Conservatism & Cultural AntibodiesBy Rod Dreher
April 18, 2022
Politico wonders why conservatives actually think they can demonize Disney — and what that says about conservatism. Excerpts:
Disney has always been an explicitly morally instructive company; its characters were used as propaganda during World War II. Walt Disney’s original vision for Walt Disney World in Orlando was a model for a healthy civic society, among many other examples. Conservatives now simply disapprove of the corporation’s chosen morality, which includes commonly accepted progressive ideas about multiculturalism and personal identity.
The story of fighting back against that gradual, seemingly inevitable leftward cultural creep is more or less the story of conservatism itself. The incentives and pressures that have led conservatives on this particular quest, however — one that’s not only almost certainly hopeless, but that has led them into sinister rhetorical territory in referring to opponents of the law as “groomers,” or manipulative pedophiles — are quite modern, and reveal how much both our cultural and political landscape have shifted over just the past decade of American life.
“Sinister rhetorical territory” — right. The real problem is with people who call this stuff out for what it is. Anyway, let’s move on:
They now accuse notionally LGBT-friendly companies like Disney of “grooming” children — an astonishingly cynical rhetorical flourish that, by misappropriating a term used to describe pedophiles, manages to conflate homosexuality and pedophilia, profoundly disrespect actual survivors of child sex abuse by using their experience as a political cudgel, and invoke the specter of far-right conspiracy theories like “Pizzagate” all at once. (The backlash has also predictably and depressingly caught sex education in its blast radius, which has been repeatedly proven as the most effective tactic to prevent sexual abuse.)
Oh for pity’s sake, really? Nobody is conflating homosexuality with pedophilia. Nobody thinks Douglas Murray, Andrew Sullivan, or Camille Paglia are a danger to children. What we’re talking about is the grooming of little children to accept radical sexual and gender identities (e.g., “pansexual”) at a time when these kids are putty in the hands of teachers and other authority figures. It teaches them to think of themselves as sexual beings, and their every desire as constitutive of their identity. Both gays and straights doing this are grooming kids into a highly sexualized culture — one that seems obvious to many of us to be headed straight for the literal sexualization of children, as in turning them into objects of sexual desire.
To pretend that objecting to this is being Anita Bryant is rhetorically dishonest, and maybe even sinister. But anyway, let’s go on. Author Derek Robertson has a point here, though:
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Nevertheless, Robertson also gets to a reason that I wrote The Benedict Option (and now, Live Not By Lies). We on the cultural and religious right really have lost this war. We absolutely have to wage guerrilla warfare when we can — that’s what Rufo is doing — but the deeper currents of American culture are moving strongly to the left. This is not something we can vote ourselves out of. Unless American conservatives can make these groomer woke capitalists afraid of us, nothing will change. Are there enough of us to do that? I hope so, and maybe there is right now. But it won’t be forever. As Eric Kaufmann warned, based on his research, the Millennials and Generation Z are the wokest generations ever.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/conservatism-cultural-antibodies-disney/
