Trentino, Embedded with the Troops, Reports on the CULTURE WAR

No one can say precisely when the Culture War started nor, indeed, exactly what it is, but roughly it is: A contest between Left and Right for the cultural high ground begun about two hundred years ago, sparked by the French Revolution and given grim impetus by Karl Marx and his successors.

For much of the twentieth century,the Left appeared to be winning all the battles. The Left was joyous and triumphant. The Right persisted, but the myths of the merits of socialism as benefactor of the poor and oppressed, deliverer of peace and prosperity, nurturer of liberty, fraternity, and equality held sway. We conservatives could hardly get a word in edgewise.

For most of the Left most of the time, Soviet Russia was a scientific, Marxian socialist utopian triumph. "I have been over into the future and it works," announced Lincoln Steffens, accounted then a worthy public intellectual who was sent to Lenin's Soviet Union by President Woodrow Wilson. From Steffens in 1919 to John Kenneth Galbraith in 1984, scarcely a discouraging word was heard. Oh, there were rumblings, rumors and reports of famine, staged criminal trials, and a vast archipelago of prison-work camps-death camps, and many of the faithful denounced Stalin but most continued to embrace socialism. They ignored its persistent failure to deliver the goods, Anything, in their dominant view, was preferable to despised capitalism.

According to Marxist theory, industrial capitalism was going to progressively immiserate the "working class." But it didn't turn out that way. It turned out that capitalism's working people, particularly in America grew immensely rich. How could that be? How could it be that talented, trained, and disciplined German engineers made such a mess of East Germany? How could Chinese in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan flourish while Chinese in Red China starved? These paradoxes were never addressed in the mainstream press, the media, as it's now called, as far as I am aware.

Monumental failure could not dam the torrents of Leftist words nor disguise their growing shrillness. Consider this indictment handed up in 1967 by Susan Sontag. "The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history. It is the white race and it alone--its ideologies and inventions--- which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." (Emphasis added.)

Note how delicately Miss Sontag shows off her acquaintance with the intellectual attainments of the West--she lists Boolean algebra right up there alongside Shakespeare and George Balanchine--my God, what a brain that little woman has!

Of course, Sontag's rant is extreme. Most on the Left are content to damn America and the West in more subtle ways. Consider this sample from Jane Fonda's speech to an audience at Michigan State University in 1969: "I would think that if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees, that we would someday become communist."

In general, the mainstream press was mainstream because it didn't identify statements of this sort as anything extraordinary. Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" did raise mainstream media hackles. How cowboyish and primitive of him to inject questions of morality into the public arena. Horrors, the guy might even be a Christian.

In academe, the suppression of ideas contrary to the Left dogma was all but complete. An overwhelming number of the professoriate were people of the Left who simply could not imagine anyone not of their persuasion being intelligent, not to say worthy of being paid any attention at all. Speech codes were enacted so administrators could make sure that campuses were offensive-speech free; truth, of course, would be no defense.

Notwithstanding the best efforts of the Left to ignore the evident falsity, the folly of their core beliefs, their moral and intellectual bankruptcy, the truth kept leaking out. To begin with, their PC language was laughable, absurd. Their sponsorship of multiculturalism, that is, their insistence that "a bone in the nose is the same as a man on the moon," was a transparently foolish attempt to denigrate the achievements of Western Civ (which has got to go). It vividly demonstrated the Left's contempt for America. More than contempt, actually. Think back to last March when at a grotesque anti-American rally masquerading as a "teach-in" at Columbia University none of the gathered faculty and students protested Assistant Professor Nicholas De Genova's call for "a million Mogadishus."

The Left was in the process of losing the Culture War long before De Genorva's hateful outburst. In December 2002, former Vice-president Albert Gore Jr., detected a huge right wing conspiracy. Mr. Gore's conspiracy bore a family resemblance to the "vast right wing conspiracy" Hillary Rodham Clinton had invoked to deny her husband's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.

Consider this Gorean outburst: Something will start at the Republican National Committee, inside the building, and it will explode the next day on the right-wing talk-show network and on Fox News and in the newspapers that play this game, The Washington Times and the others. And then they'll create a little echo chamber, and pretty soon they''ll start baiting the mainstream media for allegedly ignoring the story they''ve pushed into the zeitgeist. And then pretty soon the mainstream media goes out and disingenuously takes a so-called objective sampling, and lo and behold, these R.N.C. talking points are woven into the fabric of the zeitgeist.

Of course, this is loony talk. Mr. Gore had just been smacked down by his own party, forced to abandon his Quixotic pursuit of the presidency, a heavy blow that seemed to unhinge him. But at its center was truth. The Left had been pierced to the quick. Competing ideas from Conservatives and Libertarians were getting heard, and many of those ideas were evidently adjudged superior to those of the Left by a substantial portion of the citizenry.

The first response of the Left to this competition of ideas was to deny that it was happening. They had the ideas, didn't they? The right had no ideas worth considering. There was no competition possible. It must be that the Left wasn't articulating its message well enough.

This attitude of denial was a repetition of Fonda's Folly. The Left could not abide the notion that the citizens had heard, all right, and had chosen the other side. Why, that was unthinkable ...unless .. .the citizens were incorrigibly lamebrained or had been deluded by the merchants of deceit. Aha, that must be it.

Sorry to say, but this article is a puff piece of wishful thinking. The only place on earth where the conservative view isn't denigrated and ridiculed is the United States. Even in the US, the conservative view is castigated beyond belief by the mass media and the intellectuals. Judging by the stink of the sewer that is popular culture, I'd say the liberal left is triumphant, indeed, all over the world.

It may be wishful thinking, but I believe this "Terror" war will move the politics of the American voters towards the conservative side, and that is the good result, the bad I am afraid is a lot more American civilians will die before this ends.
ps: I read your comments on "Free Trade" and agree with much of it. Especially the fact that with increasing Taxation and Regulation ignored by the politicos and the other pundits is the root cause of job loss and continuing decline in this countries SOL-standards of living. Unfortunately this decline will accelerate in MHO!

>>The Left had been pierced to the quick. Competing ideas from Conservatives and Libertarians were getting heard, and many of those ideas were evidently adjudged superior to those of the Left by a substantial portion of the citizenry. <<

This is accurate and retrained, not puffery. Conservative and Libertarian voices are being heard as never before. The Left is responding by throwing a hissy fit. FR is flourishing and that's ample proof of our strength and vitality. Yes, the Left denigrates us, but they're just whitling near the graveyard, IMHO.

The articles above all rely on dropping the names of the very few conservative pundits, writers, and artists that we may be familiar with because we read things like FR, but I'll bet the greater majority of Americans, let alone the rest of the world, don't even know they exist. It has taken the leftists and other proponents of the modernist project over two hundred years of relentless advances in all areas of endeavor to bring the sorry state of world affairs we see today. A couple of years of conservative punditry won't change this overwhelming fact.

Trentino's column does not rely on dropping names of pundits of the Right. He points to the debilitating effects of the plain and obvious failure of socialism wherever it has been tried.

It isn't necessary for Conservative thinkers to be known by name nor their works scrutinized by huge populations. The effects of their work percolate through all manner of publications, affect the ideas communicated by others. Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia read and was inspired by Hayek and Mises. Milton Friedman's ideas have taken hold in the minds of people who have never read a word of his.

The Chinese Politburo may cling grimly to the memory of Mao and proclaim themselves Marxist-Leninists, but they're lying, and everyone knows it. Their serfs no longer mass in Tienamen Square with their litttle red books of Mao'a mouthings. They're too busy working in market-driven factories.

The Soviet Union is caput, the Iron Curtain rusted away. Only tenured professors in western universities believe in Marx now.

Yeah, we're winning.

I don't want this exchange to degenerate to a tit for tat roundabout. But I still think that you're missing the larger picture. I maintain that the liberal-left modernists are more influential in every area than the conservatives, and I don't see this changing at all. As a nation, we see the collapse of any sense of a constitutionally restrained government (eg. the liberal Supreme Court and a liberal judiciary), rules and regulations that stifle economic freedom and political liberty multiply unchecked (eg. the laws of the land require a national library filled with microfiche to contain them), sexual libertinism and perversity is mainstreamed (eg. homosexual marriage and adoption is preferred over decent chastity, abortion and euthanasia have become unrestrictable practices), Judeo-Christian traditions are ridiculed and banned, while every other variant of religion and pseudo-religion is advanced (eg. Moslemism, paganism, and atheism become protected while Christianity is relentlessly suppressed, and Darwinistic scientism becomes the official world view).

And that's just in the US. Everywhere else in the world, these trends are magnified. Europe and Asia are less and less free every year, economically and politically (eg. over-regulated trade agreements, the EU attempts to crush economic and religious freedom, the cultural collapse of Western enclaves of civilization. Political correctness and its intellectual bankruptcy has swept through the western world to a stifling degree. The Middle East and Africa have descended into hell-holes of medieval barbarity and savagery, due to the fact that the Western colonialists left these ignorant people to their own devices. They've since reverted to their pagan selves. But in the eyes of the majority of the people of the world, the US is the "Evil Empire" and the "Great Satan".

Given all this, how on earth can you assert that "the conservatives are winning"?

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