The ‘Right’ Has Surrendered America's Culture To The Progressive Left

[LibertarianRage]

We all know that there is a culture war going on over many issues that define the mores and values of the American society. It is a war that I believe that the left aren’t just winning, it is a war that it being surrendered by the right.

The three major problems. One appears to be relatively universal. For the most part people on the right just want to be left alone and in that respect are not inclined to the kind of activism that gets much recognition. If it were the left, we would call this lethargy part and parcel of the laziness of the give me set.

The other two are the real problems. No matter how mush people on the right want to deny it. Their is a segment… in fact a pretty large part of the right, that have absolutely no interest in the U.S. Constitution. That’s right… they could give a damn about the constitution because they read into it powers that extend well beyond those enumerated within the document. Regardless of your beliefs, the constitution says nothing about sodomy, or abortion or marriage, yet, the right will work to create the same culturally intrusive laws that the left does, with gays and transgender and ‘rights’ of blacks and women. There is of course another segment of the right who find themselves as ‘slow going liberals’… they believe in the extra constitutional reach of the Federal government, they just want to do it slower.

The other problem that the right has is that it has been bamboozled and it just can’t seem to get out of the way of itself. For 50 years, the left has beat the right with EEOC regulations based around the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Some people see the twisting of the constitution for what it is. The left has managed to brow beat business into stifling their beliefs because the Civil Rights Act somehow magically transformed private business into ‘public accommodation’. The right has grumbled about this for years and a few have thrown up court cases, most of them defeated. The funny thing is that for 50 years the left have put people in business that they didn’t agree with or support. They pushed diversity and some strange definition of equality. Fifty years later, they have people at the top of these companies and low and behold, college students are now pushing for segregated housing and are being accommodated… Facebook kicks political opponents off of their business because the user doesn’t align with their point of view… Google fires an employee for a difference of opinion and businesses are turning away cops. All of the things that the right has said that they should have had the right to do for 50 years. So what do I hear from the right? “It is their business, they have the right to do that”. The left has gagged you as far as who you hire, what questions you ask, to whom you serve and what pay packages you must deliver and now that they are going to ignore the law… you happily acquiesce because all along, you knew it was Constitutional. You just surrendered to the left that infiltrated your business, changed its culture right under your nose and now they are going to use the constitution to take it away from you.

Kind of an interesting dilemma on the right… some are authoritarian and don’t care about the constitution, some are socialists parading as conservatives and some love the constitution so much that they are allowing themselves to be beat into submission with it…

[ezworldwide]

I agree that the left has a stranglehold on America’s culture right now, but I largely disagree with your three reasons and more importantly your interpretation of your three reasons.

First, the desire to be “left alone” does not mean a lack of desire to influence the culture. When a person is active in church, that person is influencing the culture. When a person volunteers at a school, that person is influencing the culture. When a person is part of a historical preservation society, that person is influencing the culture. Simply being in a band or other music group that performs publicly influences the culture to some extent. The desire to be “left alone” in the sense of not having coercive power over others in these activities and not being coerced by others in these activities does not mean that someone isn’t influencing the culture. The left is currently more active in seeking coercive power. In that sense, they seem to be winning, but people who are still active in more private vehicles of influence certainly haven’t surrendered by any means.

Secondly, the accusation that many conservatives have no interest in the Constitution is an old libertarian ad hominem that is trotted out whenever a libertarian can’t persuade someone that his or her idea is best. Some people “on the right” don’t care about the Constitution, but the same is true for people on the left and even in many nominally libertarian groups. Thomas Jefferson is a libertarian hero, but he was planning the Lewis and Clark expedition even before we made the Louisiana Purchase. Nothing in the Constitution explicitly gives the the president or even Congress the right to spend money on an expedition to explore unclaimed land. Nothing explicitly gives the federal government the power to buy that much land or explore that land after having bought the land. Jefferson was motivated largely by scientific curiosity, but many in Congress were looking for additional trade routes. Again, nothing gives the federal government the power to spend taxpayer money looking for trade routes. The Constitution says that we will fund the federal government with tariffs, but the modern libertarian is typically so endeared of free trade that libertarians wouldn’t accept scrapping the income tax in favor of tariffs.

While the Constitution is often stretched or ignored beyond reason, the strictness with which some would interpret the Constitution is just silly. The Constitution doesn’t specifically say that government can punish someone for committing murder or robbery, but most of us accept that laws against murder and robbery are good laws. In general, those laws are made and enforced at the state and local level, but accepting those laws at the state and local level means that we can’t automatically say that laws against sodomy or drug use or anything else at the state and local level are inherently unConstitutional. In giving us free speech, the Constitution doesn’t specifically say that the government can keep someone from shouting political speech at the top of his lungs outside our bedroom windows at two in the morning, but most of us recognize that government should punish someone who shouts his political beliefs in ways that infringe on others’ rights to peace and quiet. The Constitution doesn’t specifically say that the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to ammunition, but most of us recognize that when the left says that the solution to gun control is banning bullets, the left is attacking the Second Amendment.

Regarding abortion in particular, the Constitution implicitly recognizes the federal government’s power to decide who is and is not a person. The Constitution did this regarding the status of slaves, and while we look back at the three-fifths compromise as being a travesty, the fact that the Founding Fathers addressed who was a person means that they saw that decision as a federal decision. The abortion issue is driven by the question of whether the unborn child is a person. Some people in the religious right are interested in the issue primarily to inconvenience those who want to have sex without producing children, but most people who oppose legalized abortion see the unborn child as a person. Killing that person without just cause is an issue that the criminal justice system must address. Even those of us who realize that we’ll never have a solution that most people like realize that the government must decide and act.

The third point that the left has used our laws against our freedoms is interesting but again, not really evidence of surrender. Many on the left are revolutionaries. They are at war and engaging in unrestricted war against our laws, our culture, our institutions, and every other part of our society. A great man once said that revolutionaries cannot be stopped by conservatives because conservatives are still trying to conserve the civilization. He said that once revolutionaries have started total war, they can only be defeated by total and unrestricted war. The institutions cannot stay intact but can only be rebuilt if the war is won. I tend to agree with this perspective, but the point at which total warfare has been entered can be a matter of opinion and debate. Furthermore, the right time to destroy certain institutions and customs can be important for persuading those in the middle to join the side that values what our country once had. Just because someone else doesn’t agree with me about the right strategy at a certain time does not mean that person is simply surrendering to the left.

The accusation that everyone who doesn’t agree with me has surrendered or is a tool or stooge of the left is just more ad hominem. I’m not happy with the way things are going, but I’m not going to embrace this line of thought.

[LibertarianRage]

Thank you for your considered reply. Most don’t put the thought into it and I appreciate your perspective. While we may disagree on this various points I applaud your effort to engage.

To start I would like to clarify one thing. Never did I use the word Conservative. Besides, even within the sphere that identify with that word, there appears to be considerable ambiguity in it definition. I used a rather broader spectrum of ‘the right’. Also for the record, I never make a comment in an attempt to shut down a discussion. Sometimes sharp perhaps but only in retort to comments I know to have dubious merit. I learn to much from open discussion so if I say something that you disagree with, feel free to show my how I am wrong as I am not above changing my opinions to good fact and logic…

You are correct that certain groups of the right are more community engaged than others. It has been shown time and again that the right contributes more to worthwhile causes and engages in voluntary works at a higher rate than the more liberal member of our population. While this most certainly build cohesive neighbourhoods, being silenced at townhall meetings and cancelling speaking engagements because of a threat of ANTIFA showing up does not extend the ‘conservative’ message and shows a weakness to the wider society. With respect to church; for many years the pulpit has been silenced by an active left who strategically muzzled it with tax law and I would suggest that in the quest to win hearts and minds in the wider America, one is literally preaching to the choir. This work and the commitment is not to be minimized but the right doesn’t hold the left leaning MSM accountable nor does it seem to defend the voices that support its general agenda. While it comes from a certain perspective in this battle for Americas culture war, I stand by the idea that while the right might be leading a righteous life and engaging in their immediate world, on broader issues it is generally reactive… as the old adage goes, ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’ and politicians are about as greasy as they come.

In all fairness to Jefferson, his desire to explore lands to the west of the Mississippi and seeking to map the Missouri in hopes of finding a navigable path to the pacific as well as geological exploration was one that he had attempted to find private financing for and failed. While it bothered him to his ideological underpinnings, I think that despite the deviation it was one of the earliest uses of the power of treaty and indeed the first newspeak application of the words ‘Strategic Defence’ keeping in mind that the first 2 million offered to France for its purchase were funds raised in preparation for an almost certain armed conflict with them over access to New Orleans. While the idea of Federal lands most certainly added a new dimension to the union, Federalist haven’t seem to put up much resistance to the top down society desired by some as the federal government currently holds more land at 640m acres than the entire Louisiana Purchase at some 525m acres. Jefferson had said in the end that he hoped this departure in principle would not be repeated in the future… the power hungry love precedent however.

With respect to your Libertarian smoke screen comment… while I do ascribe to many principles of the libertarian ideal, I too find libertarians, particularly the American variety to be less than pragmatic. They somehow miss the idea that unilateral destruction of our sovereign borders and ‘free trade’ would be the absolute end of anything one could remotely call American. I embrace the concept of a ‘world citizen’… I’m just over the top cynical about the governance that awaits those newly minted citizens. So, while in principle I agree with much of what they aspire for, I am much more of a classic liberal and while you may hold those who see a more strict view of the constitution as silly… it is the deviation pushed by many, primarily because they have no popular support for Article V change and so readily accepted by others, that seem to be causing most of our problems.

You raise several points about the constitutionality of state law. As you no doubt know, we could fill rims in that discussion but I think that Section 1 of the 14th amendment should have normalized state constitutional boundaries with those of the privileges or immunities and indeed the fundamental conditions of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness… with the US Supreme Court being the final arbiter. I do not see that the state has ANY writ large ability to dictate someone bedroom habits and I find it hard to believe that anyone who claims belief in natural rights and the constitution from which it was derived could hold the constitution with much reverence.

Your comment about the about bullets is funny… its like saying that a constitution that specifically authorizes the right to baseball but doesn’t specifically authorize a bat is somehow ambiguous in meaning. A disabled tool is nothing more than a disabled tool. While we may look at the lefts attempt in this direction as serious but silly, do some actually believe that a completely functional firearm was not the ‘absolute’ intent?.. and if so… why isn’t there a million person march in Washington to save the bullet?

With respect to the 1st amendment freedom of speech. I think we as a society have attempted to redefine even that to encompass anything even though the amendment was specifically pointed at governments ability to stifle political commentary. The amendment says that the government shall make no laws which infringe on a person’s right to have an opinion (censorship) … it was never the intent for a person to have the right to trounce the civil liberties of others. The government as however exceedingly violated that amendment with ‘hate laws’. The laws against harming someone via coercion, fraud or theft are plentiful… to that we seem to have added the politically correct violation of ‘sensibilities’ as well. (not unlike stealthily slipping the word gender into the 1964 civil rights act) And in that, I do not see that over the past decades that the ‘right’ has not given away much to the left without so much as a wimper…While they continue to shout and bang pot lids together… and burn buildings and overturn police cars and assault people… and peacefully assemble in mass in front of the capitol….