How the left won the culture war and what to do about it
This is a British discussion. But the phenomenon is mostly the same in this country.
And by the way, although they say there was no “great conspiracy,” I beg to differ on that:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I think that what we need now is a “counter-resistance” and damn quick!
One of the many excellent points in this fascinating video is that over the last several decades the so-called “conservative” establishment (both in the UK and in the US) managed to enable the Gramscian Long March to succeed by almost entirely ignoring the importance of cultural and educational issues. In so doing, these mostly useless conservatives have ended up conserving nothing at all.
j e:
That’s why Andrew Breitbart was so important, and his death such a great loss. He was one of the few who was well aware of it, and knew how to deal with the media and use it to his advantage.
Bryan on July 28, 2020 at 4:35 pm said: I think that what we need now is a “counter-resistance” and damn quick!
yeah.. and they better not make long posts…
so much for ringing the alarm decades early
“by almost entirely ignoring the importance of cultural and educational issues.”
Saying they ignored it is charitable. The truth is that the conservative establishment has been dominated by grifters, debate-club-geeks, war-mongering liberals, and Randian dweebs. The grifters don’t care about culture or education but the rest are more comfortable with the Left than they are the Right. They LIKE the culture we have.
Mike
There are many reasons the Left has done so well. While ultimately they are responsible for the evil and decay they have inflicted upon us, we also need to look at who is supposedly manning our bulwarks.
Hint: If the same ‘Conservatives’ keep on losing again and again to the Left, maybe, just maybe it’s time to acquire some new fighters.
For your consideration:
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=20942
Some of you are definitely not going to like the above. However, try to push through the Pavlovian Conditioning and have a think about the supposed Gatekeepers of the Right and what they have so totally failed to accomplish these last decades.
We’re all going to have to get our hands a bit dirty in order to avoid either the Left chopping our heads off, or the real Hard Men (and trust me, Z Man is a moderate humane guy) will spring from the soil in the fullness of time. And Time has the feel of a freight train about it in the current year.
@MBunge
Bang on about the grifters.
At the risk of sounding off again, want to reiterate that fastidiousness, pearl-clutching, faux gentility will in the long run kill millions.
(Come to think of it, already has: How uncouth and distasteful it is to stand outside an abortion clinic holding up fetus posters… Really Not the Done Thing, you know.)
We’re all going to have to become a bit more obnoxious. And we’re going to have to pick sides. Irrevocably. That last bit scares the crap out of many people.
Tough Titties; the End of History was kind of boring anyway.
There is a sizable counter-resistance going on in the book world.
The gatekeepers of mainstream publishing, who were doing their darnedest to keep right wing/conservative out of being published, are suffering right now due to their own corporate mismanagement in the face of eReaders and the changing marketplace. And as they fall away, more independent and/or crowdfunded writers (what Sci-Fi writer Brian Neiemeier calls the ‘Neo-Patronage’ model) step up to the plate. Some are making good money right now on Amazon with almost no support from one of the big publishing houses. Ohers are already getting screenplay and movie options.*
There’s a similar opportunity with Hollywood.
The virus shutdown has helped the streaming services but the rest of Hollywood has been taking body blows since March with postponed premier after postponed premier. They’re hurting.
Couple that with the greater accessibility of cameras and microphone software and the same in-roads can be made. Already, on YouTube**, millions of Independent content creators are making serious money in competition with much bigger names and they’re holding their own.
Now is the time to strike, the time to try out independent authors and content creators. I like to support them in their crowdfunding, buy their books, click their videos and recommend them to others.
And as the aforementioned Brian Neimeier says in his latest non-fiction book: Don’t Give Money To People Who Hate You. I’ve stopped doing just that.
Never despair.
*For Star Wars fans, disappointed by the latest trilogy’s Social Justice agenda, Nick Cole and Jason Anspach have a series known as Galaxy’s Edge, which they billed as #StarWarsNotStarwars. Its a very fun, very well done series that lovingly takes the Star Wars tropes and gives a good, action packed story and leaves the politics out of it.
Nick Cole, one of the writers has his own epiphany when his publisher dropped him after he wrote a big No-No: His Skynet-esque A.I system in his novel ‘Control-Alt-Revolt’ decided to wipe out mankind when it realized that any species that condoned abortion, would undoubtedly decide to abort the Artificial Intelligence. They canned him, though they deny that was the reason. Even though that was the change they wanted written out of the story to publish it. He said no.
**Nerdrotic, The Critical Drinker, Geeks and Gamers for starters.
Artfldgr:
Do you really believe you weren’t allowed to make “long posts”?
You made literally thousands of very long comments, over and over, and there were often many many long ones in a single thread.
I shortened some really long comments at times – certainly not always and certainly not the majority of your long comments. My purpose was to increase the chance of people actually reading your comments. When they were too long and too frequent, people just automatically scrolled past.
In addition, I sometimes deleted comments where you simply were telling everyone how stupid they were.
Otherwise, you’ve written millions of words here that remain published and quite visible.
Whoa, I don’t think we have lost the cultural war. The left have over played their hand. The backlash is building.
My self imposed rule: if your comment is beyond 50% of neo’s post, you are a vain poseur.
Yes. This is an excellent discussion of a completely depressing topic. Time to course correct is short, in the US, too.
I’ve been sharing it since last week. And downloaded Marc Sidwell’s book – yes, with much that’s familiar but I expect fresh insights.
The Uber painful part is the heinous denial of the NeverTrump rump party. I don’t mean the boot lickers like Romney or Bret Stephens, those who clearly would cut their face to grovel for their masters.
I mean the types like Senators Mike Lee or Ben Sasse, politicos who could fight evil but do not recognise that Trump’s paved the winning way to combat Evil enemies, the Left.
The grey-haired lady (I did not see any names) is marvelous in her historical wisdom and insights. I don’t need to see the whole thing, but thanks for finding, Neo.
It puzzled me as a young man how Brit Conservatives were not conservative at all, and why the UK got rid of Churchill lickety-split.
But, and it is a big But, the USA, victorious in WWII, ceded ground to the USSR even in the war, letting the Russians totally destroy Berlin in revenge. Patton was held back by Ike.
Eisenhower as president aided the Long March. Remember Suez? And Nasser? The United Arab Republic (Syria + Egypt)? Supported by the USSR, while Ike played golf and fished.
And the Congress marched along as well. McCarthy was not wrong, but he was not strong ( alcoholic) and he was villified, dishonored, while the worms in State remained and Hollywood stayed full of Leftists. Entertainment is potentially Gramscian, and so joined the March.
So much for the 1950s. Then along came the Pill, rock ‘n roll, the sudden power of the young, so the obvious inversion of our social order began. No need to talk about feminism, no-fault divorce, War on Poverty, etc., etc…..all socially erosive.
I have recently, somewhat reluctantly because of their “reputation,” come to consider the possibility that we lost the Gramscian battle when Buckley kicked the Birchers out of the conservative country club.
Read the list of policy positions at Wikipedia (which is not a fan of the JBS) and tell me which ones we should disagree with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Birch_Society
https://www.jbs.org/
The Wiki is big on “has been described” and “some have called” — seems to me we’ve heard that tune an awful lot.
Maybe the JBS supports some fringe conspiracy theories, but recent events make it clear that there really WERE and are conspiracies afoot, overt and also just by saturating the world with indoctrination.
Very much on point, by Sarah Hoyt (read through the typos; they aren’t consequential).
https://pjmedia.com/columns/sarah-hoyt/2020/07/28/were-seeing-the-death-rattle-of-the-revolution-not-its-birth-n722898
AesopFan,
I’m probably late to the party but over the past few years I’ve changed my opinion of Buckley drastically. I’m starting to think he was one of the first, most popular ‘controlled opposition’ pawns in the big game.
Somebody linked this article on one of Neo’s other posts, and I think it’s worth looking at again in this context. It could just as well go on the “virtue” post; the lack of civic virtue (not personal morality, but there is a linkage) helped lead to the loss of the culture wars.
FWIW, I have no idea who Paul Graham is, but what he said made sense to me.
The “set up” for the main point is kind of long, but his four types of conformism is an unconventional (heh) paradigm.
Short summary (and “convention” is whatever the current zeitgeist mandates, so today that’s Woke Social Justice):
(1) aggressively conventional-minded: “tattletales” who want rule-breakers punished;
(2) passively conventional-minded: rule-followers who don’t want to get involved;
(3) passively independent-minded: “they don’t care much about rules and probably aren’t 100% sure what the rules even are” (hello, geeks and nerds!);
(4) aggressively independent-minded: “the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.”
http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html
It’s easy to criticize conservatives of yore and near-yore, but what exactly were they supposed to do?
I was a leftist until a few years after 9-11 and I sure didn’t see the radical New Left coming on like they have since Obama on. Then I felt like I was part of a scrappy, but doomed, movement of good-guy idealists. That was part of the appeal.
I can understand conservatives then making a similar calculation — this is a mild enthusiasm which will slip into oblivion without my help.
I wasn’t a leftist ever, but I agree with huxley – conservatives really didn’t take the New Left seriously because they (a) weren’t as numerous; (b) weren’t as organized (Weathermen notwithstanding); and (c) didn’t have the entire media & Democrat party behind them.
AesopFan: In my moments of lapsed integrity I have the pragmatic thought, “I sure picked a lousy time to leave the Left!”
It’s one of those unresolvable, historical questions of how it happened. The Left is always beavering away at the foundations, but IMO Obama was exactly the right (or wrong) candidate to electrify the country and move it leftward ho!
I doubt we would be here if Hillary had run in 2008 and even won.
huxley; AesopFan:
I was just reading some essays of David Horowitz’s, and he’s been been warning for about four decades that the far left is much much stronger and more determined than most people think. I’ve certainly been aware of that since 2008. And of course quite a few commenters here have been warning for a long time: Artfldgr, and definitely FredHJr (now deceased many years, but very clear about the danger well over a decade ago). There are others, too.
Neo – agree about Horowitz, and there were certainly others; but, as huxley said, the writing on the wall was suddenly in day-glo block-print in 2008. But by that time, the undermining of the country was already accomplished; Obama just gave legitimacy to the project.
I think Hillary would have been as bad in 2008 as she was in 2016, but she would have been a different kind of bad, and her character and political/personal baggage was such that the left-world would not have found her as energizing as Obama was.
An analogy that came to mind, is that the Left are like sappers, digging a tunnel under the castle walls; and Obama was the one who set fire to the support timbers.
I was just reading some essays of David Horowitz’s, and he’s been been warning for about four decades that the far left is much much stronger and more determined than most people think
neo: There are always people warning about one thing and another. To some on the right, a leftist takeover has always been imminent. See the John Birch Society and Joseph McCarthy. Or that the left is bad and always working against us. Even Jonah Goldberg told us that.
But such general admonitions are about as useful as claims that the stock market is overpriced. Well, yeah, but it’s the timing of a crash which is crucial, when it comes to action. And you can’t protect against every single threat without becoming unable to protect against anything.
I consider it unknowable that society would swing this far to the left right now. A possibility, sure, but no one, not David Horowitz, Bill Ayers, nor FredHJr, could know the if or the when. I can easily imagine an alternate present in which the New Left had become another movement in history’s dustbin like syndicalism.
Again, given this uncertainty what were conservatives in decades past supposed to have done and when?
huxley:
Horowitz is somewhat special to me in this role – as opposed to, for example, the John Birch Society – because of Horowitz’s past as a far left activist. He knew from the inside, as it were.
As for what could have been done, I’m not at all sure anything would have succeeded. But one possibility would have been for conservatives to have run for school boards and tried to be active in that way in educational decisions in their communities, and to pay more attention to what was going on in their alma maters at the college level as well.
neo: I read David Horowitz when I was on the left. Furthermore, I too was a leftist activist, though hardly as far left or active as Horowitz.
But I knew real radicals and I read about half of what the Weatherfolks published and they creeped me out, though not enough to leave the left. I’d bet Bill Ayers is surprised at how far the Weather agenda has gotten.
I’m not dumbfounded by the specifics of what’s happening today, just surprised that it has come to pass so suddenly. I can easily imagine that it would have remained only a possibility without Covid, Floyd and the failure of the Trump impeachment efforts.
Conservatives coulda, woulda, shoulda done a lot of things, but everyone has only so much time and energy and to do one thing is not to do another.
Just about nobody spent any time worrying about 9-11 and we got entirely sideswiped by that.
“I’m not at all sure anything would have succeeded.” – Neo.
Yes, obviously (now) conservatives didn’t fight back hard enough — but they weren’t just sitting around either.
Conservatives did run for school boards. They lost.
Or were recalled after winning (my own current school district saw the new reformers outspent in the recall elections by the state and national unions, literally — not figuratively, as the word is now used — by 10 to 1).
Conservatives fought to keep leftist propaganda out of textbooks. They lost.
My mother was on an adoption committee in a small Texas town for years, and they simply didn’t have any untainted selections to choose from, because the publishers had the money to influence the State boards.
Conservatives, once out of college, didn’t really have any way to know what was being taught there — before the internet, there were no news reports on curriculum, or class content, just whether the football team won or lost.
The high-profile “cancellings” we see now are very recent; the caving of administrators to leftist radicals in the seventies was mostly about race, which conservatives did object to but got no traction, and the rot escalated from there.
And my lack of donations to my alma mater (after I did decipher some of the news finally bruiting their leftist position 20 years ago) aren’t noticed because of the flood of money from leftists who applaud the shift in “education” — this at a major university primarily known for STEM majors and research.
Outspent, outmaneuvered, and lied to by the media; the writings of conservative Cassandras not widely enough read, and with little effect in the trenches; all of the rhetoric about truth and justice mangled by the left — what, indeed, would have succeeded, when the responses to their defensive actions are to mock conservatives for “slandering” the good intentions of the left or for opposing “compassionate” government.
And this by Republicans as well as Democrats (see: Tea Party).
I think there were several problems. One was conceptual, and resulted in a tactical error: the Reaganesque “government is the problem, the private sector is the answer.” This on the one hand led to the contracting out of government services — which led the private sector to be dependent on the gov. sector, and hence part of the problem itself. On the other hand, it alienated all employees of the huge government sector (I often check out different localities on Wikipedia, for the largest employers. In almost every case, it is local government and heavily government-dependent healthcare). The Republicans became the evil people wanting to cut their jobs and salaries, and as at the university, once the chances of someone at the proverbial water cooler being a conservative diminished, rhetoric no longer had to be moderated, and a much more rabid and closed in-group formed.
The other problem, more basic, sadly, is that the right is itself divided between “social conservative” and the Libertarian wings. (There is also my impression that the Republican party doesn’t serve its electoral base, but uses it to serve its donor one, a change too complicated to go into here).