“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked?
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
—Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926).
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I don’t have much to say except this man is brilliant and everyone should read whatever he writes.
We are told that conservatives “lost the culture war.” I dissent from this view: American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that. They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture. Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation. No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.
This was not thought necessary. Conservatives had the people. One decade they were called a “silent” majority; as the culture war heated up, that majority transitioned from “silent” to “moral,” but a majority they remained.
circle back a bit earlier,
If you care at all about this topic, Friedrich Hayek is a man to study closely. Consider his position in 1949, the year he penned the essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” He was an economic libertarian living in a world that had seemingly discredited everything he had stood for. Two decades before humanity had been plunged into the greatest depression in the history of the species. This depression was blamed squarely on the very laissez faire politics Hayek championed.
It will never remain this way and history has its own headway,
But like all orthodoxies, theirs will eventually stumble. Today’s orthodoxy will meet events it cannot explain. Today’s hopes will be the source of tomorrow’s sorrows. When those sorrows arrive, a rising generation will be looking for alternatives. The job of today’s insurgents is to build a coherent critique of this orthodoxy, a compelling vision of a better way, and a set of networks that can guard the flame until the arrival of that happy day.
Be the Remnant and stay the faith if you wonder why you woke up a few years ago and the civilization you took for granted all the sudden seemed to be crumbling down around you.
RTWDT.