The Tory Jacobins
by Melanie Phillips:
The reason why conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have lost their way so badly in recent years is that they never understood, and paid scant attention to, the culture wars. In Britain, this has now led some of them to come out as warriors on the wrong side.
Conservatism is not an ideology but an attitude of mind. It involves identifying and holding onto what is most valuable and defending it against erosion or attack. In the 18th century this was embodied in the thinking of Edmund Burke, widely considered to be the philosophical godfather of conservative thought, when he defended freedom and human rights against the barbarism of the French Revolution.
In the 20th century, conservatives knew what they were defending and against whom. They were defending liberty and democracy against Soviet communism. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they assumed their fox had been shot since everyone seemed to have accepted capitalism.
What they never understood – at least, most of them – was that the left-wing war to destroy the west had not in fact ended but merely shifted its strategy. Instead of the workers seizing control of the levers of the economy, the left would now seize control of the levers of the culture – the universities, media, civil service, churches, the legal profession – and subvert them from within.
Its aim was to undermine and weaken the normative values of the west and then flip them, so that what was transgressive became normative while what was normative became ostracised as transgressive. That way the west would be destroyed and would be transformed into… quite what was never very clear, but some kind of new world order.
The institutions at which this cultural revolution took particular aim were the family and the education system – the principal means though which a culture replicates itself.
And since the purpose was to destroy the west’s core values, and since these core values were enshrined in the Hebrew Bible and the Christianity that embodied those Biblical moral codes in western civilisation, traditional Christianity was directly in its cross-hairs. It had to allow itself to become diluted by secularism to became a pale and meaningless shadow of its former self, went the threat, or else it would be attacked and destroyed.
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