If you ask me the only culture that progressives have won is popular culture. I think Brooks confuses progressivism with secularism. Although the two have many things in common, they are by no means the same thing (YouTube blogger Sargon of Akkad can attest to that). If by progressives he means cultural marxists like BLM and Antifa, that's pretty much confined to universities and inner cities. If you want an example of a place where progressives have won the culture war, look at Western Europe.
They haven’t just won it, it’s been a massacre.
Same sex marriage, gender fluidity, bathroom laws, white privilege, diversity idiocies, openly gays in the military, the demolition of borders and nation states,the diminution of family, toxic masculinity, the takeover by the left of 90% of major public, private, religiouz and corporate institutions.
Brooks says: "Self-marginalized"????How ridiculous, if one considers the people who live in the large land mass beyond the fringe acreage of big cities on the East/West coastlines as being that "self-marginalized" populace! Hillary Clinton, on foreign soil, recently acknowledged that her supporters were centered in those population centers, which she described in terms of the GDP.
Such so-called "progressives" as the Clintons and Obama also portray themselves as the "intellectual" elite, although they appear to be totally bereft of any real knowledge or understanding of the great ideas which were the seedbed of Ameria's successful 200-year experiment in liberty.
Today's liberals, especially these so-called "progressives," with all of their domination of academia and Far Left politics, seem to fit into a category described in an essay by T.S. Eliot on Virgil:
"In our time, when men seem more than ever to confuse wisdom with knowledge and knowledge with information and to try to solve the problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism not of space but of time--one for which history is merely a chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and have been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no share."(Bold added for emphasis)
Without intellectual anchoring in the enduring ideas which provided the philosophical foundation of America's Declaration of Independence and Constitution, their vain imaginations of superiority only expose their limited world view.
Yet, the America which rose from obscurity to greatness, from crude hoes and axes to putting a man on the moon, and from oppression by King George to a symbol of liberty for millions all over the world--that America provides shelter for them, even as they attempt to "change" her into something unimagined by the Founders.
If they are allowed to succeed in their own little provincial experiment, their posterity never will know the "blessings of Liberty" proclaimed by the Preamble to America's Constitution.
Now would be a good time for conservatives to read Dr. Russell Kirk's "The Conservative Mind, which can be read online, by the way.
In Kirk's last chapter he reviews the works of poets and writers, quoting lines which now seem to bear a strikinig resemblance to the players on the stage in American politics today.
For instance, in Robert Frost's "A Case for Jefferson," Frost writes of the character Harrison:
"Harrison loves my country too
But wants it all made over new.
. . . .
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens.
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it made over new."
Yes, the pseudointellectuals who recently occupied the White House, and, even now, the media, and much of Congress fancy themselves "intellectuals."
By their words and actions, however, they display that provinciality Dr. Kirk recalls as having been described by T. S. Eliot (see above) as being one of time and place, seeming to have no intellectual grounding in ideas older than their own little experience in dabbling and discussing Mao, Marx, and other theoreticians.
America's written Constitution deserves protectors whose minds are out of their "teens" in terms of their understanding of civilization's long struggle for liberty.
It certainly deserves protectors who do not consider it a "flawed" document because that Constitution does not permit the government it structures to run rough shod over the rights of its "KEEPERS, the People" (Justice Story).
Blasting it "all to smithereens" seems to be the goal of the Far Left which recently had control of the Executive and Legislative branches of the government.
Their spokesmen, both legislators and media, rely on what they must believe to be the ignorance of the American people when they make their ridiculous claims. They have been outwitted, however, by an increasingly knowledgeable citizenry who are using the miracles of technology to study for themselves ancient and modern writings on the ideas of liberty versus those of tyranny. As Jefferson wisely observed:
"History, by apprising the people of the past, will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views."
It’s the opposite.
The left are at the point where they need to violently shut their opponents up. They do not want debate. Their anti-liberty culture can only implode. This goes hand-in-hand with their arrogance. This is what happens when you live in a bubble.
Conservative values embrace individual liberty, driven by Judeo-Christian ethics. This cannot be destroyed. It can be mocked, ridiculed, down-trodden, etc. but there’s a natural outcome to progressive thought. Tyranny. At which point it falls apart.
They cannot “win” - they just think they can and if they’re loud enough, violent enough, bully enough, they believe what looks like a “win”, as nobody is allowed to argue, is in fact a final victory...when it is only the beginning.
It’s just like trying to crush Christianity. It never works. The very concepts of Christianity are against tyranny and people always see it when they’re living under it.
