Capitol Ideas: Losing the War
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS by Tom Bethell Losing the War L ast month I noted that the left is winning the cultural war. Every year they advance a little, and nothing is ever rolled back. The Brezhnev Doctrine...
...I want to say something about this ever-active, thrusting force, which is committed to nothing less than a reconstruction of our mental outlook, to the abolition of human nature, and to a matching change in all our laws and institutions...
...So it can be reshaped —by politics...
...As a result, only two of their five appointments voted to overturn Roe v. Wade...
...perhaps because the Islamic world has itself been unable to develop modem institutions...
...In the last twenty-five years, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times must have accused at least fifty people of "hate," without having access to the state of mind of those so accused...
...For centuries of Western history, conservatives were basically in charge...
...One demonstration of the left's control of the judiciary is that they no longer need constitutional amendments to get their way...
...One can only marvel at the audacity of the left...
...The whole movement of secular leftism is itself a fanatical attempt to rewrite the laws of life without God...
...But the left had other ideas and the U.S...
...Constitution is now defunct, except for those parts of it that are seen as promoting the aggressors' agenda —the broadest possible interpretation of the First Amendment, for example...
...Confronted with the threat of this fury, the conservative instinct is to retreat, to back off, to retire into the gated community, into private life, to withdraw from the public school and to teach children at home, to retreat to the rural eyrie...
...A thousand laws and regulations make it easy for the bureaucratic armies to pursue them...
...What need of an Equal Rights Amendment in the current judicial climate...
...This conjured up the terrifying prospect of a world in which their accusation privileges were revoked and reassumed by the dark forces of the ancient orthodoxy...
...The demographic balance, shifting in their favor, suggests that the cultural war there will only intensify...
...I bring this up not to indulge an inclination toward political pessimism, but because the port-and-cigar conservatism we live with needs to be jolted from time to time...
...The Brezhnev Doctrine ("what we gain, we keep") prevails in American culture and politics, if no longer in Russia...
...It implies a non-existent symmetry with "the Right...
...They want to be left alone and most would gladly settle for that...
...The important things were not put up for grabs in the political arena...
...The war we are in has been waged by coercion, but more subtly by permission...
...Those who thought of themselves as morally superior to the rest of the human race found themselves in the unaccustomed role of defendant...
...The Conservatives are blind to the evil forces in our midst...
...A real conflict between the religious right and the secular left rages there...
...It is probably true that the state in its coercive role will find it difficult to grow larger...
...members, no doubt, of the gun-nut creationist-Christian-Right...
...Since Roe, priests who have dared to preach against abortion have rarely been heard from in the pulpits...
...Such people are viewed as truants, absconders from the servile state, tax delinquents, scofflaws...
...Liberalism" is already too stale and confusing a label...
...The great asymmetry is this...
...The problem with the Supreme Court today is not that its new members automatically become liberals, whoever appoints them, but that neither Reagan nor Bush bothered to inquire into the judicial philosophy oftheir nominees...
...They were more interested in mollifying the New York Times than the right-to-life movement...
...Normal Americans who do sense the conflict mostly shrink from the fight They know they run the risk of being smeared with insults and accusations, and they prefer the quiet comforts of family life...
...at any rate, because the great majority doesn't know what is going on...
...But one of their own had been accused...
...For most of those on the left, this life is all there is...
...The Washington Post's Supreme Court reporter considers that "today, outbursts of judicial activism usually emerge from the right, not the left...
...It is already too old...
...What is ever rolled back...
...The mainline Protestant denominations appear to be near collapse...
...help to advance them in the political arena...
...Comfortable people out there who haven't been through the re-education camps yet...
...The conservative wants to be happy at home...
...Heretical movements came and went...
...But notice that the word heretic is now commendatory, describing someone who bravely defies an old orthodoxy...
...It is a revolutionary force, in the sense that it seeks to overturn the existing order, but it differs from the spirit of Marx and Lenin in that it never proclaims itself openly...
...Today's heretics are every bit as incorrigible, far more numerous, and close to running the show...
...and viewed by the left as the ones who above all need to have their "comfortable" prejudices and preconceptions shaken up...
...The Clinton administration's agenda of balancing the budget is not calculated to lift up the hearts of the left...
...You realize how far the Republican Party has been from seeing what has been going on...
...His defenders were those least inclined to object to the substance of the charges...
...Think of Bush and Dole and weep...
...The recipient classes vote, and, as has been amply shown in Europe, have the political power to preserve their benefits intact, no matter how weak the economy or high the unemployment rate...
...Peter Collier and David Horowitz have some interesting reflections on this in the latest issue of Heterodoxy...
...its present shape is contingent, fluid, produced by a series of random accidents...
...At the same time, the aggressor affects victim-hood ?a vivid demonstration of their present cultural power...
...They want to leave us no place to hide...
...Thatis the world that we live in...
...They may even be won...
...For some time now the Christian churches have harbored virulent apostate movements squarely in the enemy camp...
...As a member in good standing of the left he has accusation privileges...
...We are indeed too comfortable...
...T he one time in recent history when the right felt strong enough to level accusations at the left is looked upon as the darkest period of American history: the McCarthy era...
...It is at war with the institution of marriage...
...bigots in training...
...In fact, the aggressive force that keeps on playing offense against traditional standards all over the Western world is something much larger and more powerful than that...
...Cooperating with Moscow—my God, what was so bad about that...
...Accused...
...It seeks the destruction of traditional morality, and is well on the way to achieving that ambitious goal...
...Doctrinally, they closely resemble earlier heretics, too...
...In Israel there is such a war, although we see little written about this remarkable development...
...Where is the counter-reformation...
...And I need hardly say that it seeks to normalize and indeed to "moralize" homosexuality...
...Transferring the provider role from the male to the welfare state has greatly advanced that goal...
...The American Spectator ?February 1997 21...
...Their leaders were usually found incorrigible and were sometimes burned at the stake...
...It aims to separate sex from procreation, to undermine the whole notion of individual responsibility, to normalize abortion, to abolish the traditional distinctions of gender...
...Such comments only show the magnitude of the left's victory...
...It also suggests that we are talking about a small, sectarian entity—those who subscribe to the Nation, perhaps...
...Positing that two people of the same sex can be "married" to one another, and heaping indignation on anyone who disagrees, will further the cause of disintegration...
...20 February 1997 The American Spectator liberal wants to change the world...
...I would extend that to Reagan as well, by the way...
...Can be, and must be...
...The remote mountain top of Ruby Ridge, Idaho, whence the Weaver family was pursued and gunned down by federal agents, is a better symbol of the war we are in than Oklahoma City...
...For most conservatives, politics is something they would rather not have to think about, except maybe for a few days after the World Series every fourth year...
...The American Catholic hierarchy has been preoccupied with leftist causes for a generation and has squandered much of its moral capital as a result...
...We hear talk of a cultural war, but there really is not one yet, not in the U.S...
...For the most part, conservatism today is a weak, passive force, seeking to defend private enclaves and to hide from the social engineers, the social workers, the socialists...
...The key point is that the left today is more corn-mated to changing the world than the right is to preserving its essential features...
...But he didn't have to, did he...
...We are the ones who are accused of extremism, hate, prejudice, insensitivity, greed, meanness...
...People indubitably sympathetic to Communism were accused of being Communists...
...What the left couldn't stand was not so much the wildness of some of the charges as the fact of them...
...There is nothing "essential" about it...
...Nor is it conspiratorial, for its goals are not always fully understood by those who Tom BETHELL is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Among the theoreticians of democracy, the idea that voting by the recipient classes should be abridged is not on the table—a reactionary absurdity...
...In Israel, the right has true believers of its own...
...Those who report on the judiciary's activities share the beliefs of the cultural left and do not see the court's bias (or pretend not to...
...On the permissive side, the judiciary's assault on religious traditions has coincided with a near vacuum in Christian leadership...
...Heresy is met with diplomacy...
...The left is constantly the aggressive force...
...Islam for some reason seems to have remained immune to its aggression...
...Where are the leaders who will be needed to launch a counteroffensive...
...As John Leo of U.S...
...But that is not permitted in the modern world...
...The Left" covers it in part, but is also unsatisfactory...
...Republicans are still so confused that they have been unable to unite behind the one aggressive response available to them: Disregard all media talk of "credibility," vote for a large tax cut, and defy Clinton to veto it...
...It brings to mind the longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer's comment that if you're going to get into a fight with true believers you had better have a few on your side if you want to win...
...For 150 years, the Constitution did what it was supposed to do, protecting this way of life by holding politics harmless...
...Fifty-three percent of Catholics voted for Bill Clinton, despite his position on abortion...
...Meanwhile most conservatives—by which I mean normal people —have little conception of the aggressive and revolutionary force that confronts them...
...They note the unwillingness of most conservatives to play offense...
...This explains why so many on the left, such as Peter Jennings of ABC News, felt the need to come to the aid of the late Alger Hiss...
...I agree with Gertrude Himmelfarb (Correspondence, this issue) that "the religious wars are yet to be fought...
...I doubt if one of those smeared by him has ever responded to his malice...
...News 6 World Report wrote in the First Things debate (January), the most galling aspect of the revolution in the courts "is that it remains invisible to most Americans...
...It cannot easily be identified or named...
...I n the U.S., most people don't understand that they are in a war...
...At the same time, rolling the state back will be even more difficult...
...But the moral habits that have collapsed will only with difficulty be restored...
...Within the Catholic Church, prominent dissenters from orthodoxy, such as the late Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, are showered with secular garlands...
Vol. 30 • February 1997 • No. 2
