The Peril Of Conservative Culture-War ComplacencyBy Rod Dreher
March 20, 2022
A few years back, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said to a group of international visitors of which I was part that he hoped we would consider Budapest our “intellectual home.” I’ve thought about that a lot over the years since, most recently this past weekend at the Danube Institute’s excellent one-day academic conference, titled The Post-Liberal Turn And The Future Of British Conservatism.
Eric Kaufmann, the academic I was most looking forward to meeting, had to cancel because he came down with Covid, but he did manage to deliver his lecture by Zoom. And what a lecture it was! When the video recording goes up on the DI’s website, I’ll post it, because you really need to hear it to get the force of its urgency.
Kaufmann’s main point was that conservatives have to make fighting the culture war their most important goal — more important than economics, taxes, or anything else. Why? Because his research on the attitudes of younger generations shows that they are illiberal leftists who don’t believe conservatives have the right to participate in society. “I don’t think we are ready for what’s coming,” he said.
Kaufmann based his remarks on recent research he carried out for the Manhattan Institute; he discusses his findings in-depth in this City Journal article from earlier this year. Excerpts:
The clash between socialist and liberal economics defined the late twentieth century, and this century brings a cultural version of that struggle. Today’s culture wars pit advocates of equal outcomes and special protection for identity groups against defenders of due process, equal treatment, scientific reason, and free speech. Our political map is taking shape around this new divide between what I will call cultural socialism and cultural liberalism.
Cultural socialism, which values equal results and harm prevention for identity groups over individual rights, has inspired race-based pedagogies and harsh punishments for controversial speech. Rooted in the idea that historically marginalized groups are sacred, this view is no passing fad. Letters, associations, universities, and media defending free speech notwithstanding, the young adherents of cultural socialism are steadily overturning the liberal ethos of the adult world.
Survey data from my new Manhattan Institute report, “The Politics of the Culture Wars in Contemporary America,” show the scale of the challenge. While the American public leans two-to-one in favor of cultural liberalism, a majority of Americans under 30 incline toward cultural socialism. For instance, while 65 percent of Americans over 55 oppose Google’s decision to fire James Damore for having questioned the firm’s training on gender equity, those under 30 support the firing by a 59–41 margin. Similar gaps separate young and old people on similar instances of cancel culture, such as the oustings of Gina Carano (an actor fired from Star Wars for social media posts) and Brendan Eich (the former CEO of Mozilla forced out in 2014 for opposing gay marriage in 2008). Only part of this disparity stems from the fact that young people lean left: centrist young people, for instance, support Google over Damore by a 61–39 margin, while centrists over 55 support Damore over Google 58–42.
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Kaufmann added that conservatives have to have plans to retake public institutions, as well as to bring political scrutiny to public institutions (e.g., universities) to force them to be fair and neutral. Defending the rights of individuals is more important that respecting institutional autonomy. If the state will not intervene to protect political and religious minorities from discrimination, and to ban woke policies on speech, and so forth, it will only get worse.
He made it very clear that, based on his research, conservatives are going to face a fight for their right to exist within institutions and in the public square. Kaufmann later added, in the Q&A period, that conservatives are either too “stupid” (his word) to see the seriousness of the threat to wokeness, or are too stubbornly distracted by the things they prefer to talk about (like cutting taxes) to recognize that if we lose the culture, we will have lost the opportunity to argue for anything else.
Kaufmann was followed by James Orr, a lecturer at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and a bruised but unbowed veteran of the culture war in that university. (It was Orr who initially tried to bring Jordan Peterson to campus to speak, was shot down, then fought back, finally succeeding.) Orr told the audience that conservatives should not make the mistake of thinking that wokeness is shallow. No, he said, it’s deep, and it’s a very serious threat to the free society. Only the State is strong enough to regulate all this and to defend liberty and sanity. Conservatives would be foolish to think that we can get by with modest responses to this threat.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/eric-kaufmann-peril-of-culture-war-complacency/
