Cultural War Since 1848 -- Introduction 3c

Evil Empire

The Left went ballistic when Ronald Reagan called the USSR an "evil empire." The Left was wrong in being terrified of conservatives being so righteous against the tyranny of communism. And sadly, most people do not realize that the goals of feminism, socialism and liberalism is simply communist. Just because the USSR fell and the Berlin Wall came down doesn't mean that the threat from Marx and Engels is over. The final battle for the hearts and minds of people is the cultural war we are going through. The attack on the Boy Scouts is a drop in the bucket of the chaos liberals are inflicting on America. The Left looks at Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and sees a evil. He is called a threat to democracy. He is seen as being mean-spirited, hypocritical, closed minded, and hateful. He is feared as wanting mankind to march in ideological lockstep without any heart for the poor and lowly. Gingrich criticizes the Left and accuses them of being the demagogues and abrasive. Each side demonizes the other.

Here is a few passages from Berlet in Eyes Right!: Challenging the Right Wing Backlash: "For decades anti-communism was the glue that bound together the various tendencies on the right. Ironically, the collapse of communism in Europe allowed the US political right to shift its primary focus from an extreme and hyperbolic anti-communism, militarism, and aggressive foreign policy to domestic issues of culture and national identity. Multiculturalism, political correctness, and traditional values became the focus of this new struggle over culture. An early and influential jeremiad in the Culture War was Allan Bloom's 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind." Bloom's book is great. When it comes to the truth in this cultural war, either you are right or wrong. There is no centrist stand. The Left eventually must go through the difficult process of experiencing the pain of changing their minds. America is deeply divided and the majority is wrong on many issues. It would be tragic beyond words if America fell. It is God's champion in this world that has so many evil leaders of evil nations. The Founding Fathers felt God's presence. How else could they have won against the world's greatest empire?

The Left hates hearing the Right wrap the flag around themselves and act holier-than-thou. But they are more patriotic and God is on their side. And the Right must be bold in denouncing evil like Reagan did about the USSR. Each side accuses the other of being horrible and disgusting. There is good on both sides, but there is far more truth taught by the leaders of the Right. The Washington Times is far better than the Washington Post. Beverly LaHaye is far more on the side of good than Betty Friedan. God is more on the side of Jerry Falwell than He is on Jesse Jackson's. The differences between the Left and the Right at the year 2000 is of biblical proportions. The difference between the U.S.A. and the USSR in their 70 year struggle for power is equal to the division between the feminists and the traditionalists today. The East Germans are now united with their brothers in West Germany and everyone lives under a democracy instead of both living under a tyranny that tried to crush religion and biblical values for marriage and family. But there is still much work to be done to prevent the feminists and socialists from continuing the dream of Marx, Lenin and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

We believe there is more to fear from the Left than the Right. The Right is not going to make a nightmare religious Islamic like totalitarian state like the feminists fear in the novel The Handmaid's Tale. In the book and movie there is the disgusting view that if Christians got in control they would end all freedom and then rape women to have children. The Left is too paranoid. The Right goes too far in some cases to legislate their morality, but the leaders of the Right are not the Hitlers that the Left sees them as. The Right is correct in seeing that the leaders of the Left are on the side of evil. If the Left continues to win the cultural war America may not survive. A nation that has a majority of its citizens who think that the Boy Scouts must be forced to have homosexual leaders and that women should be in combat is so far from God and goodness and sanity that it could fall like so many other powerful nations have done before.

Jesse Jackson Jr. -- Like Father, Like Son

Communist nations have fallen because they violated spiritual laws. America increasingly declines because it is embracing the ideology of Marx, Engels and Stanton. The leaders of the Left today like Friedan and Jesse Jackson and his son, congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. are just continuing the communist dream of abolishing biblical values. Jesse Jackson Jr. interprets the Bible the opposite of the Promise Keepers in a speech reprinted at the NOW website. He blasts conservatives for oppressing women with outdated interpretations of the Bible instead of a "modern" interpretation that coincides with the thinking of Patricia Ireland, the president of NOW. Ireland has both a husband and a lesbian woman lover. Jackson has no problem with this. America has advanced from old-fashioned values that he sees were disrespective to women and were socialist in economics.

One of the most outspoken critics of the Left is Pat Buchanan. We don't agree with some of his ideas such as his isolationism, but he is one of the most fearless public speakers and a powerful critic of the feminists.

Patrick Buchanan

Patrick Buchanan is a well known conservative who is a TV social commentator and Presidential candidate. When Clinton was not impeached for defiling the sacred Oval Office with his affair with a young employee and then lying in court, some conservatives lost heart. He wrote a powerful call to arms:

WHY WE CAN'T QUIT THE CULTURE WAR by PATRICK J. BUCHANAN February 19, 1999

With the Senate's failure to muster even a bare majority for the conviction of Bill Clinton, some conservatives are near despair.

"I no longer believe that there is a moral majority," writes veteran activist Paul Weyrich. "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values."

"If there really were a moral majority, Bill Clinton would have been driven out of office months ago," he laments. "The culture we are living in has become an ever-wider sewer. ... we are caught up in a cultural collapse ... so great that it simply overwhelms politics."

He urges conservatives to "drop out" and "quarantine" themselves from a poisoned culture and the politics it has produced. Henry Hyde echoes his despair, "I wonder if, after this culture war is over ... an America will survive that will be worth fighting to defend."

Is the culture war over? Has our culture become so debased that conservatives have no choice but to secede? To answer those questions, we must ask first: At its original and deepest level, what is the culture war all about? Who are the contending forces?

Ultimately, our culture war is about one question: Is God dead, or is God king? For centuries, this issue has been crucial. If God is dead, as Nietzsche wrote, everything is permissible, and eventually, one will logically reach the conclusion of Paris' student radicals of 1968: The only thing that is forbidden is to forbid.

But if God is king, men have a duty to try, as best they can, to conform their lives to his will and shape society in accordance with his law. Defection and indifferentism are not options open to us. We are commanded to fight.

Yet, looking back over recent decades, it is impossible to deny that an anti-Western counterculture has completed its long march through America's institutions, capturing the arts, entertainment, the public schools and colleges, the media and even many churches.

In politics, conservatives have won more than they have lost, but in the culture, the left and its Woodstock values have triumphed. Divorce, dirty language, adultery, blasphemy, euthanasia, abortion, pornography, homosexuality, cohabitation and so on were not unknown in 1960. But today, they permeate our lives.

The critical change has come in the attitudes of our elites. What our leaders once believed to be symptoms of social decline many now celebrate as harbingers of a freer, better society. What was once decried as decadence is now embraced as progress.

Born to sin, men have always done wrong. The sea change is that society no longer accepts the old distinctions between right and wrong. Thus, the young are astonished that Clinton, having been consecrated in the secular sacrament of free elections, might be punished and removed for something so trivial as perjury.

The counterculture of the 1960s is now the dominant culture. As in France in 1789, most of the intellectuals have gone over to the revolution. America has been converted, and her conversion may prove as historic as that of Constantinian Rome to Christianity.

Politics is the last contested battlefield of our culture war, for only through politics can the new cult, a militant and intolerant secularist faith that will abide no other, impose its values on us.

But how, then, does it avail us to withdraw from politics, to retreat, to give up? Where do we go? What shall we do?

We cannot quit. We can no more walk away from the culture war than we could walk away from the Cold War. For the culture war is at its heart a religious war about whether God or man shall be exalted, whose moral beliefs shall be enshrined in law, and what children shall be taught to value and abhor. With those stakes, to walk away is to abandon your post in time of war.

Is the battle truly lost? Or, as traditionalist Russell Kirk argued, can a culture renew itself by its very struggle to renew itself, even as the striving of sinners to lead good lives is the making of saints? Perhaps T.S. Eliot was right when he said there are no lost causes, because there are no won causes. The struggle is eternal.

What is needed today is the same awareness that finally hit the conservative men of America in the early 1770s. Loyal to their king, they had rejected the counsel of Sam Adams to rebel against him and fight. Finally, it dawned on these conservatives that they had to become radicals; they had to overthrow the king's rule to keep what they had. And they found in George Washington a conservative leader with the perseverance to take us to victory over an enemy superior in every way but courage and character.

Women in Combat

At the Republican National Convention in Houston, Texas August 17, 1992 Buchanan said, "The agenda Clinton & Clinton would impose on America" is "women in combat -- that's change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God's country. ... We stand with President Bush ... against putting American women in combat."

In the next chapter we will look more closely at the debate over women in combat.