No matter how the establishment media likes to portray things, it is the Left, not conservatives, that is mounting an aggressive and transgressive culture war, against which Middle America reacts only to avoid surrender.
If a village is besieged, it is those laying siege, not the villagers, who are the attackers.
This is a point some of us on the center-right have been making for months, but it has now been eloquently expressed in the past 10 days by both top-notch conservative thinker Peggy Noonan and by thoughtful, veteran liberal writer Kevin Drum. Now, three items across my desk over the past weekend bolster the points made by Drum and Noonan.
Start with Drum’s honesty from the Left, which is most welcome. On July 3, he posted an essay called “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals.” This is the same Drum who for years wrote for the uber-Left Mother Jones and pilloried the conservative case for religious exemptions from federal laws. But in his new essay, Drum presents copious data showing that “since roughly the year 2000, according to survey data, Democrats have moved significantly to the left on most hot button social issues while Republicans have moved only slightly right.”
This, of course, contradicts the dominant media narrative that conservatives are the ones who have moved more to the extremes, but the data is unassailable. As Drum puts it, “The Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary.” Note the “us.” Drum likes the leftward march but still recognizes that the march has far outstripped Middle America’s approval.
In “The Culture War is a leftist offensive,” Noonan agrees that “the cultural provocations that are currently tearing us apart do, certainly and obviously, come from progressives. And the left seems to have no prudent fear of backlash. They don’t seem to believe public opinion counts for much anymore.”
Examples of this trend — things that just a few years ago even most of the media would have thought of as not just abnormal but offensive — pop up almost every day. The New York Times, for example, published on July 7 what can only be called a glowing profile of an “educator” named Justine Ang Fonte, who teaches high school children about “porn literacy” and teaches first graders that it is “OK” to “touch” their private parts for pleasure. No amount of New York Times issue-fogging can hide the reality that most decent people think this stuff is beyond the pale.
Separately comes word that a new policy in Chicago schools will make free condoms available to all students starting in fifth grade. Oh, don’t worry, says a spokesman for the Chicago Women’s Health Center, which helped create the program: “I want to be really clear that the existence of condoms does not mean that all students are going to be using those condoms or encouraged to use them.”
That’s like handing out free cookies and then saying, “Don’t eat them.” Judging from the furious online reactions, it’s pretty clear that the schools are using the wrong definition of “loco” when trying to serve in loco parentis, because this just seems crazy.
Finally, of course, there is the controversy over teaching critical race theory, with leftists saying both that it isn’t really taught and that it’s not a bad thing anyway. To which, leading critical race theory critic Chris Rufo released a list last Friday of at least 30 school districts in 15 states teaching a book positing that “whiteness” is an aspect of, yes, the devil, who leads white children astray with “stolen land” and “stolen riches.”
At the risk of begging the question, if these examples don’t immediately strike you as highly objectionable, no amount of persuasion will change your mind. Yet, even for those who agree with this cultural direction, any reasonable assessment would admit that the provocation, the “war,” is being waged from the Left, and that resistance to these initiatives is a largely defensive effort.
It’s time for the Left to call a pause and to start attempting persuasion rather than coercion. Right now, as Noonan says, the Left is tearing the country apart.
