Previously, I wrote of the common notion that the progressives were winning the culture war, a brief and by no means complete survey of reactionary thought on the matter and proposed a number of explanations for and caveats to that idea. Now, I begin to look at the deeper reasons why the right, the reactionaries especially, have a difficult time even maintaining the status quo, let alone in turning back the clock, in modern civilization.
The right wing political message is harder. By harder, I mean that right wing political thought trades in both foundational principles and policy proposals that are less likely to be widely popular. Conservatives have always been the "party of no", the party-poopers of the political scene. They claim that we cannot achieve all of our legislative goals without punishing levels of taxation and government overreach.
Central to conservative thought as far back as Edmund Burke is the notion that human nature is not fundamentally perfectible, and indeed it's an uphill battle to improve it at all. Humanity is in need of some kind of higher set of moral and philosophical principles beyond the reach of his will to power in order to keep him on the right track. Religion is often touted as the source of this.
Overall, this is a less popular message than that peddled by reformist politicians and ideologies of boundless optimism. First classical liberalism, then socialism and today feminism promise if not utopia, at least a greatly improved way of life over what we have now. This is naturally a more attractive message. It is more attractive to believe that pressing social problems can be solved, than to view them as intractable and that trying to solve them will simply squander limited and valuable resources. We feel better about the left's message of a brighter future. It flatters our egos. We don't like being told that we have a naturally debased nature that makes social progress very difficult and even dangerous.
The left has a long history of offering up ideal classes of people: the proletariat, the 3rd world, women, the poor and marginalized, who if they were just given the reins of power, would guide us into a world free of exploitation, poverty and war. Being the sober voice in a climate of excitement and enthusiasm doesn't win popularity contests. And don't expect to be exonerated in hindsight when the project truly does go awry, just as you predicted it would, either. Of course, the right does sometimes enter its own politics of fervent hope and even utopianism, but these incidences occur in spite of, rather than because of, the underlying nature of conservative thought.
It is not that the left does not posit the need to make sacrifices for the achievement of its goals. But the left tends to ask more of those who are, at least according to leftist bodies of thought, able to give up more. Moreover, leftism offers hope of societal improvement when all is said and done. The sacrifices demanded by reactionaries, on the other hand, are mainly to stop things getting worse than they already are, and more often fall on those already on the less fortunate end of the social spectrum. This is in contrast to the deeply rooted Christian ethic otherwise so much touted on at least some segments of the left, which generally extols charity and concern for the less fortunate.
It is not that right leaning people are unwilling to be charitable. But they're far more likely to balk at the encoding of charity into our political, economic and social structures in the way that leftist calls for reform advocate for. Rightism would prefer that charity be a private, individual decision, and don't like the notion that there are structural inequities and injustices in the way that wealth and resources end up being distributed. Most people know, or at least suspect how inadequate this will be in the face of the real need out there. Right wing people may sneer at how easy it is to be generous and charitable with other people's money, and that's precisely the point. It is easier. It is easier to at least advocate for redistributive taxation and social spending, even if the threat of capital flight and investment strike make those programs tricky to implement.
Up until very recently, the right was seen as the side of the prudish, the censorious and the puritanical. Say no to drugs. No sex until marriage. Abstinence only. Contraception and abortion are bad, murder even. Every sperm is sacred. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were seen as the gateway to Sodom and Gomorrah. Not among all right leaning people, but those who thought that way did lean right.
That is not the path of least resistance to which people are naturally inclined. While we can hew to very straight and narrow lifestyles in times of shortage and hardship, or else when in tight knit social environments that share the same values, once modern levels of affluence and technological development made less stringent ways of life attainable with reduced social costs, that's naturally what most people did. Who would naturally deal with the shortage and hardship of marrying young and having a mess of children once this ceased to be economically necessary or socially mandated? If there's no real reason not to enjoy sex, drugs and rock and roll once we stop believing that they'll make the baby Jesus cry and your parents, boss and neighbors won't object to it, it's easier to do so than not to, however real the very real problems of addiction and abuse are, at least for some people.
Over the last decade or so, the cultural left has introduced its own culture of austerity, with privilege checking, broadening definitions of sexual harassment and rape, speech codes, avoidance of bad words that might trigger someone with a marginalized identity, deconstruction and critique of movies, music, video games and so on for sexist and racist content and so on. This goes back a bit further on college campuses, to the late 1980s approximately. And even here, they are not so much suggesting that we "just say no" but rather that we merely get informed, enthusiastic and affirmative consent. In triplicate, and you'd better cross all the t's and dot all the i's. And still hope that no one cries rape or harassment, since the zeitgeist demands that the accuser be given the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, this new stringency doesn't seem to apply to historically "marginalized" groups: women, ethnic minorities, trans folks etc.
Still and all, this is an altogether different message than abstinence only, at least until marriage. An option that is increasingly beyond many people's price range, and not likely to be entered into until after the long period of education and preparation needed to secure the kinds of middle class jobs you can raise a family on. Whatever flaws exist in hook-up culture so called, and there are many, people will simply not revert back to the sexual morality that prevailed in agricultural societies where for all intents and purposes, you were an adult at fifteen.
So while not completely equivalent, the emergent social justice warrior (SJW) is sometimes mentioned as the leftist counterpart to the stuffy Christian conservative. Hard leftists - Marxists, Stalinists and Maoists and the like, have had a similar sort of tough mindedness, but these have never been significant even on what's considered left wing in the 1st world. What's relevant here is that the last few decades wherein second wave feminism gradually gave way to the SJWs are a wink of an eye in the face of the history of western civilization overall, wherein it has been religion and conservatism that has eschewed creature comforts in favor of stoicism and stern morality.
Moreover, reactionaries propose some genuinely harsh measures. Who is going to tell women - the majority of the population and currently united and galvanized by feminist ideology - that their place is at home, barefoot and pregnant after all? This seems like political suicide, and so not surprisingly is backed away from even by those on the right who actually do think this way. In a similar vein, it is the right wing that is proposing that worker's rights be curtailed or even done away with entirely, and employment for mid to low skill workers with little bargaining power reduced to something comparable to serfdom. It is the right wing that proposes that much of the populace lose access to health care, public education, or a social safety net in times of need. Outside the United States, these messages unsurprisingly do not resonate with working and middle class people. And conservatives within America must go to great lengths and expense to gain working class buy-in for their frankly sado-masochistic kinds of policies.
So it is that the right wing presents a harder path for individuals and societies to follow, and not always with a long term payoff to make it worthwhile, other than the suggestion that the left will lead us to a still worse place. This is a handicap for the right. As a reason for progressive dominance in the culture war, I'd say it's relevant, significant even but not central.
For one thing, the right's message of austerity doesn't always fail to resonate. While they haven't convinced most to just say no or wait for marriage, they've convinced many more, particularly in the English speaking world, that harsh cutbacks to social services, infrastructure and the like, along with weakening the power of the unions and the state to affect wages and working conditions were necessary to preserve the long term economic health of the 1st world nations.
The message resonated deeply with many of the people who had the most to lose from it, because it appealed to a sense of heroic mission and sacrifice, as well as to a sense of individualistic masculine pride. The aforementioned Robert Conquest and John O'Sullivan, they who believed leftward drift inevitable in any but explicitly right wing institutions, would have been quite surprised by the direction that Tony Blair would take the British Labour party, and how this was the rule and not the exception in social democratic parties across the western world.
In my own jurisdiction of the province of Alberta in western Canada, it's very hard to win an election if one isn't running on a platform of economic austerity. The deep cuts to social spending implemented in the 1990s by then Premier Ralph Klein make him one of the best remembered premiers in provincial history among Albertans, and they elected United Conservative leader Jason Kenney as premier in April of 2019 in the hopes that he can repeat Klein's performance.
The trick to pulling this off, though, is that a LOT of long term investment into policy institutes, think tanks, alternative media and similar kinds of capital intensive ideological infrastructure was necessary to eventually gain mainstream buy-in. Not just investment, but long term strategic thinking that boiled down the message of austerity to three to four word sound bite slogans with which a compliant media could saturation bomb the public, until massive cut backs and privatization just became common sense.
Another example: to this date, the late David Koch and his brother Charles have financed libertarian minded organizations, with highly successful online outreach and thus right-libertarianism has a notable following among post-boomer generations, particularly of white males who've been excluded from the mainstream narrative of privilege and social justice, themselves rather infamously funded by rival billionaire "philanthropists" such as George Soros. While libertarianism has been, for reasons soon to be discussed, less successful than social justice overall, it does show that the more dour nature of right wing thought is not an insurmountable weakness, provided there's sufficient resources and organization behind it. Which there often isn't, for reasons to be discussed in future installments of this series.
Another weakness of leftism is that it's ideologies are more complex and systemic. The core of right wing thought can be boiled down to the idea that some people are naturally more gifted than others, or that good and/or smart people do good and/or smart things, and so succeed. When society goes astray, it's because bad people are gaining the reins of state power and implementing redistributionist policies. These ideas can range from relatively reasonable criticisms of center left politicians to bizarre conspiracy theories implicating the Illuminati, Elders of Zion or even reptilian space aliens. As naive as these views are, they are also simpler and easier to understand for the uninitiated.
Leftist theories, by contrast, posit deeper, more complex, abstract and systemic views of the world, and come up with their own unsettling sorts of ideological claims. Leftist explanations of poverty and steep levels of inequality are systemic and therefore not as easy to grasp. They're also easier for the right to straw-man: "leftists are just jealous of people who are better than them and want to take their wealth and resources for themselves" or similar nonsense.
Moreover, leftist claims posit their own challenges that no shortage of people would like to duck or deny. If poverty and hardship have systemic causes and could happen to anyone, does this not then place a burden of responsibility upon the polity and its citizens? Should we not be willing to pony up more in taxes to help the poor, raise the minimum wage or even be prepared to roll up our sleeves and take to the streets because, after all, the means of production aren't going to seize themselves? Is it not easier to simply suggest that the poor are just stupid and lazy and leave the tough job of managing the economy and the polity to the smart fellas willing to put in the time and effort to do it? And if they get paid a lot more money to do so, aren't they deserving of it? This isn't so easy a line of argument to refute as the left would like it to be. It's not completely and entirely untrue either.
Of course, the outcomes of this kind of thinking don't always rebound to the benefit of the right, as "woke" dominance in cultural spheres imposed by incorporated cultural institutions make clear. Cultural leftists did an effective job of organizing and strategizing in order to increase their influence in academia and the media, as any paleoconservative willing to talk about "cultural Marxism" would be only happy to tell you. The thing is, the whole "long march through the institutions" thing isn't simply a right wing conspiracy theory. There's something to it and it goes a long way towards explaining current progressive cultural dominance in cultural spheres, because the right was so poorly equipped to deal with it.
So the right's core political message is tougher overall to accept, though there's plenty of qualifications and exceptions to this. This is one reason for progressive dominance in the current culture war, but by no means the most significant one.
Continued in Part 3: Left Alone
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