It’s the Culture, Stupid: Facing the Long Road Ahead
Imagine how many television viewers, many of whom know virtually nothing about how we got to where we are, will learn from this expertly edited documentary how and why the United States is basically an evil nation, on the wrong course, and supported the wrong side in all foreign policy crises throughout its modern history. We cannot disregard the effect this kind of miseducation has on the knowledge of our fellow citizens. Do you wonder why the polls show that most Americans think Barack Obama’s foreign policy the past four years was successful? It is because they are a generation educated from “historians” like the late Howard Zinn, political theorists like the linguist Noam Chomsky, and now from filmmaker Stone and his historian co-author, Peter Kuznick.
Finally, I have a recommendation. For your left-leaning friends and associates, I highly recommend a new e-book written by my friend, the eminent historian Martin J. Sklar. It is called Letters on Obama (from the Left):The Global Revolution and the Obama Counter-Revolution. Sklar is sui generis. He calls himself a Marxist historian and a socialist. Yet the positions he takes — which he argues are those in defense of liberty — are positions regularly associated with conservatives and Republicans. You might consider this naiveté or an oxymoron. But any serious reader should take into consideration the insights he presents and the intellectual case that he musters.
One reviewer on Amazon’s site, Norton Wheeler, describes Sklar’s thesis in this way:
On the basis of decades of historical research and publication, as well as political practice, Sklar concludes that the market economy in a modern society plays an increasingly prominent role in providing social welfare. He further concludes that the wing of the Democratic Party that has been ascendant since, roughly, the beginning of the 21st century has become a fetter on the forces of production, adopting state-centric, low-growth policies (“capitolism”) that inhibit both general prosperity and vibrant democracy. Relatedly, he argues that the same tendency has constrained the historical role of the United States as promoter of free societies on a global scale. On the basis of these critiques of current domestic and foreign policies – and with the premise that the United States has historically been a left-tending nation, in thought and practice – Sklar concludes that the last three Republican presidential candidates have been to the left of the last two Democratic candidates.
In Sklar’s view, the Republican have advocated policies that are pro-growth, pro-democratic, and within the American tradition, while the policies of the Democrats have been regressive, reactionary, and, in Marxist terms, counter-revolutionary. I urge readers to purchase his book – which costs only $4.95 – and engage his argument.
All of these works I have mentioned are examples of the task that faces us today. To win in the political realm four year from now and in the future, it is not only finding new candidates that count. We must also change the culture.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle, more post-election cultural reflections:
Just what Joe-The-Plumber needs. A book. A peer reviewed book. Something Joe is sure to read while under your sink fixing the faucet.
Let’s start with the idea that social conservatism can be seperated from economic conservatism. I don’t believe they can. Both presume natural law, and the primacy of virtue, restraint and responsibility. But arguments made for social liberalism frequently emphasize personal autonomy, and elevate personal pleasure and fulfillment as the highest goods to be pursued. Thus, abortion must be allowed, if what brings me pleasure is a life where I can have sex while not getting tied down with a family (natural law theory has typcially tied the two), which would stand in the way of a career, traveling the world, partying, etc.
But once you’ve accepted that, why should a person accept quaint, outdated natural law ideas like property rights, or that prosperity should be earned through hard work? My pleasure is the highest good. If I can get Obamaphones and free birth control via the force of a willing state government, why not?
Economic conservatism prespposes moral absolutes. Social liberalism denies them, and is relativistic. If the latter is adopted, I don’t see how the former will be far behind.
I believe we’ve passed the tipping point. It’s time to help the Left bring it down. If we destroy the welfare state from the inside, we may be able to rebuild a govt based on the US Constitution in our generation.
If large numbers of conservatives want to accomplish something significant, it might be to laugh and so demean Howard Zinn’s execrable People’s History of the United States that any school board or faculty in the country would be too embarrassed to assign it. It would be a good start.
Some people are working on that:http://anthemfoundation.org/gifts-to-universities/fellowships.html
Just bought the Sklar book on Amazon and posted on my Facebook page. I came to the US 10 years ago coming from a Country where there’s no word for conservatism, neo-con or “the Right”. In Brazil, everybody debates and argues to stand to the left of their adversaries as much as possible, nobody wants to assume to be right of center, even if they’re actually are. Obama in Brazil would be right wing, since in Brazil single payer health system is a given, for instance, anything less than that is unacceptable. And yes, it works badly, everybody with a job has a private insurance carrier on the side. But everybody loves the system. There’s no coming back.
That’s what I fear about what’s headed upon us. We must stop such entitlements. Forget about Presidents. Congress can stop all that, most of the times. Completely losing the plot in the Senate in 2012 upsets me a lot more now.
Once any society crosses the Socialist Event Horizon, the only possible outcome is mass death from hunger and/or war. World War II ended the Great Depression not because it forced governments to spend a lot of money, but because it forced people to take responsibility for their own survival.
The blue states have crossed that horizon. Maybe the red states can secede and save themselves, but they can’t save Obamaland.
Welcome to Zimbabwe.
But Dave, how will the Red States cover the costs of maintaining such things as dams and power systems without the Blue States to cover for them? How will they cover the costs of impoverished citizens who support resistance to Federal help for everyone else but are in fact themselves supported by the taxes of Blue State liberals? The Red States presently have the highest rates of poverty in the nation, and the lowest rates of educational achievement. They and their conservative governments and citizens are in fact the welfare queens of the nation. How are they going to survive? Anyone with a lick of sense and any educational achievements at all will free to the hated Blue States, leaving all that behind.
The good news is that the kids in college today have one and only one goal, to spend four years in a drunken orgy.
I doubt very seriously that one in a hundred of the students has the haziest idea of what their professors said in a given class on the day after the final.
It is a tragic waste of time and money, after all the kids could hold down the sort of menial job that they will get after graduation without spending $200,000 on tuition, and they could drink and screw on the weekends.
Promoting “diversity” in higher education means supporting relatively trivial variations in physical attributes of humans (such as skin color or gender differences), not the far more important differences of the mind manifested in verbal and written expression.
This is the money quote right here, and it doesn’t just apply to higher education, but the Left in toto. I’ve never figured out how one unimportant physical trait (speaking specifically of skin color) has come to trump all. We need to move our society to a point where such trivial things no longer matter.
The vast majority of voters (whom we call low-information voters) have little or no interest in politics. Most peoples’ passions involve some aspect of the popular culture and their heroes are musicians, actors, athletes, or others on the fringe.
Every four years these low-information voters bestir themselves to choose a new president. So where do they go for advice on a candidate? Why, right back to those sources they trust: the mass media, entertainment industry, and academia, left-wing bastions all.
Our culture is overwhelmingly left-wing, so it is not surprising that the Democrats dominate so many elections. The real mystery is why we conservatives win any elections at all.
The real mystery is why we conservatives win any elections at all.
Because conservatives keep drifting leftward themselves. On many issues, 2012 conservatives have the same positions that the typical Democrat had 30 years ago.
Also, conservatives are quick to support any and all leftism as long as it can be packaged as ‘chivalry’. Any program that rewards women at the expense of a man (since if something bad happened, it can only be the man’s fault) is something a conservative will support.
The abortion debate, for example, is one where both sides are left-wing.
Democrat/pro-choice : The fetus is expendable.
Republican/pro-life : The father is expendable.
Democrats want it such that women can erase the costs of promiscuity. Republicans think abortion will go down by punishing MEN, not women (an amazingly stupid position). Neither side says the father should have any rights at all, or that the woman should bear any responsibility for her actions.
So conservatives keep drifting leftward without realizing.
The important thing about mass culture is not that it is “left wing” but that it is primarily populist, so is irrational and scapegoats powerful Jews who may appear in many guises. I wrote about the master narrative of populism here: http://clarespark.com/2012/11/07/capitalism-is-on-the-line/.
Of course, there is no “master narrative” of populism, except in your imagination.
Liberalism is popular for the same reason post-modernism is popular. They both promise the believer the ability to do whatever he/she wants with zero consequences.
How does one counter such a seductive ideology?
We do need to pay attention to culture but we need to first understand the Left’s definition of culture, the prevailing beliefs, feelings, and behavioral practices at any given time. The noetic system in other words. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/priming-delicate-minds-for-a-desired-disruptive-revolution-what-is-the-real-damage/
As sociologist William Kapp postulated in the early 60s and Julian Huxley before him when UNESCO was created, change the culture and the political and economic systems have to follow. We are under attack through all of our institutions, that’s the blueprint, but especially education. As Milton Rokeach recognized, make education about values and social and emotional learning and you control future behavior for the most part. At a largely unconscious level. It is also why there is such a push for digital devices and computers for all in the classroom. It hobbles the mind when the computer becomes the reservoir of knowledge. And using a tool as the focus of the classroom is vocational, not intellectual. Plus it shifts working memory to visual instead of accessing the conceptual long term memory. There’s also a reason we hear so many references to Brain-Based Learning now. Methods shown to foster a lobotomized automaton are all the rage. They act from emotion. The vote on emotion. And the pressure points are known and thus create a ready handle for manipulation.
Ready for their “Release the Kracken” call.
I think one reason the Republicans failed in this election is their refusal to discuss “social issues.” This may have been defensive on Romney’s part due to his religion, but any future candidates must face the fact that we can’t solve our economic problems without solving our social problems. Take the decline of marriage: nearly or actually half of all births in the US now are out of wedlock. Often there are multiple births by multiple fathers.
The left began attacking the only biologically sound marriage arrangement decades ago by redefining a “family” as basically any group of people that chooses to live together. This has been a disaster. Even the New York Times acknowledged in an article this year that as much as 40% of economic inequality in the US is due to single parenthood – that means largely women as heads of households.
The Democrats provide incentives for this through direct financial support that enables groups of related women to live together without working. Values are changed by the Democrats allies in the media who promote “alternative lifestyles” and push their acceptance. Conservatives are exercised by the advance of genderless marriage, but it is only an additional nail in the coffin.
A family headed by a mother and a father is the acknowledged best environment for raising children. Within such a family children learn trust, how to related to others, and to accept limits. Fathers are particularly important in the process to both boys and girls. Rather than claiming a God-driven reason to support the “traditional family,” why can’t we point out that undermining the nuclear family (for lack of a better word) is bad social policy and has consequences that will iterate through generations? Rather than reaching out in this way, conservatives have made themselves the targets of humorists and others by using religious language.
I hope that Republicans do not decide that the way to win elections is to become a carbon copy of the Democrats. First of all they would not be convincing and second of all we know appeasement doesn’t work. Churchill spent many years in the political wilderness and that is what Republicans must do. They must find candidates who can better articulate conservative principles and how they apply to life and work. I don’t see any with the intellectual heft at the moment, but perhaps someone like Paul Ryan can rephrase his Catholicism to make the case.
“…the new power of public sector unionism, a far different breed than that of the old labor movement of Walter Reuther and George Meany.”
The GOP, with its right-to-work legislation and attacks on the NLRB is a friend to NO union, public or private.
Hillel, your great namesake would have noticed the asymmetry in your statement. Are any unions, public or private sector, “friendly” to business owners and creators or wealth. Why should Republicans be friendly to unions when organized labor funds Democrats?
In what moral universe do you have the right to force me to negotiate with you? Why should suppliers of labor to a business get favorable treatment compared to other suppliers? Don’t tell me that you still believe in the archaic Marxist labor theory of value. Labor doesn’t create value. Ideas do.
Did you know that Sam Gompers, the founder of the American labor movement said that the worst thing a business owner can do to his employees is to fail to earn a profit?
I find your support of unions ironic in light of what the great sage Hillel said: “If I am for myself alone, what am I?”. Unions are for themselves alone. Like Albert Shenker, the former head of the teachers’ union said, he’ll care about students when students pay union dues.
Frankly I hope you get what you voted for. It will ruin the country but this is what you want.
I am glad to learn that Ron Radosh is an “intellectual,” who performs difficult but indispensable “theoretical and analytical work” in behalf of our beleaguered republic. What should we do without people like him? I dare say he deserves to keep his job. They all do.
We would have had a “long road ahead” if Romney had won.
What we were saying during the campaign was not a slogan dictated by ideology: the majority of brainwashed idiots has voted for poverty, tyranny, and the ruin of America.
The internationalist subversives will proceed with their plans to destroy America’s might and in the process the system has good chances to collapse.
There is no road ahead, we plunged off the cliff.
PS
Far from me to deny the role and the importance of a serious cultural war against nihilism. But you need a country to do that. I doubt that in two years from now we will still have anything like a country.
“We must also change the culture.”
Have you met anyone more smug than an “intellectual” left-winger? Such people do not respond to facts, logic, rhetoric, or appeals to common sense. They already know the best way to run the USA (a left-wing autocratic nanny-state) and what’s best for us as individuals.
I see no hope of libertarians and conservatives changing the culture when the education system and the mass media are continually distributing left-wing propaganda, and the current national government has the loyalty of almost all government employees and is buying the loyalty of the elderly, the poor, college students, etc.
Ronnie: David Brooks’ column, today (11/9) is in synch with yours, i.e., that there is an abiding antigovernment ethos, which (as Paul Carlston, you old acquaintence at the U of Iowa, has said, goes back to the Scotch/ Irish rebellions against the British, and their descendants in e.g., appalachia, which is a very legitimate part of the U.S.A’s authentic nature.
On another unrelated topic: I heard the Klesmatics, last night. Wonderful! They also Klezmerized (I think letigitmately), late songs of Wood Guthrie, who lived in Brooklyn, for a while and was married to a woman whose mother was a celbrated Yiddish poet. It was a marvelous evening. If you can catch their act you might want to hear them.
Also, thanks for your kind words (which I forgot to tell you), in your 75th ruminations.
Hugh
I hate any titles that call me stupid. It’s the economy stupid. It’s the culture stupid.
Don’t call me stupid.