Drowning Cultural Conservatism
by Rod Dreher, The American Conservative:
From time to time in this space, a fellow religious conservative will attempt to cheer us all up by claiming that our tribe is more fecund, and will outbreed secular liberals. It’s a nice thought, but there’s no reason to believe that it’s true. In Italy, in 2016, a sociologist released a study showing that of the (small number) of Italian Catholics who considered themselves to be “convinced and active believers,” only 22 percent of those families reported having children who were also convinced and active believers.” As other studies of religious practice have found, having parents who are convinced and active believers is one key factor in whether or not young people practice the faith into their own adulthood, but it is no guarantee.
Daniel McCarthy writes about the total domination of left-liberals in cultural and culture-forming institutions, and what this means for the future of conservatives. Examining the dynamics of US culture and politics, McCarthy says that political victories for a Trumpist GOP masks the collapse of social and cultural conservatism. Excerpt:
The trouble with this, for Republicans and cultural conservatives both, is that even success at the ballot box will not check the consolidation of left-wing social power. The opinion elite, educators and the media, shape the environment in which business takes place, and in which business people themselves are formed. Cultural conservatives can home school, they can send their children to Hillsdale or Christendom or Grove City College — but where will they work when they graduate? Even pizza companies must follow the unwritten laws laid down by the opinion police. The insider left, in its new form, has strategies to win at the cultural, economic, and political levels, each of which reinforces the others. The right can barely hold its own in politics and is without any cultural leverage over economics. The Tea Party and Trump succeeded at least in channeling the great popular anger at the new insider left, but the deplorable Americans on whom they’ve relied are scheduled for extinction by opioids and economic euthanasia.
Conservatives can’t wish their plight away — they can only take a stand on the ground they already occupy in politics, while they turn their minds to nexus of cultural and economic power that is their greatest challenge today.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough to my conservative readers: read the whole thing.
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