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Break on Through to the Other Side
The impeachment aftermath is proving quite interesting for conservatives. I don't think most of us realized the extent to which we were pinning our hopes of cultural/political redemption on this one process. It served as a marker for "All that is wrong with America", and its result would either validate our perspective of "real" America or send us off the deep end. The failure to impale Slick Willy has hit conservatives like a baseball bat to the solar plexus. The estimable Paul Weyrich has responded by withdrawing from the field of battle. He has concluded that willful failure to remove such a scoundrel from office is clear proof that the culture war has indee been lost, and that the only hope for cultural conservatves is to hunker down out of sight, waiting for a brighter day. He is absolutely correct. The Culture War has been lost, but his timing is a wee bit off. Perhaps a brief review of history is in order.
The Culture War was over by 1970, before conservatives even knew that there was a war in progress. By 1970, virtually all defining components of the culture were firmly in the hands of the liberal/radical/progressive worldview. The universities, print and television media, Hollywood, the arts, and increasingly religion. Outside of a few grumpy sorts at National Review, most Americans didn't even notice this cultural ascendancy until the dominant cultural forces began to intrude on their lives through the engine of politics. To paraphrase Clausewitz, politics is the extension of culture by violent means. By the early '70s cultural liberalism had reached the saturation point and began to leak into politics in the practical forms of busing, abortion on demand, environmentalism, affirmative action, the active persecution of religion in public life and the blooming of pornography. (The fact that many of these were accomplished through judicial intervention is irrelevant. Judicial activism is by definition a political rather than a judicial act).
Conservatives nonetheless drew solace from the reality that the values of the instruments of culture seemed completely at odds with the values of the American people. And they were right. The reaction of the traditional Silent Majority (and a few non-radical democratic intellectuals) to this meddling created the Reagan Democrats, NeoConservatives, Moral Majority and the Christian Right almost overnight. The grumpy old paleocons finally had allies, and together they swept St. Ronnie into office. But even as powerful a political figure as Reagan could do no more than stall the progessives on the political front, while we continued to watch the culture go downhill. In retrospect, it seems that virtually all of the available conservative firepower in the 1970s, '80s and '90s has been directed at trying to use the political power of the silent majority to overwhelm the liberal cultural ascendancy. I don't think we thought that's what we were doing. Maybe some cabal of really bright strategists pointed us that way deliberately, but I doubt it.
In 1992 Pat Buchanan gave one hell of a speech at the Republican Convention along these lines, declaring a culture war to be in progress and proposing political means to end it. And once again we were doomed to fail. One Bush, one Gingrich and one Starr later some of us may finally be beginning to understand that politics does not and can not beat culture. What makes the impeachment debacle the final straw for so many on the right is that it seems to be proof positive that the worldview of modern liberalism has spread like a cancer from the instiutions of culture to infect the values of the people at large. No more are we a common sense and conservative people burdened with out of touch cultural institutions. We fear the people themselves have been coopted. This, to me, seems a touch pessimistic. The bias of our cultural institutions always exerts a pull on the rest of society. But to convert core values through the application of cultural bias is a hard and slow thing to do. This is, in a sense, our wake up call.
The lesson for conservatives in 1999 is that we must change our focus. We need to continue fighting on the political front, if for no other reason than to keep the dikes from bursting and the dykes from gaining control, but if we are to truly win back our nation we must first win back the culture and allow the natural beliefs and values of the American people to feel as if they belong. We cannot do this by hiding in our houses and refusing to play with the rest of the country. And we cannot do this by pretending to be liberals. What we can do as a first step is to break up the monolithic culture established by liberalism. A bunch of conservative fuddy-duddies will probably never be able to exert the sort of cultural stranglehold that comes natural to liberals. But if we are able to offer alternative means of cultural transmission, using the myriad means now avaialble, we may stand a fighting chance.