The Stupidity of Sophisticates ... Mark Steyn

Last week, I swung by the Bill Bennett show to chew over the news of the hour. A few minutes before my grand entrance, one of Bill's listeners had taken issue with the idea that these Supreme Court decisions weren't the end and, if you just got on with your life and tended to your garden, things wouldn't be so bad:

Claudine came on and said that's what Germans reckoned in the 1930s: just keep your head down and the storm will pass. How'd that work out?

In one corner, we have government recognition of marriage contracts between gays. In the other corner, we have Jews, Catholics, gays, their sympathizes [sic] and other undesirables being put in Nazi concentration camps.

One of these things is nothing like the other, unless you're a lunatic. Maybe the reason conservatives keep "losing everything that matters" is because they really can't tell the difference. Which causes increasing numbers of people to recognize them as lunatics.

Since you call me and Claudine "lunatics", allow me to return the compliment and call you an historical illiterate. If "one of these things is nothing like the other", it's because that's never the choice: It's never a question of being Sweden, say, vs being the Islamic State (although, if you're a Jew in Malmö, they're looking a lot less obviously dissimilar than you might think).

Nathan Bedford's Third Maxim of Politics: Culture Trumps Politics and Bottom up Beats Top-Down.

In the wake of World War II Hollywood knew who the bad guys were but at the end of the Cold War Hollywood never got the memorandum about the Soviets, Cubans, Chinese, or the North Koreans, at least not to the same degree. This is understandable, if you are perchance a Jewish producer or director financing or directing a movie, your natural inclination is to portray mass murderers of Jews for what they were. The same tendency obtains throughout the media.

But a political writer on the right who does not have a culture receptive to conservative values because it has been conditioned by movies and television, should choose his historical examples very carefully. When Mark Steyn chooses to make his point by pointing to Nazis rather than Soviets he makes his choice drawing on his consummate literary skills but I would rather he considered his metaphors in the light of how the choice might condition the electorate.

Our media discourse has come to a point at which a conservative observer must ask, are there no villains on the left? It is in this that context I urge conservative spokespeople (there's little point in exhorting right-wing moviemakers or television producers because there are so few of them) to choose a left-wing example to exemplify evil whenever practicable.

I could extend the same observations to media portrayals of Christian men of God. These people, especially if Protestant, are invariably depicted as hypocritical and/or overbearing and absurd. Jewish prelates are portrayed with a kind of bemused respect. Generally, Catholic priests are treated better than Protestant ministers; Catholic nuns are treated better than Catholic priests but one senses that all of that is changing rapidly as nice distinctions among Christians disappear and we are all tarred with the same brush.

When a conservative writer reaches out to make a parallel example of a villain, let him look to a secularist, to an atheist, to a hater of Christians of whom there is certainly a surplus. When Christian life is distorted in movies let us react in indignation claiming all the rights of a defamed minority, in short, demanding that Christians be accorded the same decent respect enjoyed by leftist "victims" who are currently in fashion.

When a movie portrays a hero reaching deep within his inner character to overcome all obstacles to save the world and get the girl, let us routinely point out that Hollywood virtually never chooses to have a hero be motivated by his faith. It is okay for heroes to be motivated by emotional love, Freudian childhood misunderstandings with their fathers, bereavement, or even homosexuality, anything but the courage that one might derive from Christian faith.

When I was a lad it was still the practice to find examples in the Bible to illustrate a point or to illuminate a side of character. Today, even conservative writers are liable to look to a character in Star Wars or in a Harry Potter novel to make a point. The tendency is to secularize our mythology and that results in secularizing our epistemology. A secular mythology inevitably produces a leftist electorate. We lose the myth, we lose the language, we lose the election.

We still have a First Amendment which gives us the power to choose our mode of expression. We conservatives should use it to fight our corner. We are in a culture war, a war conceived by the Frankfurt school, implemented by Saul Alinsky and waged by Barak Obama. The weapons in this war include language, metaphor, myth and historical examples.

The left rarely fails to deploy these weapons to their advantage. We must do the same.

Although it is superficially unfashionable to compare someone to Hitler the truth is if you can successfully call someone a Nazi- or a racist-the debate is over. You are quite correct, no one argued the truth as you pointed out more effectively than Jonah Goldberg in his book, Liberal Fascism, that communist and Nazi doctrine are offshoots of the same poisonous root.

When we deal with the impact on the electorate of our choice of words or our choice of myth, metaphor, analogies or historical example we must decide whether to directly make our point or to detour and educate the public about the true historical roots of fascism. Once we embark on that course we risk being put on the side of the Nazis because in the public mind does not easily distinguish between defending purity of expression or Auschwitz.

By all means conflate the Nazis with the communists but do not be maneuvered into a position of defending Nazis.

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