When Will Conservatives Understand That It’s Not a Contest of Ideas?It’s a competition for jobs.
Mark Bauerlein - January 22nd, 2020
Even as Donald Trump continues to frustrate #TheResistance after three years of ceaseless fabrication and hysteria, conservatives must not forget just how close they are to the edge. We have a defender in the White House, but the social ideas of the Left prevail in nearly every other elite and cultural space in the United States.
The election of November 2016, the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the Mueller report debacle, the Iran turnaround, and other wins for conservatives may be satisfying, but they have not shaken the leftist lock on our institutions one bit. The simmering stew of LGBT rights, toxic masculinity, white privilege, disparate impact calculations, and Millennial social justice campaigns has become dogma in corporate America, media, higher education, K-12 public schools (and many private schools, too), Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Broadway, the art world, museums, libraries . . .
It functions in all those realms as a hegemony, a body of beliefs and values that are wielded by those in power in such a way that a society comes to accept them as the ordinary and proper criteria of judgment. A hegemony distinguishes good from bad, legitimate from illegitimate, qualified from unqualified. And it gives people the capacity to act on that judgment. A criterion isn’t hegemonic unless it has force behind it.
(The term “hegemony†as used here comes out of Marxist thought. We should always consider the Left’s vocabulary of critique when addressing the current situation. The Left aims its lexicon of “hegemony,†“privilege,†“exclusion,†“normativity,†etc., at conservatives and their putative aggressions and discriminations. The language is altogether accurate, but not in the way leftists think. It describes very well the Left’s behaviors, not the Right’s. There is no better analyst of the Left than Michel Foucault.)
Margaret Thatcher once said that you have to win the argument before you win the vote, but when the Left controls the institutions—or rather, screens conservatives out of those institutions by applying tests of social opinion (“Do you oppose or favor same-sex marriage?â€)—Thatcher’s formulation can no longer hold. For 30 years, conservatives have won many debates, issued best-selling books, and swayed public opinion in many areas, but they haven’t slowed the long march of the Left through the institutions at all. For example, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and writings by Roger Kimball, Dinesh D’Souza, Richard Bernstein, and countless others convinced the public that political correctness was becoming a serious problem on college campuses, but the coercive uniformity of opinion in higher education has only gotten worse since then. While the Right was beating them in the ideas arena, the Left was claiming office space...
