutions of modern times, on the same level of delusion as No Child Left Behind. Since the vouchers are backed by public funds, the private schools that are paid by the vouchers come under the entire panoply of federal anti-discrimination regulations. Vouchers are classic “big-government conservatism.” All they would accomplish is (a) to bring the private schools under the same government control as the public schools, and (b) move lots of minorities from the public schools into the private schools. This is why vouchers have been repeatedly defeated at the local level.
James R. writes:
“If conservatives effectively took themselves off the scene, liberals would no longer have a scapegoat on whom to blame the disasters brought by liberalism.”
Other than really, really, in a “The Movement” kind of way, which we’ve never really had (for all the talk of “the conservative movement,” it’s nothing like what was called, in the ’60s, The Movement), this may be the only effective strategy remaining.
Can I invoke R.L. Dabney’s infamous quote about “northern conservatism” again?
I’m at a loss otherwise, the other alternative is to overturn progressivism, purge progressives from every institution, and the like. Things we probably wouldn’t have the stomach for even if we had the strength for it. Which is one reason few people are up for it. Gov. Walker style methods are a step towards this direction but even he is “too mild” to be ultimately effective. My bet is that it sustains the State fiscally for a decade or so (which may be longer than some other States), but does nothing to affect the sorts of things you’re interested in and thus just gives all this an extended lifespan, and another bogeyman to whip. So in the long run, perhaps even counter productive from our point of view.
Alissa writes:
I agree with every single word of this post. Homeschooling anyone?
James R writes:
Perhaps—and this is the hope, perhaps the only hope—progressivism would collapse before every remnant of conservatism and traditional society is wiped out, in which case there would be something around to rebuild on. Prolonging things just means less and less is left to rebuild on, and also allows various “alternatives” to be infiltrated into our civilization. Such as: what if the resistance becomes Islam?
A parallel is now playing out in Washington where Republicans have managed to position themselves as handy scapegoats for whatever happens on the fiscal and financial front, so once again progressives will be able to obscure their culpability. It’s an age-old pattern. Plus any cuts they manage will probably so marginal they will do nothing to reverse what WRM calls “The Blue State Model,” but simply allow it to stagger on for awhile longer, till when it finally does tumble down things are that much worse.
This is similar on the social, cultural, and civilizational front. Progressivism is in the saddle, but they take resistance as oppression and use it as a whipping boy and scapegoat for the problems they create.
Hannon writes:
There is a principle, perhaps the physicists have a suitable term for it, which says that any force needs resistance to give it traction. In martial arts a related idea teaches that when faced with oncoming force, the best response is to deflect your opponent so that his energy carries through, past you, and leaves him stumbling while you are in a good position to attack or remain in control. An opponent will get tired eventually and see that if you wished you could destroy him. Aikido is the premiere example of this art. On the other hand, if your response is to engage in a struggle, your attacker will feel empowered since that is the way of the bully. Deprive the bully of that which he thrives on, and expects of you, and you have weakened him considerably.
In a practical sense, however, it is difficult to see what “giving up” would accomplish. Maybe the best approach is to vigorously pursue traditional principles and practices and place less emphasis on attacking liberalism. We see liberals have grown in strength while conservatives continue to flounder—how can the latter grow strong when we are not giving it our undivided attention? Isn’t that how the liberals did it?
A reader writes:
“I’m not actually proposing that social conservatives execute the John Galt type strategy I’ve just described. But if they did, what would happen?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein
Goldstein is always the subject of the “Two Minutes Hate,” a daily, 2-minute period beginning at 11:00 AM at which a purported image of Goldstein is shown on the telescreen (a one-channel television with surveillance devices in it that cannot be turned off). The reader may surmise that a political opposition to Big Brother—namely, Goldstein—was psychologically necessary in order to provide an internal enemy posing a threat to the rule of the Party; the constantly reiterated ritual of the Two Minutes Hate help ensure that popular support for and devotion towards Big Brother is continuous.
Maria D. writes:
What about the children learning these things in class?
Jim C. writes:
Kind Sir,
Homosexual geniuses don’t need affirmative action.
Yours sincerely,
Walt Whitman
Marcel Proust
Francis Bacon
Thomas Bertonneau writes:
On the topic of a conservative-traditionalist “Atlas Shrugged” strike, you wrote: “I’m not actually proposing that social conservatives execute the John Galt type strategy I’ve just described. But if they did, what would happen?”
If that were all they did—assume a rhetorical position—the liberal revolution would roll over them, to borrow a phrase from Solzhenitsyn, “with wheels.” The right must be as organized and as militant as the left currently is before it issues ultimatums. It is not organized; it is not militant. Most non-liberals have no coherent non-liberal counterview; they only have an inchoate, instinctive sense that liberalism is a doom, but they are too polite to utter their intuition. They are lamed forensically by their false sense of courtesy in conversation. The GOP is organized, but it is not the right. If the right were organized, and if it were prepared to move vigorously to pick up the pieces after the liberal revolution failed, as it would, then the grand rhetorical pose might be justified. But this would mean that the right would have to ready itself to fight and win a low-level civil war in every state of the Union. The existing “right” is not even prepared to be forthright with the mainstream press and its fellow travelers in broadcast journalism or with liberal politicians. (E.g., Lindsay Graham and Orrin Hatch.)
The rhetorical pose, with its foundation in real preparedness, would need to include an explanation of why the liberal revolution would fail. It would demand widespread civil disobedience. (E.g., county clerks refusing to issue marriage licenses, and large crowds of people willing to back them up loudly and forcefully.) Existing “conservative” institutions are incapable of providing such an explanation and productive America is averse to civil disobedience, even while it is being taxed into humiliation. WASP America, the kernel of America, is the victim of what George Santayana once praised as “the Genteel Tradition.” Liberals renounced gentility ages ago—hence their advantage in a democracy.
Matthew H. writes:
You ask: So why don’t we just step back and say, “Hey, liberals, you’ve won. We won’t fight you any more. We quit. We’re not going to keep struggling to hold up the remains of the social order that you keep trying to destroy while you demonize us for defending it. It’s your country. Do what you like with it.”
I think what we need to do is to stop giving a damn what the thugs, parasites and sodomites say about us. We should start calling them by their rightful names. They stick all sorts of hateful labels on us, yet insist that we employ an ever-changing litany of euphemisms when talking about them. They are the wreckers. They are the ones who deserve to be rebuked and shamed. Sen. Joseph McCarthy had the right idea (see here). It’s a shame that when they finally got him ten others didn’t rise up to take his place.
The good people of America need to re-learn the simple lost art of calling a spade a spade. They also need to remember that the adults must always win and that one never gives in to a temper tantrum whether it’s one three-year-old throwing his milk or hundreds of pampered government functionaries who refuse to pay even part of their own health insurance premiums.
I shudder to think about what it would mean for Leftists, unopposed, truly to “have their way” with this country.
(Of course this is not to say that I have any hope in the wretched GOP.)
May God help us.
As an aside, and apropos of nothing, I’m sending you this link to the scene from the 1959 Howard Hawks film Rio Bravo where Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson and Walter Brennan sing My Rifle, My Pony and Me followed by Cindy. It’s the former that is worth the click. I hope you enjoy it.
Paul Henri writes:
I believe in the indirect approach, as my strategy with immigration has developed recently. Pretend we are attacking the budget deficit, which is an impenetrable force to conservatives; but once the government shuts down, attack illegal immigration, the vital supply line of Democrats and Independents. Pretend we are attacking the budget deficit, but attack the Department of Education and the celebration of homosexuality (other Democratic/Independent supply lines) in due course. Bankruptcy is the defeat of liberalism and the rise of conservatism, assuming conservatives are willing to defend themselves against violence, which will almost certainly come about as any government shutdown drags on: See Wisconsin and other union thuggery.
Republicans should be preparing for the worst, which the South failed to do before the Civil War, instead of engaging in hysteria and bellicosity. Michele Bachmann just might be the modern Admiral Nimitz, who brought about the “Miracle at Midway” or the Admiral Spruance of Midway; Spruance was not a pilot as all other carrier captains were. Bachmann is not a former senator or governor as almost all presidents have been. Florid and belligerent rhetoric is inappropriate; forthrightly laying out the facts and offering inspiring solutions is appropriate. Republicans need to be warning of the certain need for sacrifice and of a long battle. That will wise up both Republicans and “Democrats.” The Republicans must avoid being responsible for another stupid Fort Sumpter, where the Confederacy foolishly took the direct approach after assuming they were too big to fall.
Tactical maneuvering might be necessary. For example, the Republicans could send a balanced budget to the Senate which would certainly disapprove it. Even extending the deadline for a bit might be wise. The brainpower is there; iron leadership, as I hope Bachmann has, could be decisive.
Kristor writes:
There is just one problem with letting the liberals have their way so that the system, no longer restrained and corrected, collapses: in the process of collapse, they’ll take away our guns, and then they’ll take away our freedom of speech, press, and religion. VFR and kindred sites and publications will be disappeared, along with their commenters and readers.
So long as we can keep them from doing that, we can speak openly and forthrightly. Only by thus speaking may we hope to convert anyone.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 18, 2011 05:56 PM | Send