The “Culture Wars” Are Actually a War for Civilization

By Selwyn Duke

“Are Republicans losing the culture wars?” left-wing Politico asked recently. A better question is, though: Are we, as Americans, losing the war for our civilization?

Moreover, how do we define “winning”? If a party triumphs politically by promising to rain down toxins upon us that most people mistake for manna from Heaven, who, if anyone, has won anything?

Making the case that the GOP is losing the culture wars, Politico wrote over the weekend:

School board candidates backed by Moms for Liberty [MfL], a conservative vanguard whose members popularized restrictions on classroom library books, are losing elections in Florida and some swing states. Republican leaders who rallied against critical race theory and LGBTQ+ issues recently faced recalls in red pockets of California.

And in the presidential race, Democrats are playing offense. This week’s party convention in Chicago featured liberals attacking conservative candidates as “weird” and denouncing so-called book bans.

Not surprisingly, MfL sees things differently. “’We’re in the middle of a cultural revolution in America, and one of the biggest battlegrounds is the schools,’ Moms For Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice said in an interview,” Politico further relates. “‘We didn’t start this fire, but we’re going to put it out.’”

Of course, education has for ages been a powerful agent of “cultural revolution” (devolution, really). To use a spin on the biblical counsel, train a child in the way he shouldn’t go, and when he’s old he will not depart from it. Schools have long peddled left-wing ideology and corrupted kids’ moral compasses and have, consequently, made them confuse evil for good.

Minnesota Vice?

Politico also credits Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz for “redirecting the divisive education issues promoted by conservatives,” as the site puts it. Politico then relates that Walz, a former teacher, leveraged social issues

to pivot to a law he signed as Minnesota governor providing free school meals to all students.

“We made sure that every kid in our state gets breakfast and lunch every day,” Walz said Wednesday at the DNC. “So while other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours.”

That’s a good applause line, of course. It’s also not redirection — it’s magician-like misdirection. That is, no one is against children being fed (though government programs are inherently wasteful). Moreover, no Republican is campaigning against the Minnesota lunch program or any other.

Democrats have, however, put porn and sexual devolutionary (LGBTQ+) material in schools. These leftists then cry foul when normal Americans take exception to this corruptive indoctrination.

The Projections of the Weird

And while feeding kids is wonderful, man does not live on bread alone. This brings us to another law Walz signed — one he doesn’t boast about. That legislation, HF 146, gave Minnesota courts the power to facilitate body-rending sexual-distortion treatments (“gender-affirming care”) for children.

Of course, most Americans think that not much is weirder than insisting boys can transition into girls at will. Compounding the weirdness, these child-abuse enablers also claim you’re a bigot for opposing the madness.

Yet this is status quo for today’s Democrats. These are people who insist on having their own pronouns and that drag queens should be reading stories to seven-year-olds. They say traditional sex roles are artificial but homosexuality is natural. They assert that having men who masquerade as female compete with women is fair. Why, they even claim to not be able to define “woman” — while also claiming to know precisely when Republicans are trampling a “woman’s” rights.

In fact, the Democrats are now the Party of Weird, as The New American illustrated well July 30. As the site wrote, the “White House has assembled a cast of characters that makes The Addams Family look normal.” To the point here are the tweets below.

Democrats- “Trump and Vance are weird”😂 pic.twitter.com/MAe9BlVqjU

— whowhatwherewolf (@whowatwherewolf) July 30, 2024

“JD Vance is weird” – Team Kamala Harris pic.twitter.com/avMgy4Kp8M

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 28, 2024

There Is No “Other Side” on Planet Weird

Now, in reality, there is no conservative analogue to the above anywhere. This is a reason why, too, leftists tell lies such as “Conservatives want to ban contraception and IVF.” They’re grasping at straws. Yet the truth is that neither Donald Trump nor the Republican Party has proposed doing any such thing. The claim is, again, misdirection.

As for books, no one is “banning” them. Conservatives are merely doing what everyone does:

They’re picking and choosing what books children should be exposed to in school.

Liberals have done this, for ages — quite successfully. (Why do you think Huckleberry Finn is no longer found in most schools?)

The Big Picture

Yet there’s a deeper issue here. The truth is that conservatives are not only losing the culture wars — they’ve always lost them. One reason for this is that the Left controls the culture shapers: mainstream media, education, entertainment, and now Big Tech.

Yet a more interesting reason harks back to an observation by ancient Chinese sage Confucius. “I never knew anyone who loved virtue as much as sex,” he wrote. Vice is a much easier sell than virtue. In fact, things naturally move toward disorder unless there’s maintenance; that is, a continual application of buttressing energy. Thus will a car or house degrade if left to itself and not maintained.

And thus will a culture degrade and move toward moral disorder.

Vice is precisely what the Left is peddling, too. “You’re not accountable for what you do; you don’t have to pay for what you get,” is the message. “If it feels good, do it.” Responsibility is harder to market — especially when those culture-shapers are of a piece with the sin-sellers.

The final reason conservatives have been losing is that the “best defense is a good offense.” Those ever proposing changes have an advantage over the perpetually defensive: Any compromise whatsoever moves society in the former’s direction.

In our time, leftists are the change agents and conservatives the defenders. Liberals continually come to the bargaining table asking for more concessions. And conservatives, ever “reasonable,” often cede a portion of what they demand. Five percent now, 10 percent the next time, seven percent on the occasion after that, etc. Complete this progression of “progressivism” and soon, you realize, the Left will have won its culture war of a thousand cuts.

This is why G.K. Chesterton once wisely noted, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” Really, though, when “mistake agents” carry the day aided by sin-of-omission enablers, what has anyone “won” for our civilization? The answer?

Hell.

                   This article was originally published at The New American.