Capitol Ideas / Culture War II
Bethell, Tom
p atrick Buchanan has a new organization called the American Cause, whose supporters recently convened at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington. The topic was "Winning the Culture War." Ever since his...
...It makes one wonder what might happen if Republican pols dared take the moral offensive...
...Three of the "four last things" having been discarded—judgment, heaven, and hell (socialism has not yet been able to triumph over the fourth, death, although that triumph, too, was once anticipated)—the socialist conscience insists that we all be as equal as possible in this one and only life...
...he recognizes their influence but finds it hard to accept that their policies, which involve further centralizing power, can beunpopular with the people...
...Nor was Ronald Reagan (although, unlike Bush, he was politically astute enough to know what it took to get re-elected...
...Precisely because "the culture" is so basic, however, it is difficult to change at all, and impossible to change overnight...
...But first it must be fought...
...Buchanan's remarks at Houston were subsequently attacked with the ferocity that liberals cannot hide when their most treasured beliefs are questioned...
...It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself...
...So of course they didn't like it when Buchanan came along with his belated wake-up call...
...Republicans in general have showed no inclination to put up a fight on this front...
...its institutions are defended more out of self-interest than conviction, its inner weakness disguised by blustery outbursts of fanaticism...
...There was a moment of real resistance to the left at the time of Reagan's election, embodied in the supply-side, anti-tax movement...
...Does the reference to Clinton & Clinton seem so exaggerated now...
...The inroads of the nihilists are so great that they will have to be addressed in moral terms...
...An analogous point about the underclass has been made by Myron Magnet in his recent book The Dream and the Nightmare (reviewed in these pages last month by Tod Lindberg...
...The argument was couched purely in terms of efficiency: "If we cut tax rates the producers will produce more goods...
...Buchanan calls him "a disgrace to medicine who belongs in a padded cell or a prison dorm with the convicted killer whose vital organs this defrocked quack was once so anxious to collect...
...By 1996, this will not be enough...
...And in that struggle for the soul of America, Clinton & Clinton are on the other side, and George Bush is on our side...
...The best way to fight a war is to fool the opposition into thinking there is no war...
...He wants to "save American jobs," but more likely will end up saving American trade unions...
...Meanwhile, Republican politicians have hardly dared to fight the left on moral terrain...
...Jimmy Carter at least had the grace to come to Washington with a certain humility...
...sexual intercourse should await matrimony and thereafter be confined to one's spouse, and so on...
...In the press conference that Buchanan held when he entered the Republican primaries eighteen months ago, "the culture" was not mentioned...
...First, he made some comments on "the agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America—abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat," which he lumped together as "radical feminism...
...Mario Cuomo asked on "Face the Nation...
...Gays in the military...
...It is about who we are...
...Ever since his speech to the Republican Convention last August, when he said that we are in a cultural war, Buchanan has become identified with the controversy surrounding this hard-to-define thing called "the culture...
...It was still possible in 1980 to finesse the cultural issues by advocating increased individual autonomy in the economic realm...
...Here was a "change of direction" that the people would applaud, once they saw the wisdom of repudiating "twelve years of trickle-down economics...
...The left's long march through these institutions has been "successfully completed...
...He certainly was not disposed to lead one side against another...
...Then, a few paragraphs later, he said this: My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what...
...The good news, he continued, is that the left today is in a position analogous to Soviet Communism a decade ago...
...Even liberal elites have lost confidence in liberalism," Kristol said...
...We are indeed in a war, as Buchanan said, and it can be won...
...Let us hope Kristol is right...
...How to explain not just his erroneous judgment, but the confidence with which he has asserted it...
...The howls from Cuomo, Rowan, and others told us that they knew perfectly well what was going on...
...That's a word they used in Nazi Germany...
...In a recent column, Robert Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, discussed an angry response to an editorial the paper had published questioning the values of the "cultural elite...
...The travails of Bill Clinton suggest that it may be easier than we think...
...Having been released from the confines of Arkansas, Mr...
...It looks solid enough but its foundations are weak...
...Conservatives have been so devoid of leadership that there has been almost no resistance to the leftist onslaught...
...Some of you may be trying to recall what it was that Buchanan said to provoke such outbursts...
...An important part of the left's agenda now is to attribute this mounting pathology not to the collapse of an old culture and its replacement by a new one, but to persistent middle class wickedness: to racism, greed, prejudice, homophobia, sexism, selfishness, indifference to the suffering of mankind, and a stubborn unwillingness to pay higher taxes to alleviate that suffering...
...Absent judgment in the hereafter, social justice must be vengefully pursued right now...
...President Bush, as Buchanan said, was "on our side," but like almost the entire Republican leadership he was uncomfortable with the idea that there is such a thing as a cultural war...
...The bad news, he said, is that the left now dominates virtually all the institutions in the country, and to an unprecedented degree: state and federal government, the universities, publishing houses, the mass media, and so on...
...as in the West generally, were for a long time broadly Judeo-Christian...
...Welfare reform is at least a (remote) possibility...
...The corruption of liberal values has become so blatant that Republicans will ignore the issue at their peril in the future...
...Even this modest argument stirred up tremendous ideological hostility...
...The tax changes were then opposed on moral grounds: they would reward greed, hurt the poor...
...The results of abandoning the old culture are now apparent in the gay bathhouses and the AIDS wards, in the addiction treatment centers, in the crumbling inner cities, in the street gangs of the underclass, in the abortion clinics, in the high-school clinics that distribute condoms and Norplant, in the welfare offices, in the public housing projects, in the crime and illegitimacy rates, and most recently in the activities of the serial killer from Michigan, Jack Kevorkian...
...In many quarters, Buchanan was immediately attacked for declaring a war, when he merely said we were in one...
...That will generate more revenues to distribute to the needy...
...The people would soon recognize the justice of "extending civil rights" to this oppressed minority...
...It is what Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw basically do for a living...
...This was partly right, but Kristol might have added that the left had won by default...
...A few months after the Republican convention Irving Kristol wrote in the Wall Street Journal, with uncharacteristic pessimism: "I regret to inform Pat Buchanan that those wars are over and the left has won...
...All those beliefs have for a long time been under attack and have now been very widely discarded...
...To some extent even this was exaggerat...
...He missed gays in the military, by the way...
...The rich must be imprisoned, the poor liberated, and so on...
...The left was dismayed to see the notion of incentives—the intractability of human nature—reintroduced into public discourse...
...Few believe that now...
...0 ne of the most interesting speeches at the conference was given by Bill Kristol, who was chief of staff to former Vice President Dan Quayle...
...The bishops have remained pathetically mute, or have cravenly joined the opposition, confining their sermons to the safe topic of social justice...
...Jack Kemp is a fine fellow, but things have reached a point where cutting the capital gains tax will not be sufficient to rescue us from decline...
...Those who did not share these underlying religious beliefs were nonetheless for the most part willing to assent to them, and to accept the resulting framework of law and custom: abortion is wrong and should be illegal, homosexual behavior is shatneful and should be frowned on, at best closeted...
...Clinton seems to think of his new constituents as dwelling in Manhattan, Cambridge, and Berkeley, with not much in between...
...Politically, it is something of a novelty...
...And the liberals (as the left is usually called in America) have been very good at that deception...
...4 4 hT e culture" really refers to a widely held set of beliefs about the purpose of life and the way in which society should be organized as a consequence...
...It is necessary to get it right, even if it is no longer sufficient to do so...
...What was it that got the left so upset...
...Because the new culture that the left seeks to impose on us is godless, it is also egalitarian...
...What do you mean by culture...
...Those beliefs, in the U.S...
...Therein lies the opportunity...
...Anything else would be horribly unfair...
...On "Inside Washington" Carl Rowan said that Buchanan's remarks were the closest he had ever heard to a Nazi address...
...He sees that "the culture" is something more basic than theeconomy, and so, he seems to feel, if we can restore the culture, the economy will somehow take care of itself...
...The answer surely is that Clinton has spent his entire adult life hobnobbing with friends on the left...
...The discovery and dissemination of these sins is now the routine activity of journalists...
...It is about what we believe, it is about what we stand for as Americans...
...As far as I know, they were never defended on moral grounds: allowing people to keep the money they have earned is simple justice, and is resisted by those who are base enough to traffic in envy and slander...
...Pretty heavy stuff, huh...
...Laws have been changed to reflect the new "reality...
...Republicans still don't get it...
...Their opposition is always pragmatic...
...On the other hand, his vague appeal to "change," meaning leftward movement, suggests he knows honesty is not the best policy...
...Thirty years ago, liberals really believed that pouring cash into the inner cities was the solution to poverty...
...Dan Quayle Was Right...
...Liberalism has degenerated from an honest belief to a hollowed-out, rotten shell...
...Likewise, the lesson of recent elections is that if you get the economy wrong, as Bush did, then you will lose no matter what your other positions may be...
...The people are beginning to, however, with a little help from Pat Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh, and even more from Clinton & Clinton...
...Politically, advocating home-schooling (as Mary Kay Clark did at Buchanan's conference) and attacking the corruption of modern art cannot make up for economic errors that will make it more difficult to find employment...
...Clinton seems to believe quite sincerely that Reagan was an unpopular president...
...New taxes...
...There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America...
...it is going to collapse...
...Buchanan will be more than happy to do this, but he is at the same time flirting with a serious error—economic protectionism...
...Bartley concluded that "it's one thing to question liberal economic policy, but quite another to question liberal moral leadership...
...The problem in the inner cities, Magnet suggests, is more fundamental than the unintended consequences of mere welfare payments...
...T he extent to which we now live in a society that' is dominated by leftist values is scarcely recognizable by politicians...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
