Push-Pull: The way the culture war works, unendingly - ongoing cultural battle between the political right and left

National Review, March 5, 2001 by Stanley Kurtz

Political correctness often succeeds by creating the illusion that no other points of view exist. Go to a bookstore, for example, in a tony liberal neighborhood, and you will see that books by, say, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly are not displayed prominently (as would befit their bestseller status), but filed away on the shelves. When is a bestseller not a bestseller? When it contains views the P.C. crowd would like to wish away.

The ultimate expression of this desire to erase the other side may be the oft-heard claim that the culture war is over, and that conservatives lost. After the Republican love-fest in Philadelphia, with Pat Buchanan gone and social conservatism invisible, the culture war was supposed to be finished. But ever since the appearance of that blue-red map of the Gore and Bush nations, the persistence of our social divide has become inescapable. Indeed, President Bush's understanding of the indispensable role of social conservatives in his coalition is what led to the current culture clash over John Ashcroft.

So the culture war didn't disappear after all. The talk about a permanent conservative defeat does signal a significant social change; but what has changed is only that moral assumptions formerly taken for granted have now been put on the table for discussion. They are being discussed, but have not been finally decided. Conservatives can no longer expect majority agreement with their cultural views, but the Left has a problem too: Its cultural program is too utopian to shape a stable, coherent society. That means we're in for a long-term cultural battle in which neither side gains total victory.

Once the hippies and antiwar activists began their long march through the institutions, war was inevitable. By 1996, talk of conservative defeat had begun. The Left chafed at the Republican Congress and Clintonian triangulation in politics, but consoled itself with a declaration of victory in the culture: The academy and the media were now firmly in its grip. Gay Day at Disney World, the failure of William Bennett to make a dent in Hollywood, and the tepid public reaction to Madonna's out-of-wedlock child-all were taken as signs that the Right had finally lost the cultural battle. But the crucial moment for conservatives came in early 1999, with President Clinton's acquittal in the Senate. Clinton's victory led conservative activist Paul Weyrich to declare, "I no longer believe that there is a moral majority." Weyrich warned of "a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics."

Jubilant liberals seized on Weyrich's concession as proof of conservative surrender; but both sides were confusing the collapse of an unequivocally traditional majority with the end of the culture war. Yes, social conservatives have suffered a serious setback: Anything approaching unanimity on cultural questions no longer exists. But the weakness of the Left's alternative makes its own ultimate victory unlikely. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, all the utopian experiments fell apart owing to their own incoherence. Sexual liberation ran aground on the shoals of jealousy, male/female difference, and the needs of children. Communal sharing and collective identity were irreconcilable with individual liberty. Group solidarities splintered indefinitely into subgroups, and this led to paralysis. Turning the personal into the political made for intrusive tyranny.

This same incoherent utopianism remains embedded in the cultural program of the Left. The culture of the Sixties is basically unsustainable; it can only live parasitically, on the body of tradition. Each victory for the new morality can only lead to yet more radical-and less realistic-demands, eventually provoking a traditionalist reaction.

Take homosexuality. It's true that America's view of homosexuality has shifted irrevocably. Only a small minority of today's Americans would have us return to the Fifties, when homosexuality was so shameful that gays were barred from positions in the State Department for fear of blackmail. Still, although many Americans welcome increased tolerance of gays, most would nonetheless object to full equivalence between homosexuality and heterosexuality-that's why majorities continue to oppose gay marriage. But complete removal of any distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality remains the program of gay activists. In the end, this would require not so much gay marriage, as the complete elimination of state-sanctioned marriage in favor of an infinitely variable set of family and sexual arrangements. And, as we're beginning to see in a few states, total equivalence would also require secondary-school programs in which homosexuality and heterosexuality are presented to children as equally legitimate alternatives.

Gay activists know all this, and patiently continue to push their radical program-incrementally. But the program is impossible: It rests on the utopian premise that the stigma of homosexuality can be entirely removed, even though that stigma originates in the primal fact that well over 90 percent of the population is heterosexual. Whatever the state does, gays will always feel like outsiders, simply because the vast majority of people take heterosexuality for granted. A misguided attempt to "overcome" this preference can only lead to reaction from the heterosexual majority.