And Rightly So

January 20, 2009

This Bulletin will go out in the mail on Inauguration Day, 2009. By the time it shows up in your mailbox, Barack Obama will be President of the United States. As we conservatives head "into the wilderness" for the next four years -- and all too likely for longer -- it's a good time for stock-taking.

Since the election there's been an argument more about conservatives than among conservatives: Did the McCain campaign -- and also the Bush administration whose record McCain had to run on, willy-nilly -- fail because it was too conservative (or the wrong kind of conservative) or because it wasn't conservative enough? Sarah Palin definitely energized the Republican base. But did her God-guns-and- babies stripe of Republicanism turn off more voters than it attracted?

To my mind, the tenor of this argument -- and the fact that even many folks who identify themselves as conservatives are saying it's not enough to rally the base with appeals to old-fashioned conservative values -- suggests the real lesson we should be taking to heart after our defeat.

That lesson? It's certainly not that John McCain and Sarah Palin ran too right-wing a campaign. But it's not that our ticket wasn't conservative enough to win, either. Don't get me wrong. A more conservative Republican nominee would have warmed the cockles of my heart. But would he have won the election? I doubt it.

Here's what really happened in 2008: Politics finally caught up with the culture.

In 1999, the late Paul Weyrich declared the culture war lost. Backlash against leftward drift in the 1960s and 70s helped put Ronald Reagan in the White House; Republicans took Congress back in the 1990s. But while America kept voting Right, she kept moving Left.

Republicans kept winning elections, yet the media and the movies, the universities and the public schools churned out ever more shameless propaganda for moral relativism and clueless faith in government solutions to every conceivable problem. Why weren't the votes that went our way some kind of brake on the relentless progress to statism and decadence? 'How come,' conservatives used to ask, 'we keep winning elections, but the country just keeps moving left?'

That question is now moot.

As America Alone author Mark Steyn pointed out the morning after the election, Obama comes out of "the cultural turf the GOP largely abandoned during its 30-year winning streak at the ballot box. . ."

We won't win again in politics (or our victories will be Pyrrhic ones) until we start meeting the enemy where they're actually winning this war: in the battle over education, history, entertainment, media, art, basic attitudes -- our culture.

The Left has succeeded in selling America -- if not an absolute majority of Americans, a growing plurality, including overwhelming numbers of younger people whose attitudes will determine our future -- on their vision of the differences between us. Conservative objections to abortion on demand, "sex education," "gay marriage," appeasement of foreign tyrants, the "scientific consensus" on "climate change," and the impending government takeover of medicine and huge swathes of the economy are wholly explained by our backwardness, our fears, and our greed. We're selfish; they care. We're the "haters" trapped in the dysfunctional prejudices of the past; they're the open-minded, tolerant ones.

Our most pressing task as conservatives is to win back the culture -- one argument at a time, one book or movie at a time, one fight at a time to retake control of an American institution, and, most importantly, one child at a time educated to understand and love the wisdom of our great past.

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