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Winning the Culture War

by Christopher Chantrill
February 08, 2004 at 3:00 am

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“DO WHATEVER you want,” advised the Edwardian actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell to the apprentice libertine, “But don’t frighten the horses in the street.”  Perhaps the gay marriage ukase of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and the “Super Reveal” will make placid conservative horses finally rear up in horror.  And get into harness to help bring home victory in the culture war.

Victory in the culture war would be a very small thing.  All we ask is for our American elite to extend a genuine tolerance to the middle class and its values.  It would stop persecuting ordinary people who go to work, pay their taxes, belong to a church, follow the rules, and obey the law.  It would not stigmatize such people as stupid, or easily led, or as religious bigots. 

It would recoil in horror from those who would chase Christian rituals and symbols out of the public square.  It would no longer celebrate an arts community that “challenged” society by attacking the cultural symbols of the middle class: marriage, children, God, fidelity, modesty, and manners.  And it would not allow a determined minority to redefine the meaning of marriage.  Is that so much to ask?

Fortunately, we know where our tormentors live: in the political party that has become the home of single people, cultural relativists, and secularists: the Democratic party.  It is shocking, for instance, to realize just how anti-religious the Democrats have become.  At the Democratic convention of 1992, Bolce and De Maio reported in The Public Interest, over half the delegates rated Christian fundamentalists on a “feeling thermometer” graduated from 0 to 100—at an ice cold zero.

How, one wonders, do they feel about ax murderers and rapists?

By comparison, the average 1992 Republican delegate rated their ideological foes—feminists, environmentalists, and prochoice groups—at 27 degrees, over half way from ice cold zero to room temperature 50.

But why should anyone be surprised?  The mainstream media jumps down the throat of anyone that cocks a snook at left-wing activist, but maintains a shameful silence when religious people are attacked.  According to Bolce and De Maio, that “the more attention a person pays to the national political news media, and especially to television news, the more likely is that individual to believe that Christian fundamentalists are ideologically extreme and politically militant.”  Does that mean that bigots naturally gravitate to the national news media, or that the media actually teaches them to hate?

Liberals demand that we be “tolerant” of gays, lesbians, transgressive artists, secularists, and moral relativists, but ignore intolerance towards people of faith. 

The culture war must be won be turning the tables on these chancers and chasing their liberal “tolerance” out of the public square.  The good news is that conservatives are finding effective ways to fight back.

Conservatives are challenging liberals in the public square to demonstrate their tolerance for the conservative “other”—through the street theater of affirmative action bake sales and conservative “coming out” days on campus.  Conservatives are challenging liberals to give college students full value for money and teach both sides of the story. Appropriately, it is a former leftist, David Horowitz, who has taught conservatives how to play this game.

And when liberal judges legislate a new definition of marriage from the bench, or remove “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance and rip the Ten Commandments out of the halls of justice, they reveal more about themselves than Janet Jackson could ever do. 

So conservatives are going on offense, shaming the liberals as intolerant hypocrites and exposing them to the world as extremists and anti-religious bigots that want to drive religion out of American life.  Will there ever come a time when Washington Post reporters would be ashamed to write that Christians are “poor, uneducated, and easily led?”  Dream on!

But as we drive back the liberals with a politics of shame, let us never forget our larger quest.  For all our focus on the culture war, we want to build a political home for all Americans, from the frightened immigrant, to the stolid homeowner, to the creative entrepreneur or artist, to the compassionate communitarian.  We want to build an America that provides tribal solidarity to the fearful, rules and roles for the purposeful, an open frontier for the enterprising, and a universal community for the caring. 

From shabby liberal neglect we can restore the shining city on a hill to incandescent glory, and we will.

 

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Socialism equals Animism

Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Physics, Religion, and Psychology

Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”

Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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