With the resignation of Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy from the US Supreme Court the nation is plunged into another no-holds-barred fight over a Supreme Court nomination.
For liberals, evidently, there is a full-on panic about abortion and gay marriage. Do you see the problem, liberals? If you make the Supreme Court the supreme arbiter of everything cultural and moral, then your very lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor depends on a majority on the Supreme Court. The proper way to go is to persuade the voters to elect representative that will write laws to enact your agenda.
Of course conservatives have our own problems with the Supreme Court. It was called the "Strange New Respect" problem by Tom Bethell at the American Spectator 30 years ago. Simply put, when the Washington Post starts according "strange new respect" to a conservative in Washington, DC, it means that the said conservative has surrendered to the ruling-class culture and will no longer hold out for conservative principles. Justice Kennedy is the poster-boy for the "strange new respect" syndrome. The strategy of the Federalist Society and the apprenticing of staunch conservatives in the judiciary has been a conscious effort to inculcate heroic values in young conservatives so that they will go to their deaths like Antonin Scalia without ever getting "strange new respect" from chaps like Peter Strzok.
OK, great. So President Trump gets to convert the "strange new respect" Kennedy that voted for abortion and gay marriage with a guy that won't. But that doesn't solve our problem.
Our problem is that the elite culture of the US is pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage. What we need is an America in which educated evolved people in the ruling class would say: look, I understand the liberals and the feminists on abortion: it's a terrible burden to bring a child into the world because of a breakdown of contraception or without the support of the father. But we are talking about human life here. Or they would say: I understand the yearning of gays for the stamp of normality, to come in from the cold of the sexual wilderness, but we are really talking children here. The purpose of marriage is not to make life all cozy for couples, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual or the lastest wizard wheeze of intersectionality. The purpose of marriage is to protect the mother of children, to bind the father of her children to her, to enforce the woman's instinct for eternal love against the male appetite for sexual adventure.
So, we are faced with the Andrew Breitbart maxim: "politics is downstream from culture." If you want to win in politics you have to win first in the culture. And conservatives are not winning in the culture. Instead our children are being marinated in left-wing culture K thru grad school, and every day by the left-wing entertainment and news industry.
But even that is not the whole story, as I wrote just yesterday. And I got that from sci-fi author and Christian John C. Wright, who wrote in "Last Crusade: Fighting the Wrong Battle" that it is not enough to fight the left on the cultural front knowing that "culture is downstream from religion."
So I believe that our present problem is that our ruling class, the people that have learned their lessons well at the woke university, have been taught a false religion. This religion is one part "activism," the fantasy that "peaceful protest" on behalf of helpless victims is the highest form of life, and one part "paternalism," the conceit that "we" are selfless educated and evolved people that are called to minister to the people and organize and administer the welfare state on their behalf.
I will tell you what is wrong with both these conceits. The add up to the Great Reaction, the retreat from the modern society that has advanced beyond tribalism and subordination to an independence of sorts in the free market society of the nation state. But the religion that Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls are taught in school and in the media is the reactionary neo-tribalism of identity politics, and the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. Thus, Great Reaction.
One Fine Day, the best and the brightest will wake up from this nightmare and take up a religion that rejects neo-tribalism for a much broader pan-human identity, and rejects neo-feudalism for a cooperative and human community rather than an administrative and mechanical community. But that day is not yet.
And that means that we conservatives are reduced to depending on nominating brave Supreme Court justices to hold the line against the follies and the injustices of the left until the dawning of a new age.
For liberals, evidently, there is a full-on panic about abortion and gay marriage. Do you see the problem, liberals? If you make the Supreme Court the supreme arbiter of everything cultural and moral, then your very lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor depends on a majority on the Supreme Court. The proper way to go is to persuade the voters to elect representative that will write laws to enact your agenda.
Of course conservatives have our own problems with the Supreme Court. It was called the "Strange New Respect" problem by Tom Bethell at the American Spectator 30 years ago. Simply put, when the Washington Post starts according "strange new respect" to a conservative in Washington, DC, it means that the said conservative has surrendered to the ruling-class culture and will no longer hold out for conservative principles. Justice Kennedy is the poster-boy for the "strange new respect" syndrome. The strategy of the Federalist Society and the apprenticing of staunch conservatives in the judiciary has been a conscious effort to inculcate heroic values in young conservatives so that they will go to their deaths like Antonin Scalia without ever getting "strange new respect" from chaps like Peter Strzok.
OK, great. So President Trump gets to convert the "strange new respect" Kennedy that voted for abortion and gay marriage with a guy that won't. But that doesn't solve our problem.
Our problem is that the elite culture of the US is pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage. What we need is an America in which educated evolved people in the ruling class would say: look, I understand the liberals and the feminists on abortion: it's a terrible burden to bring a child into the world because of a breakdown of contraception or without the support of the father. But we are talking about human life here. Or they would say: I understand the yearning of gays for the stamp of normality, to come in from the cold of the sexual wilderness, but we are really talking children here. The purpose of marriage is not to make life all cozy for couples, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual or the lastest wizard wheeze of intersectionality. The purpose of marriage is to protect the mother of children, to bind the father of her children to her, to enforce the woman's instinct for eternal love against the male appetite for sexual adventure.
So, we are faced with the Andrew Breitbart maxim: "politics is downstream from culture." If you want to win in politics you have to win first in the culture. And conservatives are not winning in the culture. Instead our children are being marinated in left-wing culture K thru grad school, and every day by the left-wing entertainment and news industry.
But even that is not the whole story, as I wrote just yesterday. And I got that from sci-fi author and Christian John C. Wright, who wrote in "Last Crusade: Fighting the Wrong Battle" that it is not enough to fight the left on the cultural front knowing that "culture is downstream from religion."
[I]f the Left retains the moral high ground, the people (who in the long run always seek moral validation before any other factor, including wealth or gratification, applause or power) will cleave to the Left.See, when that foolish woman owner of the Red Hen chucks Press Secretary Sarah Sanders out of her restaurant she thinks she is doing the moral thing. Because she is a Good Little Girl that has learned her lessons well.
The Identitarians will find that their cultural ammunition, the memes and short videos which are this generations version of folk songs, will not have any deep or lasting effect.
One cannot change a man’s mind unless his heart allows it. But one cannot change a man’s heart unless his soul allows it.
In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion.
So I believe that our present problem is that our ruling class, the people that have learned their lessons well at the woke university, have been taught a false religion. This religion is one part "activism," the fantasy that "peaceful protest" on behalf of helpless victims is the highest form of life, and one part "paternalism," the conceit that "we" are selfless educated and evolved people that are called to minister to the people and organize and administer the welfare state on their behalf.
I will tell you what is wrong with both these conceits. The add up to the Great Reaction, the retreat from the modern society that has advanced beyond tribalism and subordination to an independence of sorts in the free market society of the nation state. But the religion that Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls are taught in school and in the media is the reactionary neo-tribalism of identity politics, and the neo-feudalism of the welfare state. Thus, Great Reaction.
One Fine Day, the best and the brightest will wake up from this nightmare and take up a religion that rejects neo-tribalism for a much broader pan-human identity, and rejects neo-feudalism for a cooperative and human community rather than an administrative and mechanical community. But that day is not yet.
And that means that we conservatives are reduced to depending on nominating brave Supreme Court justices to hold the line against the follies and the injustices of the left until the dawning of a new age.
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