By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
It is easy to see why Americans with traditional values would be in a gloomy mood. It seems as if the country is turning against us; that behaviors and beliefs that would have been seen as bizarre and inimical to a virtuous society in the America of our youth are now mainstream, everything from same-sex marriage to legalized pornography and drug use.
We see the media making no effort to disguise their contempt for us. And it would not be an exaggeration to hold that American higher education is dedicated to ensuring that future generations of American will not think as we do about the important questions in life. Not good.
But all may not be lost. We should keep in mind the many pendulum swings that have characterized American history. Ideas and movements once seen as lost causes have risen again. The American left, for example. As hard as it is to believe in the light of recent events, it was not that long ago that “liberal” was a word that politicians ran from like the kiss of death. Even now, many on the left favor the term “progressive.”
Think back to the early 1970s, when Kevin Phillips was all over the television dial explaining the logic behind his book The Emerging Republican Majority. In it, he argued that a political alliance between suburbanites, disaffected blue-collar workers, and Southerners was going to lead to control of our government by conservative Republicans for as far as the eye could see.
We could also recall the early 1990s, when the talk shows were batting around in earnest tones Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History, in which Fukuyama argued that we have reached the end of mankind’s cultural and political evolution in the form of Western liberal democracy.
Or as he phrased it: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” I guess ISIS and Vladimir Putin didn’t read Fukuyama’s book.
And we could reminisce about the many times, not that long ago, when Rush Limbaugh would joke that he was determined to not let liberals disappear from the scene completely; that he wanted to “keep a few of them around, to make sure that Americans never forgot what they were like and make the mistake of listening to them again.” (I am quoting from memory but am pretty close to Rush’s exact words.)
The left did not surrender in the face of this conservative ascendancy. Instead, they hunkered down and preached their message all the more fervently in Hollywood and the academy. It worked. We now have Bill Maher, the HBO television commentator, gloating that Republicans are “going crazy” because the United States has become the kind of country that atheists and leftists have always wanted.
But if the pendulum is going to swing back toward conservative values, we have to ask: What will propel it? Bodies in motion tend to stay in motion. Maybe it is wishful thinking, but I submit that it will be precisely the cultural changes that the liberals are pointing to with pride these days. There is reason to think that there will come a time, maybe sooner than we think, when the American people will recoil from what is being pushed upon them by Hollywood, the universities, and the left-wing activists.
The prospect of having their children grow up in a country, where “Caitlyn” Jenner and homeless young people roaming the streets of Denver and San Francisco in a drug haze are the “new normal,” could lead to a backlash even among lifelong liberals.
(The CNN poll in early July showing that 57 percent of the American people agree with the proposition that the Confederate flag stands for “Southern pride” rather than racism is not entirely unrelated to our theme. Those who voted that way in the CNN poll were making clear that they were not going to be browbeaten into accepting the campaign by the media and the academy about what the Confederate flag represents.)
I’ll take this a step further: It could be that the current societal decay will lead to a “Catholic moment” such as that envisioned by the late 19th-century writer Orestes Brownson. Brownson was a convert from Protestantism who turned to the Catholic Church as a way to combat the loss of moral standards he feared inevitable in a democracy, a fall from grace that he was convinced Protestantism could not prevent.
Brownson argued that democracy — because it placed decision-making in the hands of the masses — required a moral citizenry with consciences shaped by religious belief; that an inner discipline was need to replace the authority of the kings and an established churches of Old Regime Europe, the Europe of Altar and Throne.
Brownson feared that Protestantism was ill-equipped to provide that inner discipline since, as he argued in his Essays and Reviews, it left “religion entirely to the control of the individual, who selects his own creed, or makes a creed to suit himself” and “submits to no such restraints but such as are self-imposed.”
He concluded that Protestantism could not maintain a virtuous society because “it asserts the universal and absolute supremacy of man, and his unrestricted right to subject religion, morals, and politics to his own will, passion, or caprice.”
Brownson feared that a democratic majority, encouraged by Protestantism to define truth and virtue individually, would inevitably display a “radical tendency…wide, deep, and active.”
Russell Kirk explored the implications of Brownson’s theories in The Conservative Mind back in 1953: “Ceasing to regard anything as sacred or venerable, spurning what is old, injuring what is fixed, setting adrift all religious, domestic, and social institutions, we borrow nothing from the past and ignore the data of experience. We even try to deny that language has exact meaning.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Maybe like a modern Republican politician trying to explain his position on same-sex marriage after a reporter points out to him that “public opinion” now favors such a redefinition of marriage.
Perhaps the deer-in-the headlights confusion of that politician will prompt all of us to see that morality, decency, and truth cannot be defined by 50 percent plus one of the population at any given moment; that there is a need for a moral authority in life superior to the shifting winds of public opinion shaped by the flattery of demagogues.
When that revelation takes place, society may experience a “come to Jesus moment” far more profound that what is implied by that hackneyed figure of speech.
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