The Latest on the Culture Wars

Leftie professor associates of mine have lately been indulging in the tactic of declaring the culture wars are over. Conservatives have made their point, they say, so let's moveon.org.

If you get our drift.

The culture wars are far from over and are damn close to lost, so effectively has the hardcore leftists taken over our academic, legal, governmental, and cultural institutions. The development of irritating things ranging from Fox News to the right-wing blogosphere—things the establishment left currently cannot control—freaks these deranged children out, however, forcing them to reveal the fascism that lies at the core of their deconstructed system of unbelief.

That's close to what Mark Steyn is exploring when he discusses what he terms the U.S. "cold civil war" in a piece that appears in the online version of Canadian mag Macleans:

A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.

Yeah, and if you happened to have been unfortunate enough to put a Bush-Cheney sticker on your car, the finish by now will have been "keyed" many times over by the juvenile delinquents who've taken over the Democrat Party.

Steyn continues in this vein, making a few telling points:

Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:

Hollywood's latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?

A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper -- "Taser this: F--k Bush" -- and the Denver Post hails him as "the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious." Anyone audacious enough to write "F--k Hillary" or "F--k Obama" at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?

Unfortunately, Steyn, a reliably brilliant thinker, doesn't quite seem to know where to go with all this, although his pensées are certainly worth reading. What no one on the right seems to fully recognize, however, is just how thoroughly our educational institutions and cultural institutions have been transformed into, when all is said and done, old-fashioned Communist re-education centers. For the very young, socialism is really the only kind of education they get. They are taught not to think but emote. Thinking is punished, emoting is celebrated. Go to a rock concert, and world hunger is solved. So easy and fun. And so superior to those ugly capitalists who create economies, jobs, and prosperity.

No one on the left ever questions where the money will come from to implement their facile non-solutions. It will come from somebody else, somebody not as "good" as them, someone "richer," even though most of these immature Idiotarians have never known any semblance of poverty.

Being on the right end of the political spectrum is like getting blackballed at a frat house. The young live in fear of this. It's far easier to go along to get along. Neither they nor their immature "instructors" in the educational establishment never get much beyond this extended exercise in self-gratification.

Thus, we get the "me-too" culture, where everyone on the left, trapped forever in a time-warp of arrested adolescence, preens for his or her peers while things fall apart. Nor would these imperfectly formed ideologues know what those things are even if confronted by them; because the world in which they live has been reduced from a place of infinite complexity and awe-inspiring majesty to a claustrophobic box whose limits are defined by cheap slogans, a phony overabundance of hydrocarbons, and an abiding fear of ostracization from one's peers for daring to question the secular religion.

When people who go to the polls lose their capacity to distinguish between Bush and bin Laden, we know that the capacity for political dialogue has ceased. This is essentially Steyn's point. But it seems to bother him so profoundly that he doesn't know where to go next.