ASHER writes:

There is a sophisticated line of reasoning I’ve been exploring for a few years involving the notions of legitimacy and demarcation of authority, both moral and legal. Moral authority is inextricable from cultural interpretation and imposition and different cultures impose different moral schemes. Legal authority interacts with moral authority and they continuously interact to shape and conform to each other for the the long-term. Moral claims are only legitimately asserted where the claimants have standing to assert authority, which only exists where all parties co-exist within the same moral universe. 

The problem with the Manhattan Declaration (discussed here last week)  is that it is attempting to impose where it no longer has any moral authority, and this is because the West has decisively split into two distinct moral universes, the leftist and the Christian. The Left seceded from the Western Christian moral universe many, many decades ago. Alan Roebuck call your office. So, the Manhattan Declaration is a call to take back the culture, as if the West were still broadly one moral universe, one culture, which is palpably not the reality of the situation. Now, we could alternatively interpret the Declaration as one of open warfare, such as Lincoln’s achievement of forcing the South to remain in the Union. But, if that were the case, the Declaration would have called for killing lots of people, which it clearly does not. Amusingly, abortions probably eliminate individuals who would otherwise overwhelmingly end up in the leftist moral universe, which is the competing universe to the very one in which the Declaration originates. If the war between these two moral universes goes hot we will be thanking the women who aborted all those future, would-be leftists – fewer enemies to kill. 

Any imposition of Christian moral order on leftists would require a hot civil war, as the people involved, say, women having abortions, inhabit a different moral universe and would not, rightly, acknowledge your authority. Because authority is ultimately predicated on force. 

In order to re-establish the hegemony of the Christian moral universe in the West you would need to slaughter tens of millions of people. Given that you are hell-bent on saving leftist children from being aborted by their leftist mothers I doubt that you have the stomach for a fight that would involve wholesale slaughter. 

I would add that Alan Roebuck’s “deliberate action to restore a properly ordered society” is amusingly telling. Silly rabbit, we don’t have one society, we have TWO distinct and completely irreconcilable societies operating within and vying for supremacy of one body-politic. He also talks about the importance of Christians taking back the ruling institutions. How? Seriously? What way from here to there? Does he not realize that the complete edifice of every major social institution is located completely within the leftist moral universe? No re-trenchment. No going back. There is no way from here to there. The only way forward is in making completely new governing institutions. Or perish. As a man who grew up in a generally conservative Christian environment I can tell you that I am acutely aware of all the young women I meet who grew up in the same environments and who are now thoroughly in the leftist universe after their sustained contact with those ruling institutions. These are now the young women whose personas I have to navigate if I want to have a life in any major upscale urban center in the U.S. 

Not only will the institutions not change if people come to the Christian moral universe, as Alan Roebuck correctly posits, but the current trend is moving toward the leftist moral universe. And that movement is entirely driven through, but not necessarily by, young women. Thus, any attempt address cultural issues, sans widespread bloodshed, must focus on putting the bit and bridle to young females, something that I simply do not see anywhere in the traditionalist conservative crowd.

                    — Comments —

 

Alan Roebuck responds:

Thank you for taking my essay seriously enough to give it a serious response. 

Although you express agreement with my assertion that bringing individuals to Christ will not change the institutions, your overall response to my essay seems to be disagreement. In your view, we cannot retake the culture without drastic, even physical, warfare. 

I agree that the situation is dire. But it may not be as dire as you think, because one could argue that our side has not begun to fight in earnest. 

What I mean is that most conservatives, and certainly the vast majority of the leadership of the conservative movement, are still operating under the old paradigm of conservatism in which the nation is basically sound, and only needs to be protected from a few discrete threats such as abortion, the legitimization of homosexuality, mass immigration and big government. What most conservatives have not realized is that America is not a basically sound society in which liberalism keeps popping up here and there. We are actually a sick society, intellectually, morally and spiritually, in which liberal phenomena are concrete manifestations of this sickness. [Granted, there is still a great deal of healthy functioning in America. We are not 100% sick. But it is the sickness that is most important.] Most prominent conservatives actually share most of the basic beliefs of liberalism; they only object to some of its concrete manifestations. Most prominent conservatives, for example, agree with liberals that America is defined primarily by freedom, rather than holding the traditional view, in which America is “defined” by Christianity, the white peoples who founded her, and the traditions of our people. 

But liberalism is actually vulnerable. Authority is ultimately based on truth, in the sense that our leaders have to lead in accordance with principles John Q. Public believes to be true. And he only believes (or goes along with) liberal principles because America’s intellectual and spiritual leadership class tells him that these principles are true. Whatever society’s real leaders (its intellectual and spiritual leaders) teach is true, the people believe to be true. 

Of course, we cannot just do a quick 180: Even if we could immediately seize control of the universities and the media and start using them to teach conservatism, the public would not all go along at once. They would need gradually to come to reject their former false beliefs. There is a great deal of “cultural momentum” in a leftward direction that would have to be slowed and then stopped. 

But this can be done. We know this because the leftists did it. Starting several hundred years ago the left waged a successful jihad against conservatism, in which the primary weapons were intellectual and moral persuasion, the improper and propagandistic use of various scientific theories of which the most important was Darwinism, and deceptively telling people that they were loyal to the traditional order but only wanted to make a few changes. 

If the leftists were able to seize power without (outside of the communist nations) shedding blood, then it is definitely possible for the right to do something similar. The major difference between these situations (which is admittedly an important one) is that liberals regard Christians as their ultimate enemies, whereas the guardians of tradition who were defeated by the left generally did not see liberalism as the ultimate enemy. 

But liberalism is vulnerable. For one thing, since it is false, it is not possible actually to rule a nation in accordance with its principles. Liberals must constantly smuggle in what Lawrence Auster calls “unprincipled exceptions” to liberalism in order occasionally to make correct decisions and make life bearable. An example would be occasionally allowing murderers to be executed: Capital punishment is a major violation of liberalism, but sometimes the authorities have to allow it because of the outrage of the people against the murderer. 

Liberalism is also vulnerable because it is unrealistic and inhuman, and therefore normal people do not love it. Only angry people love liberalism for the hatred it expresses against the people they hate: whites, Christians, parents, police, “normal” people, etc. And careerists support liberalism because generally one must act as if one loves liberalism in order to advance in the world. Normal people are suspicious of liberalism, and therefore a concerted effort to oppose its basic beliefs can seriously weaken the rule of liberalism. The liberal Empire will, of course, fight back. But it is ultimately doomed, because any society that rigorously follows liberalism all the way will either disintegrate or else become a police state. And a police state cannot last, because if everyone knows it is founded on falsehoods it sooner or later must fail. 

Consider: our current rulers will die one day, and our future rulers are currently young. Most of the young have no great attachment to liberalism, because it teaches that there are no authoritative answers to the great questions of life, in which case human life, and indeed reality itself, is absurd. Liberals cannot give any justification to their basic principles except to say “you have to be tolerant and nonjudgmental,” or “these are the latest findings of science [which will probably be contradicted in a few years]” or “because the Big Boss Man says so,” and these answers do not satisfy. We can reach many young people if we make a concerted effort to show them the foolishness and danger of liberalism. But it is specifically the foundational principles of liberalism that must be identified and publicly opposed. It is not enough to argue against liberal policies, we must also argue against the liberal principles that lead to these policies. 

Here are my responses to some of your specific points: 

The Left seceded from the Western Christian moral universe many, many decades ago. Alan Roebuck call your office. So, the Manhattan Declaration is a call to take back the culture, as if the West were still broadly one moral universe, one culture, which is palpably not the reality of the situation. 

We do not have to have a single “moral universe” in order for my analysis and my plan to be valid. I acknowledge that the left is alien to us and opposes us. But it is vulnerable. 

Amusingly, abortions probably eliminate individuals who would otherwise overwhelmingly end up in the leftist moral universe, which is the competing universe to the very one in which the Declaration originates. If the war between these two moral universes goes hot we will be thanking the women who aborted all those future, would-be leftists – fewer enemies to kill. 

Although aborting liberals may bring some advantages, abortion overall degrades a nation. It is therefore not proper to gloat over this great evil, even in passing. 

Given that you are hell-bent on saving leftist children from being aborted by their leftist mothers I doubt that you have the stomach for a fight that would involve wholesale slaughter.

 As I have said, slaughter is not necessary. 

[Roebuck] also talks about the importance of Christians taking back the ruling institutions. How? Seriously? What way from here to there? Does he not realize that the complete edifice of every major social institution is located completely within the leftist moral universe? No re-trenchment. No going back. There is no way from here to there. The only way forward is in making completely new governing institutions. 

Making parallel governing institutions is also a good idea, but we need also to aim to retake the main institutions. It can be done (although it will take a long time), and carrying the fight directly to enemy headquarters will boost our spirits. But I admit that since success in this latter endeavor is not guaranteed (liberal institutions may disintegrate before they can be retaken), we do need parallel new institutions. 

…any attempt address cultural issues, sans widespread bloodshed, must focus on putting the bit and bridle to young females, something that I simply do not see anywhere in the traditionalist conservative crowd. 

The “bit and bridle” is traditional morality, which is part of the package for which we shall be arguing. Many cynics say that since liberalism promises freedom, nobody will voluntarily relinquish it. But man desires other goods in addition to freedom. It is arguable, in fact, that man’s greatest need is for order, and liberalism destroys all order: intellectual, moral, spiritual, political, and so on. Once people fully realize the horror of life under liberalism, they will find traditional ways more appealing. 

For more details about my proposal of conservative apologetics, see my essays Conservative Reformation and, at VFR  Authority, liberalism, and traditionalism,  How to defeat liberalism  and Challenging Liberal Assumptions.

Laura writes:

Asher speaks of moral universes as if they are physical entities: once you enter a moral universe there is no way out except by some physical force. You are even born into a particular moral universe and there is no way out except by force. This is patently untrue and we would not be where we are if it were true. Communism would never have been overthrown, it would never have been brought to an end without “wholesale slaughter,” if this was the case and people were not motivated, and society was not determined, by highly changeable worldviews.  Authority is not ultimately predicated on force, it is predicated on ideals, which are then enforced by a culture joined in the collective pursuit of these ideals. As Alan points out, force cannot hold a society together over the long term and it is not force but ideals that will ultimately determine the direction of our society.

Asher started off by stating that he was engaged in a “sophisticated line of reasoning,” but there are two things he said which suggest crude emotion instead. First his comment about abortion, that conservatives should welcome the abortions of leftists, makes no sense and is vengeful.  How would conservatives achieve their goal, which is to create a more balanced and ordered society, if fighting the culture war brought them to the point of embracing the pointless and futile deaths of innocents and the desecration of life, the very things they despise. Killing combatants in a just war is not the same thing as killing non-combatants and does not involve the same desecration of life. Asher’s point that conservatives lack the stomach for a fight because they oppose abortion is ludicrous. Conservatives may indeed lack the stomach for a fight but their opposition to abortion does not prove this. The rejection of abortion is not simply a mindless opposition to violence of any kind. Abortion destroys not just individuals but the spiritual foundations of life; a just war does not. Abortion throttles and stifles the will of an entire people to perpetuate themselves. A just war does not.  

Leftism, by the way, causes abortion but abortion also causes and perpetuates leftism. It allows both women and men to divorce themselves from reality, to momentarily evade the consequences of radical autonomy, and pursue their gnostic programs of salvation on earth. There is nothing advantageous for conservatives in the abortions of leftists. Reason and truth will win this war and once it is over, there will be a need for as many people as possible to rebuild society. Abortion, by the way, is killing us economically as well as spiritually and we will experience its economic consequences for many years.

The other thing that Asher says that suggests an emotional reaction rather than sophisticated reasoning is this:

As a man who grew up in a generally conservative Christian environment I can tell you that I am acutely aware of all the young women I meet who grew up in the same environments and who are now thoroughly in the leftist universe after their sustained contact with those ruling institutions. These are now the young women whose personas I have to navigate if I want to have a life in any major upscale urban center in the U.S.

Not only will the institutions not change if people come to the Christian moral universe, as Alan Roebuck correctly posits, but the current trend is moving toward the leftist moral universe. And that movement is entirely driven through, but not necessarily by, young women. Thus, any attempt address cultural issues, sans widespread bloodshed, must focus on putting the bit and bridle to young females, something that I simply do not see anywhere in the traditionalist conservative crowd.

These words imply that women are only benefiting from the current regime, that they are only reveling in its benefits and enjoying the fruits of liberalism. Certainly much of popular culture and everyday life confirms this sense of the enormous confidence and self-glorification of women. And, when one walks through city streets and sees hundreds of attractive, well-dressed women who are single, childless and enjoying the Sex and the City life, the impression that women have no motives to participate in a radical redirecting of our society seems all too real. But this is only part of the story.  A river of tears runs through our culture and its waters are fed by unhappy women. They are unhappy because they do not like raising their children alone and unmarried; they do not like turning old when they are childless; they do not like leaving their children in the care of others; they do not like ruling over their husbands; they do not like casual sex that ends in nothingness; they do not want abortions; they are slaves to schools and corporate institutions, and they secretly do not like the consequences of their own radical freedom, particularly the disappointments of divorce. Many are unequipped to articulate what it is that is slowly destroying them because they are constantly told that these things are necessities and they are constantly whipped into a state of insecurity about money and survival. 

I agree with Alan. Liberalism is inhuman and conservatives can win many converts if they have the will to energetically argue the alternatives. We also need to be realistic and realize that this country may not last as a single entity. We should envision the worst as well as hope for the best and work on building a new society and institutions from the ground up.

Asher responds:

The sophisticated line of reasoning is that America is no longer one nation, despite the fact that a map will show the boundaries of a unitary body-politic. Both you and Alan, as well as other conservatives, don’t seem to understand that there is no longer one nation, of society, one people, one culture, and that “one nation under God” is simply gone, never to return. Alan claims, erroneously, in my opinion, that authority is based on truth. Well, there is no going back to one America and that’s the truth. 

And I don’t see you or Alan arguing against my assertion that there is no longer one America, that it is now a political boundary inhabited by two, or more, distinct moral universes. Nor must any particular individual only exist interminably in one specific universe, since, as I pointed out, I’ve seen many a young female move from the Christian moral universe to the leftist one. But the fact that individuals can move from one moral universe to another says nothing abut the distinctiveness of the divergent moral universes. They are real, wildly divergent and not going away. It’s this brute reality that you conservatives seem unwilling to acknowledge, burying your head in the sands in conversations, like this one, as if somehow that would obligate me to bury my head in the sand. 

The conversations I have with conservatives, and this is no exception, run like this: 

Me: You do understand that we are dealing with distinct moral universes, distinct cultures.
Cons: Yeah, but take back the culture, take back the culture.
Me: But how can you take back what is distinct to begin with?
Con: Yeah, but take back the culture, take back the culture

 What’s the point of these conversations? You can’t “take back” something that isn’t yours to begin with, and the leftist moral universe is not yours, so you have no moral authority over it. The term “moral” comes from the Latin “mores” meaning customs, simply what is considered customary in any particular place and time. So, you have Christian morality, Leftist morality, Roman morality, even Nazi morality, all of which have moral authority in their own particular social context. But your Christian ideals have no moral authority in the Leftist moral universe. Sorry, that’s the truth, and endlessly chanting the mantra “take back the culture” won’t change the brute reality of the divergent moral universes. 

But let’s just stipulate that there is some way back to one moral universe for the US. Alan points out that it took centuries for the Leftist moral universe to diverse from the traditions of the West. How did it do that? The really smart people decided that the traditional ways of doing things no longer suited their tastes. Hate to break it to you, but “smart” is a real thing and the objectively smart people are overwhelmingly located in the leftist moral universe, so are the stupid people, making the Christian/Leftist divide not a dumb/smart divide. The template of making incremental inroads only can work if you get the overwhelming majority of smart people move toward the traditional moral universe of the West. 

How do you propose to do that given it’s the smart people that are driving the leftist moral universe. 

As for the stuff about me being emotional, I assure you this is not the case. I’ve been saying that for a solid ten years. Let’s take personal investment out of this and examine another claim I’ve been making for years: if what Hitler had said about the Jews had been true the Holocaust would have been a good thing. Now [I] have no Jew issues, consider the Nazis to be idiots and yet can acknowledge that if the claims made by Nazis about Jewish culture had been true then extermination was the only viable response. So, my observation about abortions eliminating future leftists is one from cold, calculated rationality, not raw emotion. Also, I don’t see how you assign gloating there since I broached the topic in the context of conservatives not having the stomach for a hot war. I mean if you’re so obssessed with saving innocent human life that you’re going to try and stop your enemies from killing their own children it’s not bloody likely that you have the stomach to kill your enemies yourself. 

The only emotion I feel is frustration at encountering conservatives who endlessly repeat the mantra of “take back the culture”, which is based on the lie that we are one culture. If moral authority is based on truth, something I deny but stipulate here, then I don’t see how conservatives can claim moral authority when they are basing their claims of the lie of one culture. 

Finally, I never claimed that women living the SITC lifestyle are happy. No, Laura, this is why I made a very specific claim that the leftist push is being done through the medium of young females, which is not the same thing as saying that is being done for or by them. That’s simply an observation regarding the reality of the state of things. 

The three of us obviously agree that the most important need for human is social order. No doubt about that.

Laura writes:

I do not dispute Asher’s argument that there are two distinct moral universes in the West and that these spheres are radically and fundamentally opposed.  We are subjects and slaves of the ulterior moral universe at the moment. We do not have significant power and we, the traditional people of the West, cannot live peacefully under the domination of the leftist sphere in the long term. I do not rule out the possibility of a drastic re-ordering of our governing institutions and prefer to envision something along the lines of what Jeffersonian, a commenter at VFR proposed, a division of the United States into two countries.  Asher makes the assumption that the call for action made by Alan Roebuck is all that I deem important by way of fighting liberalism when in fact I believe we must consider many scenarios, but in the meantime continue to forcefully agitate and press our ideas because these do matter.  Asher says he acknowledges the possibility of moving from one moral universe to another, but he doesn’t consider this a serious possibility for many, especially for those in power and the most intelligent. The same could have been said by anti-Communists in the Soviet Union fifty years ago. Liberalism, similar to Communism, brings not just increasing personal unhappiness but economic breakdown and demographic decline. As in the case of Communism, these unpleasant facts help push people toward considering the ulterior moral universe.

We still do have basic political freedoms. We are not totally silenced. We are not imprisoned or exiled. There is ample interplay between these two moral universes and if one is true and the other false, this exchange inevitably benefits the side that is right even if progress appears nearly invisible at times and even if no tangible gains are made for years. Asher can say that this is Pollyanna-ish, but cannot prove that this progress is not real or possible. Yes, there are many conservatives who simply escape into idle wishfulness. But that is not true in all cases and Asher is making blanket assumptions.

 ” … if what Hitler had said about the Jews had been true the Holocaust would have been a good thing.”

No, it wouldn’t have. If what Hitler had said about the Jews had been true, then relegating the Jews to a position of submission or marginalization would have been the solution, not wholesale slaughter. But the analogy stinks because what Hitler said about the Jews was not true and neither Hitler’s solution or your support of abortion for leftists stems from cold, calculated rationality, they stem from falsehood, which is not rational, and extremist sentiment. The side that gains force by the calculated slaughter of innocents never does win anything worth having in the long term. Asher’s point that we are “obsessed” with abortion, with the saving of the unborn, over everything else is unproven. His apparent point is that we are willing to pursue this one goal to the point of cultural suicide. Show me where we have demonstrated this obsessiveness, this monomania regarding abortion. Again, the idea that opposition to abortion necessarily entails a squeamish inability to fight, really fight, if the time should come is presumption.

In any event, what does Asher propose doing about this irreconcilable clash between two cultures?

Vanessa writes:

Asher writes, “Thus, any attempt address cultural issues, sans widespread bloodshed, must focus on putting the bit and bridle to young females, something that I simply do not see anywhere in the traditionalist conservative crowd.”

If anything, this is precisely the area that modern traditionalism has most focused on. Or, at least the movement is moving decidedly in that direction.

Although men are civilization, women are society. Therefore, if we want to rebuild our civilization, we have to begin by rebuilding our society. We can only do that by reforming and re-educating young women. I see no way around that. I think that is why calls to men to reform are having little effect. How are they to reform if the women are in permanent rebellion? Most men will behave in the manner women reward with their sexual and platonic attentions. If we want men to be better behaved, women have to reward them for that, and scorn those who misbehave. Women are currently doing the exact opposite, and reaping what they sow.

We ordered hedonistic brutes, so we have no right to complain when we are delivered hedonistic brutes. If we want Christian patriarchs delivered, then we should start ordering Christian patriarchs; by honoring them publicly and rewarding them with chaste behavior privately. We know that this is possible because there have been examples of this throughout history, including in the Early Church. Christian women purposely set themselves aside from the promiscuous and decadent Roman women, in order to serve a higher purpose. And I think that fact contains the key to how a cultural war is won. It is won — or lost — through the women.

Although fathers have a hand in such a reform, I think that the onus will be on the older women. In my personal experience, young women are not adverse to such messages, and are even often quite eager for them. Many are tired of being treated like commodities, and yearn to be valued as individuals. Leftism, strangely enough, is not only about personal autonomy. It is also about collectivism, or the idea that the individual is unimportant. The reason they are so obsessed with self-expression is because they instinctively know that the people around them don’t care about them, and probably wouldn’t notice them otherwise.

For instance, a young woman whose parents allow her to dress provocatively and stay out to all hours may be quite autonomous, but she is also acutely aware that they take little interest in her well-being. On the other hand, a young woman whose parents are careful about her whereabouts and more selective in her wardrobe is being subtly informed that they value her highly and wish to protect her from negative influences. She may feel a bit annoyed, but she will not feel unloved or unimportant.

And it is precisely the Christian message that each and every individual is of importance, and is valuable in it’s own right (rather than it’s “choices” being valuable), that is the best weapon against promiscuity, abortion, euthenasia, and the other modern horrors. Once you have internalized this message, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the abuse of the other people around you. After all, if you are important and valuable just because you exist, then they are as well, no matter what they are like, or how much you dislike them.

Such a belief forces you to be other-centered, which leads to valuing justice and community, and to the virtue of humility. True humility is based upon the idea that you acknowledge that you are merely as important, wonderful, and infallible as everyone else. This is not the same thing as the leftist’s emphasis on “self-esteem”, which values individuals based upon their attributes, and leads to general spoilage and self-centeredness.

In other words, it is the value of the individual, rather than valuing their autonomy, that is the correct message to send. It is perfectly possible for an individual to be unique while still being part of a tight-knit community, and bound by that community’s mores. It is not possible for an autonomous individual to be so, as autonomy comes from being unbound.

Alan writes:

Asher, all you’re saying is that there’s nothing we can do. Well there’s nothing we can do that will guarantee victory, but we most certainly can do something: fight back. Unless you come up with a plan, at least in general outline, of how conservatives can fight the left, you’re nothing but a sophisticated defeatist. Or possibly an enemy of conservatism. 

Okay, I acknowledge there is no longer one America. There are many Americas: conservative, liberal, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc. I do not accept that this is good, and I do not resign myself to its perpetual existence. I retain my spirit by fighting back. 

And my resolve to try to “take back the culture” is not mindless sloganeering. I make the effort to understand how culture operates, to see that all regimes must rule by a combination of force and persuasion: Even in a police state, there must be persuasion, generally called “propaganda.” And even in the most liberated nation in the world, America, the authorities sometimes use force to maintain their rule and to oppose heretics against liberalism. I understand that every regime is vulnerable, because people have a fundamental desire for intellectual integrity, and will not grant the state their loyalty unless they feel that it is at least based on truths and that it is in some sense good. And therefore the liberal empire is vulnerable, even if you won’t acknowledge it. 

You said, 

The template of making incremental inroads only can work if you get the overwhelming majority of smart people move toward the traditional moral universe of the West. 

Historically, smart people have generally supported what we would now call “conservatism:” Preserving the ways of their people, believing in and supporting the idea of an objective moral, political, social, ethical and religious order, and so on. Has human nature changed suddenly, so that smart people can never go back in this direction? Obviously not. The smart people currently support liberalism because most of them go to college, where they are indoctrinated in liberalism and flattered that by becoming liberals, they show their superiority. But it is suicidal for any nation to indoctrinate their leadership class in an insane philosophy. Long term, liberalism is doomed. 

Asher, you are obviously intelligent and well-educated. I call on you to drop your defeatism, or in other words, retain an informed understanding of the difficulties that face us, but drop the warrantless certainty that nothing can be done. If you love our nation, you can fight back.

Reader N. writes:

Alan Roebuck is well known to me from his writings at VFR,and I find him to be a respectable and thoughtful man. In his call to “take back the institutions”, there are several issues that arise. I am not attempting to be defeatist here, but pointing out problems. One of them is the self-perpetuating nature of the current cultural elites. I shall provide two examples, the entertainment industry and higher education.

First, let us consider the entertainment industry, where any degree of cultural or political conservatism results in being blacklisted (or perhaps we should call it “redlisting”?). This is not a disputable or debatable position, see the website “Big Hollywood” for example after example.In order to avoid redlisting, therefore, with the exception of certain well known figures such as Tom Selleck, people must keep their cultural and / or political views a secret even as they are surrounded by loudmouthed liberals.

Thus, Hollywood is populated by an overclass of ever radicalizing liberals who are constantly finding some new cause to pursue in their campaign to remake what’s left of the country, while an underclass often containing cultural / political conservatives carries out the actual work of creating ever more noxious video fare. By selecting only fellow liberals for decision making positions within the movie studios, television networks, etc. the liberal/left “cultural gatekeepers” retain their stranglehold over so-called popular culture, while ensuring that no alternate views can receive any wide dissemination.

I see no way to overturn this structure, nor do I see any easy way to create a parallel system, given the monopoly status of movie theaters, broadcast TV networks as well as cable TV networks. The only thing I know to do is actively discriminate in entertainment, by eschewing virtually all broadcast TV and much of cable as well, in favor of a few cable channels and DVD recordings of older shows & movies. But that’s a holding action for my household, meanwhile softcore porn such as “Sex in the City”, etc. is pumped out into millions of  other homes in the country. “I’m alright, Jack” doesn’t work in this cultural morass.

I don’t see any solution to this quandary.

Second, let us turn to the issue of higher education. The cultural and political elites generally come from a relative handful of universities, many of them private institutions. In order to take back the culture, we need cultural / political conservatives of above average intelligence working their way into the cultural and political elites. In order for that to happen, some number of them have to matriculate from places such as Harvard, Yale, Smith, Vassar, and so forth. However, once again we see that the cultural and political elites are self perpetuating, in this case by actively discriminating against students who show certain signs of cultural and/or political conservatism. I do not mean the harassment of the few token conservatives allowed in, that’s bad enough, I refer to the deliberate exclusion of people because of their culture in college admissions.

Please see this article for details, it summarizes a recent scholarly study of “diversity” in admission to elite colleges:

Here is an excerpt:

“But what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.””

The admissions officers who screen out students that excelled in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC), FFA, 4H and other extracurricular activities clearly associated with cultural and/or political conservatism may or may not be doing so deliberately. But the effect is the same regardless of the intent. Not only are potential leaders from rural and suburban America denied entrance to elite institutions regardless of their academic qualifications, their absence also guarantees that the children of liberals will likely never encounter in their time at college any philosophy or even opinion that differs in any serious way from liberal dogma.

Right now, somewhere in the limited pool of elite colleges, a future Barack Obama is immersed in leftism. Years from now,he, or she, or  it as the case may be might attend a fund raiser in San Francisco and opine about people who “bitterly cling to their guns and their God”, and when challenged on it will shrug and simply observe that “everyone knows this”. Well, everyone that person has ever come in contact with, from K through 12 through college and into graduate school does “know” that, because nobody with a different opinion has ever been allowed into those educational institutions — not by accident, but by design. There is utterly no way for conservatives to reclaim institutions they are prevented, prohibited if you will, from ever entering.

What we have here is essentially an ideological guild system. Because “diversity” regulations are written specifically in only physical terms (skin color, sexual characteristics, etc.) and the religious aspects of regulation are increasingly a dead letter, the liberal/left elites are completely free to discriminate on the basis of culture, and they do so with grim determination.

I do not see any way to overturn this. The “diversity” regulations are deeply embedded into American culture, both corporate and governmental and especially deeply into higher education. Any attempt to widen the scope to include culture will be met with hysterical and wide spread resistance, from the media to the legislature. However, so long as this structure continues, cultural and political conservatives are shut out of the colleges that lead to positions in the media, in government, and also that act as “feeders” to lower tier universities as well as think tanks. Breaking the wall of cultural discriminationat these universities won’t automatically change much of anything, especially given the way tenure is used to enforce orthodoxy in even low-tier State universities, but as long as it is in place there’s really no chance of taking back anything culturally.

As a more positive postscript, I attended a small celebration the other week for a newly wed couple who had both recently graduated from Hillsdale College. They were both poised and pleasant young adults, a refreshing contrast to the many disaffected, tatooed, pierced, slovenly overage adolescents that one encounters all too often around colleges. The young man is a friend of the family, and I am frankly amazed, impressed and delighted at the changes in him over the last four years. He’s truly grown from a gawky, mumbling schoolboy into a competent, self assured young man.

So there’s at least one institution of higher education that teaches a traditional, Western-civilization oriented liberal arts curriculum. For those who are not familiar with Hillsdale, one of the keys to its academic independence is the fact that the college refuses to accept any Federal loan monies at all. None for students, and none for the college at large. That’s no accident, the Federal government has long used its student loans and other disbursements as clubs to beat universities into obeying whatever the latest liberal campaign is.

Laura writes:

The homeschooling movement, which is growing and developing all the time, is proof than an alternate education culture can be established. It will lead to the health and success of new conservative colleges, and already has had this effect.

The same is happening with an alternate popular culture, especially for children. You already find among homeschoolers and those who resist the trends that they cultivate their own forms of entertainment for their children and pass these on to others. A good example is the Swedish female quartet that was featured here recently. Readers listened to it and their children liked it. Things spread by word of mouth.

Also, it is very possible for Hollywood actors and producers to resist, at the risk of their careers. That’s the price. Many people are paying a price in status and money for resisting liberalis. It hurts but it is worth it. 

Alan responds:

Reader N. points out that our ruling elite rigorously screens out those who express conservative beliefs. In order to be admitted to their clubs, you must at least pretend that you are a liberal or a leftist. How then can these institutions be “recaptured” by conservatism? 

As long as the rulers of the entertainment and higher education enterprises retain their commitment to liberalism, these institutions can’t be recaptured. But observe that their former rulers, who at least pretended to respect what we would nowadays call conservatism, lost their belief that conservatism was worth defending. That’s why they capitulated to the left: conservatism lost its nerve. But as our society, which is conspicuously (although not officially) based on liberalism, continues to decline, liberalism will become less popular. Everybody hates a loser, and therefore society’s leaders—including the leaders of media and academia—will eventually have to distance themselves from, if not repudiate outright, liberalism. And if a persuasive criticism of liberalism’s premises is widely promulgated,people—including leaders—will begin openly to rebel against the Evil Empire of the left. 

Long-term, our greatest challenge is not to refute liberalism, but rather to craft an attractive and persuasive articulation of positive principles of traditionalism that can form the basis of a renewed society.

George writes:

I have lived in a blue state most of my life and only in the last year have escaped to a red state. So I must admit up front that this may color my opinion of things.

If you think that declarations, compassionate Christianity, homeschooling and vague “change the culture” platitudes are going to effect anything then I must say I think you are deeply mistaken about how bad things actually are. We are heading for a post-American America at a steady clip. The Democrats and Republicans who are now in power have been effectively a one-party system since at least George Bush I. (Shall we call them the Republicrats or Demopublicans?) You’re probably assuming your enemies have a conscience as you conceive of the thing, and I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. For the cultural liberals it’s not about right and wrong, it’s about power. Nietzsche would probably be a good place to start to begin to understand the “moral code” of your enemies. The villains in Ayn Rand’s novels are another good place to get an idea how your enemies think. At their worst, these aren’t people who think about morality differently than you do, these people don’t think about morality at all.

New Testament Christianity is not what we need. We need Old Testament Christianity’s hellfire and brimstone to swing this conflict back to the right side. We don’t need the loving Jesus who forgave his enemies, we need the Velociraptor-Jesus who drove the money changers from the temple with a lash. We need the Jesus who said “Bring me my enemies… and slay them before me.” (Luke 19:27)

The monster of tyranny must be strangled in the crib before it can grow to become the Leviathan.

Jesse Powell writes:

If I may enter into this discussion, even though my background and way of looking at the world seems to be different from the majority here, I would first like to say that I believe that America is still one country, culturally homogenous, culturally united. Now this is not totally true, of course, people do have their differences, but close enough for purposes of trying to figure out how to overcome the problems of liberalism and the social decline that is taking place in this country.  I do not believe that the cultural elite and governing bodies of the nation are liberals ruling over a conservative population, I believe they are liberals ruling over a liberal population because that is what the overall culture desires. First the overall culture became liberal, and then the ruling elites became liberal to adapt themselves and maintain their legitimacy and approval in the eyes of the emerging dominant liberal culture. 

To change terminology a bit I am more comfortable talking about patriarchy versus feminism rather than Christianity versus liberalism, and I tend to be more comfortable thinking of issues in terms of healthy and functional cultural beliefs and unhealthy and dysfunctional cultural beliefs. 

I believe the culture overall, to a great enough degree to be considered united, is in favor of feminism. Patriarchy is the contrary force, weak but growing. However, patriarchy and feminism are not polar opposites; they are degrees of health versus sickness. 

Incrementalism and gradual change bit by bit can very much work and is the strategy most likely to yield good results. The issue of liberalism, what I would call feminism, being intrinsically vulnerable has been brought up by others, and I agree with this viewpoint. To bring in a bit of my personal history, I was born into a feminist environment and breathed the cultural air around me not even being aware that anything was wrong. The problem is feminism destroyed my ability to function and when I realized this I revolted against feminism fully and never looked back. I had no significant exposure to patriarchal culture or patriarchal beliefs. If I did I like to think my personal transformation could have come sooner without me having to have gone through so much personal damage in the process. 

The point of my story is that my personal belief in feminism imploded spontaneously, it destroyed itself, with no significant external efforts being made in that direction by others. If somebody else had guided me in a positive direction I could have changed sooner, that is why it is so important to spread the word and argue against feminism publicly, but the idea I was in the “enemy camp” forever fixed and committed to self-destructive feminism is totally untrue. 

I believe this process of belief in feminism self-destructing due to the harm it causes its adherents is a widespread phenomenon. It may not be a process very far advanced at the moment but it is a process that is occurring and developing nonetheless. 

The purpose and value of patriarchal activism is to turn around cultural decline sooner and with less destructive effects on society than would otherwise be the case if those with knowledge of how to lead a better life just twiddled their thumbs and kept their mouth shut. In my opinion society will continue to decline, reach a bottoming point, and then recover. The question is how much damage is done before the process of renewal and rebirth takes place. 

If I may I’d like to interject some mathematics into this discussion. I believe that societal decline can be thought of as a process of exponential growth and that societal renewal is also a process of exponential growth. One obvious manifestation of societal decline, out-of-wedlock births, quite clearly follows an exponential growth function. In the below table, I will use the categories of Sick, Legacy, Healthy, and Functionality; with a time function at the beginning. Sick represents family destroying behavior created by feminism. Legacy represents the patriarchal legacy of the past that is still with us. Healthy represents the pro-family pro-patriarchy movement that is emerging but very small today. Functionality is calculated by one minus parentheses Sick divided by Total ( F = 1 – (S/Tot) : Tot = S + L + H ). In each unit of time the sick category grows by 30%, the neutral category stays the same, and the healthy category grows by 200% (it triples). Look at what happens to the functionality percentage over time. 

Time       Sick       Legacy      Healthy     Functionality

0               45.0         100            0.1             69.0%

1               58.5         100            0.3             63.2%

2               76.1         100            0.9             57.0%

3               98.9         100            2.7             51.0%

4               128.5       100            8.1             45.7%

5               167.1       100            24.3           42.7%

6               217.2       100            72.9           44.3%

7               282.4       100            218.7         53.0%

8               367.1       100            656.1         67.3%

9               477.2       100            1968.3       81.3%

10             620.4       100            5904.9       90.6%

What the above table represents is how I think the evolution of society will unfold described in a mathematical way. By the way, the starting numbers I used for Time 0, representing today, and the growth rates I used for the Sick and Healthy categories I didn’t just pull out of my head, they represent rough estimates of where I believe society to be today and how long it will take for this process to unfold. In my way of estimating each time unit represents about five years. 

So, to wrap things us, I think my way of viewing things comes from a different perspective than most of the other comments in this thread, but most importantly I believe change within the system is definitely possible, it even borders on the inevitable, and that the crucial point is to try to accelerate the process of change as fast as possible so that a minimum of harm befalls this nation before the inevitable rebirth occurs. Even though America’s culture is gravely impaired and getting worse America’s political system is still vibrant and functional. Use the peaceful political tools that the brilliant founders of this country gave us precisely so that America would be able to solve its problems peacefully without resort to the large scale destruction of precious human life.

Reader N. writes:

Alan Roebuck writes:

As long as the rulers of the entertainment and higher education enterprises retain their commitment to liberalism, these institutions can’t be recaptured. But observe that their former rulers, who at least pretended to respect what we would nowadays call conservatism, lost their belief that conservatism was worth defending.

This is rather a disappointment. For years I have been reading calls from cultural conservatives to “take back the cultural high ground”. It was a common theme in the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) back in the late 1960’s. It was what some people were organizing to do in the 1970’s. It’s one of the things we were all supposed
to rally ’round in the 1980’s. The 1994 election was partly about this theme, and supporters of GW Bush urged me to vote for him in 2000 because that event was supposedly part of “taking the culture back”.

So for nigh on 40 years, I’ve been seeing regular calls from cultural conservatives to “take back the culture”. Meanwhile the Left has engaged in the “long march through institutions” called for by Italian Communist Gramsci. That’s 40 years of hollow calls by conservatives, and 40 years of steady victory on the part of the left. And being leftists, once they obtained a foothold in any institution – education, higher education,
government agencies, various foundations, etc. – they promptly set about barricading the door, so to speak, in order to prevent anyone who doesn’t share their extreme desire to remake Western civilization from ever getting in. They know how they obtained power, and have set up various gatekeepers to keep anyone else from doing the same. I’ve seen this process from
afar, and close up, and have never seen anyone seriously attempt to reverse it.

Therefore, I read Alan Roebuck’s article with interest. Perhaps someone, finally, had a plan? So I offered up two concrete, clearly defined examples of the self-perpetuating strategy
employed by the left. I looked forward with anticipation to finally, after 40 years, reading a plan to roll back the left.

Unhappily, Mr. Roebuck admits that his plan consists of waiting for the Left to fail, and then to swoop in and pick up the pieces. This is no different than “the plan” from the 1970’s,
1980’s, 1990’s. How’s that plan worked out for the last generation and a half? It hasn’t worked at all. Look, waiting for the internal contradictions of  liberalism to manifest hasn’t worked so far, and I do not see how it is supposed to work in the future. Please don’t waste my time by citing the Soviet empire, there was plenty of pressure from outside on that evil organization for generations. There is no one
pressuring liberalism, least of all conservative organizations.

Mr. Roebuck, to paraphrase Martin Luther, plans to wait with his mouth open, sure that a fried chicken will sooner or later fly right in there and feed him. I am very disappointed. This
is not a plan. This is magical, wishful thinking.

 Laura writes:

I entirely agree with Alan Roebuck that our institutions of entertainment and higher education cannot be recaptured. Recognition of this does not entail passivity; this realism is the only thing that can lead to the effective development of alternate institutions. This is the sort of realism that has inspired one of the most significant grass roots movements in American history, the homeschooling movement. Our public education system cannot be reformed. It is in form and substance entirely liberal. And, in the space of a few years, traditionalists have developed through individual initiative and determination an entirely separate education world. This will be there for many generations and it grows by the hour. The same can be done with entertainment and higher education. We must boycott these institutions and support culture and learning wherever we find it. We vote with our dollars and our actions.

Alan writes:

Mr. N., you castigate me for not describing a detailed plan when I didn’t offer one, and you misunderstand what I did say. I assumed that it was obvious, and therefore did not need to be said, that a mere mortal cannot outline a detailed plan that will ensure victory. My essay and my comments were obviously intended to be general observations rather than a detailed battle plan. Obviously I did not say “Wait for the left to fall apart.” That you would describe my words in this way is evidence that you are thinking with your emotions. I was describing the weakness of liberalism: If it has no weaknesses then it will rule forever, so it is important to understand that it does have weaknesses. I was simply proving that victory is possible, not making this my plan. 

If you would read the essays of mine linked above, you will see more details of how we can fight the left. Basically, we need to organize to do what the left did: persuade people, take advantage of their sense that something is wrong with the status quo, and inspire them with an ideal, except that our ideal is traditionalist conservatism. You bitterly recount the failed conservative campaigns of the recent past. They failed because they did not do what needs to be done: challenge the left on its basic principles rather than just on specific issues. 

I am preparing more essays giving more details about “conservative evangelism.” One person cannot possibly create the battle plan; the subject is too vast. But I can certainly make important points that others can work on. 

Here are two questions for you, Mr. N: Are you sure the situation is hopeless? And if you are not 100 percent sure, then rather than continuing to curse the darkness, why don’t you light a candle? If you refuse to do so, then you become our enemy, whether you intend it or not.

[See further comments on this entry here.]