As the presidential campaign speeds past what was once its traditional kickoff date, Labor Day Weekend, many on the right continue to argue that engaging in the “Culture War” is either a distraction or that it is already lost. In both instances, waging the good fight to protect and promote a virtuous culture will ineluctably lead to the Right’s electoral defeat.
Instead, they aver, dispense with cultural issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, protecting parental rights, etc., and focus solely on the economy, immigration, and the weaponization of government. If these Republican Cassandras prevail upon the Trump campaign and GOP down-ticket campaigns to stand mute on critical cultural issues, what will victory in November accomplish for MAGA and conservative populists? The disintegration of our free republic by an erosion rather than an avalanche. And, in truth, the erosion would prove more painful by not only being slower but by being done by our own Republican hands.
A vibrant, virtuous culture of life is indispensable to the liberty and prosperity of Americans and, indeed, all of humanity. To attempt to divorce culture from democracy and the economy is to agree with the left: government and the economy are essentially mechanistic, materialistic, and deterministic—shaping the human person more than the individual shapes these institutions.
This explains why the left injects its ideology and uses the tools of both government and the economy to indoctrinate the citizenry into its collectivist ideology, and, in its secular atheism, denigrates and often infringes upon the liberty and property of dissenters who cherish faith, family, community, and country—people who are committed to defending and expanding a virtuous culture of life.
The left is waging a culture war on America—indeed a war against the very concept of truth, itself—that aims to impose its collectivist, materialist, secularist ideology upon society; and subordinating and suppressing traditional culture and its adherence to moral truths. Since the left believes it is winning, if largely by default, and is hellbent on finishing its mission, in this Culture War the Republican Cassandras are laboring under the delusion they are seeking a Détente. What they are really calling for is unilateral disarmament on the path to unconditional surrender and serfdom.
In his masterful biography, The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II – The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, George Weigel examined the late pontiff’s social magisterium and, notably, his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus [The Hundredth Year], which issued a clarion call for a “free and virtuous society and the priority of culture;” and warned of “the dangers that awaited democratic polities and free-economies that cut themselves loose from sturdy moral-cultural moorings.”
Per Weigel, the crux of John Paul II’s argument was tripartite:
The free and virtuous society [is] composed of three interlocking parts: a democratic polity, a free or market-centered economy, and a robust public moral culture. The third component part, [John Paul II] insisted, was the key to the proper functioning of the political and economic sectors. It took a certain kind of people, possessing certain virtues, to make democracy and the market work so that human beings were ennobled by their participation in free political and economic life.
Yet, what was it that enabled an individual and their society to thrive within democratic states and free market economies? “As always, recognition of the truth about the dignity of the human person was the key to the ultimate success of any human activity.” States that incorporated and protected these moral truths, for example, human rights, by circumscribing the powers of its government; and that allowed for the flourishing of human creativity and responsibility within a free market, would engender the most virtuous and salubrious citizenry.
But, John Paul II was acutely aware of what would happen when secular atheism and/or virulent moral relativism in “democracies that declared wrongs to be rights” impaired a society’s ability to adhere to the moral truths that spurred its virtuous accomplishments.
As Weigel noted, John Paul II discerned the problem at its post-modern root, namely “a world striving for freedom had not learned to live freedom nobly because it had lost touch with the nobility of the human person, which consists in our ability to know, choose, and adhere to the truth.”
And the historical horrors humanity wrought and suffered provided a crystalline vision of where a Godless, vice-addled society would dead end.
John Paul II located the deepest wound of modernity in a defective humanism that had left the world morally adrift and had created a global charnel house in which great hopes had been burnt to ashes. Life had become fragmented and atomized. The alienation experienced by the men and women of late modernity was far deeper and more complex than the alienation analyzed by Karl Marx: men and women had become alienated from their own interiority, having lost sight of a transcendent spiritual and moral horizon against which to live their lives. This deeper alienation had profound public consequences. Like his friend Henri de Lubac, Wojtyla was convinced that defective humanisms had created a situation in which men and women could only organize the world against each other. Ultramundane humanism inevitably became inhuman humanism.
St. John Paul the Great wrote this in 1959. Sixty-five years later, the inhuman humanism has metastasized throughout our country and our world, in which we are more rapidly and readily being organized against each other in a death of a thousand keystrokes in a cyber-cesspool of disinformation, envy, and animus.
Yet there is life, and yet there is hope. The hope for John Paul II, Weigel wrote, was that “the truth about the human person was ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom we discover the truth about the merciful Father and the truth about ourselves.”
Thus, in 1976, it was this conviction that led then Cardinal Wojtyla to declare that he and his peers stood “in the front line in a lively battle for the dignity of man.” A quarter century later, the Cold War was over. Through the grace of God and the work of his earthly servants, the “conscience revolution” that affirmed the primacy of everyone’s human dignity had destroyed the evil empire of the totalitarian Soviet Union and its communist satellites.
Today, over thirty years, America is in a Culture War. Launched and waged by the left, it is a Culture War without quarter. Détente is not an option, and surrender is unconscionable, for it would mean the end of our free republic and all we have cherished for generations and hope to bequeath to future generations.
In brutal truth: we cannot make America great again unless we make America good again.
Thus, the heirs of Lincoln and Reagan must dismiss the Republican Cassandras, and engage and win the Culture War. We must proclaim our support for a free and virtuous culture of life and moral truths. We must trust in the innate decency of our fellow citizens. And we must realize that whatever the immediate electoral danger, the greatest danger is to abandon our principles. For we will not only lose our liberty and prosperity.
We will lose the truth about ourselves.
***
An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.
Unfortunately, this election presents us with difficult choices. We seem to be forever mired in an era in which we must continue to elect the lesser evil. Donald Trump represents this lesser evil with his ignorant defense of abortion (“should be more than six weeks” and “we’re going to pay for that under my administration (IVF) because we want more babies”). His embrace of abortion and taxpayer-funded IVF demonstrates yet again what I have always thought about him. He is an ignoramus on moral issues as they relate to conscience and the Constitution, lacks moral character and has lacked moral character his entire life. That does not mean we should not vote for him, but it does mean exactly what Mr. McCotter sets forth so eloquently in this piece. Society is so far down the rabbit hole, it may be too late to salvage anything of what made Americans “good”.
How does one “Make America Good Again”? Ought citizens take on the established institutions and their leadership, working to replace them with people of good moral character? The 2024 election demonstrates most Republicans suffer from the same moral decrepitude as their Democrat counterparts on abortion, IVF, and a host of other issues central to this theme. Do citizens opt to drop out of society, creating their own communities organized around the development of the culture of goodness, and end the engagement with culture which cannot be changed because there are too many who not only aren’t Christian, but hate Christians and want to destroy them?
I watched “A Man for All Seasons” recently. Not only is Robert Bolt’s screenplay beautifully written, it captures Thomas More’s brilliant intellect, strength of character and deep commitment to and understanding of his faith in opposing the wishes of a dissolute king. His fight is our fight, but where are the Thomas More’s?
Yes, and even John Adams wrote that the U.S. Constitution was created for a moral and religious people and was wholly unsuited for the governance of any other. BUT….we have come to a place at this late date when Republicans must flog the issues of the economy, illegal immigration, and the weaponization of government in order to win this November—and thereby having a chance to address the moral issues. The Right will (presumably) have time to properly tackle the softer issues (the things that do not directly affect Americans’ lives on a day-to-day basis—but ONLY if they win real political power. Even the hard Left is smart enough to recognize what is most important to Americans when it comes to going to the polls in November—and wily enough to pay lip service to it for the next ten weeks. If we cannot convince Americans that Republicans absolutely own the high ground on immigration, the economy, and government corruption we will lose badly this November—and we will deserve to lose.
I believe it was columnist Selwyn Duke who opined that we cannot MAGA unless we MAMA (Make American Moral Again).
Conservatives must keep fighting the culture wars but they need to do it smarter & from the bottom up instead of waiting for a top-down approach. Whether it comes about by putting pressure on companies to moderate their public behavior or lose revenue, developing parallel economies in media and education, more visible non-profit organizations with decidedly conservative bents or all the above, conservatives need to step forward, engage and pick their battles wisely.
And I really hate to say this but just as incrementalism got our country into its current tenuous position, it may well be what gets us out of it, if it’s done intelligently. After Dobbs, a lot of states enacted legislation to restrict abortion. And, as more time passes, more & more people come to realize that, despite the claims of the Left & their lapdogs in the media, it did not transform the country into a live-action version of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. Now, add an information campaign about the medical impact of long-term contraception of women’s health, the fact that more black children are being aborted than born in urban areas, the fact that the ‘clump of cells’ argument only applies to a very short period of a child’s development in utero & that they feel pain very early during a pregnancy --all this information is out there, it just needs to be highlighted instead of suppressed. Most people don’t want to be cruel but allowing the Left to control that narrative has allowed a lot of people to remain blind to the truth-- I say it is beyond time to remove the option of willful ignorance.
Education is an other area where conservative inroads are possible. The push for charter schools has never been greater, particularly in urban & minority areas that have been failed by government sponsored schools for generations. Funding for schools that teach instead of indoctrinate; curricula that include civics and the traditional virtues vs promoting victim mentality and a warped view of our shared history would have a massive impact on the culture wars.
Okay, this is getting quite long, so I’m going to wrap it up. There are other things that can be and, to a degree, are being done. But reversing a 60-year trend in one direction is not going to happen overnight; it will take the same steady pressure in the opposite direction to move us back to a point where we are not self-destructing as a nation.
Donald Trump is going get elected so they can say he lied again. And he will admit it and be happy about it, because he has taken a page from the Rules for Radicals and can justify why he had to lied. He has to take abortion away from the indoctrinated sexual ferrets who care only about pleasure. Trump is aware of what he has to do and getting elected is needed because nothing can be done otherwise.