Cross Posted From
It Affects You
Yesterday when I wrote about Paul Weyrich's opposition to Conservative foreign policy, I went over a few more articles authored by this alpha Conservative. Weyrich is someone we must take seriously. Please don't confuse that with taking his ideas seriously, which in most cases is something we must certainly not do. But we must take the weight of his ideas seriously. Weyrich has been near the center of Conservatism since the early days, being a founder or co-founder of some of the most far right and influential Conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Free Congress Foundation and the Moral Majority. Weyrich is not an outsider or an operative; he is as much a part of the VRWC as one can be. He has been one to direct the VRWC, not follow it.
And now, he wants the "Culture Wars" to be the VRWC's top priority.
When Weyrich talks a little about
the Conservative plan to dominate our culture, you can bet it's more than idle talk. He has the means (through his many organizations, the press, and large financial backers) and the followers to try to make good on his words. This isn't speculation; this is what he's intending to do.
Weyrich means to tackle the culture wars (or maybe they'll call it the Global War on Culture - GWOC for short) much the same way Conservatives tackled politics. He doesn't offer a step-by-step plan, but two traditional Conservative tactics are right there:
- Villanize opponents: According to Weyrich, our liberal agenda is to acheive "the destruction of traditional Western culture and the Christian religion." So not kidding. Only he doesn't always call us liberals. Sometimes he likes to calls us "cultural Marxists." How cute. No need to waste energy disputing or lend any credibility to such out and out outlandish claims. Instead, I'm just going to expose them.
- Play the victim and underdog: Weyrich tells us that despite winning elections, "the left's cultural victory trumps ours." No matter how much control Conservatives have over the government or any specific institution, poor Conservatives are always being oppressed. They will always complain about activist judges, a biased media, a liberal Hollywood, or anything else for that matter. They need to play not merely an underdog, but a victim who must overcome a bully. "We have some ideas that we'd like you to listen to" does not make a very compelling narrative, while "all we want to do is honor our Christian values, but these big bad bullies are tramping on our freedom of religion" does. People generally want fairness, and most relate to the bully narrative. Conservatives play on that to get concessions where otherwise there should be none. The line continually moves to the right. Weyrich goes on to say that we control "almost every cultural venue: the entertainment industry (which is now the most powerful force in our culture), the government schools, the media, and even many churches." You have some idea of what he's targeting.
Weyrich makes it quite clear just what place the GWOC holds on his agenda:
The next conservatism will have to have solving this problem as its central theme. Conservatives have already taken some important steps in doing so. Starting in the mid-1980s when the Free Congress Foundation introduced "cultural conservatism," parts of the conservative movement have come to realize that if we lose the culture war, we also lose everything else. Culture is no longer at the periphery of conservatives' concerns, although it may not yet be at the center where I think it needs to be.[...]
The decline, decay and seemingly endless degradation of America's culture must be recognized as conservatism's most important and most difficult challenge in any new conservative agenda.
I know how tempting it is to dismiss this sort of thing. It seems implausible that it could work. Most of the Social Conservative ideas forwarded by the Religious Right are sufficiently out of the mainstream that they could never succeed in pulling this off, right? I'm sure that's what we said about their out of the mainstream economic ideas, or their out of the mainstream foreign policy, or environmentalism, or... well you get the idea.
It's already working. Conservatives and their Noise Machine are masters in the arts of obfuscation and sleight of hand. How many stories about creationism intelligent design have you read on the front pages of the New York Times recently? See what I mean?
With politics, we did not catch on until they were entrenched. We cannot let that happen in their GWOC. How do we stop it? For one, we identify this as part of the Conservative Power Grab. Their Power Grab does not stop in Washington. It is trying to reach into Americans' private lives and into their bedrooms.