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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Are we watching the same movie?

Clearly we're not, because in the film I'm watching, conservatives are losing basically every culture war battle: race, religion, drugs, sexual mores, abortion, immigration, LGBT. Rural America is dysfunctional and dying. The soft power of conservative communities has never been lower, with conservatives basically reduced to trying to secede from civil society because they're completely unable to gain any traction. Instead of going to church the kids keep moving to the big city, turning gay, and engaging in unmarried cohabitation with a trans atheist who immigrated illegally from Mexico, and there's no indication that this is reversing.

These political defeats are not totally unqualified. Gun rights have been entrenched, the post-Dobbs status quo remains to be seen (though I am fairly confident that it will highly unsatisfying to most pro-life activists), economic and environmental policy are much more of a fight, and conservatives still enjoy a tremendously favorable position when it comes to the exercise of hard power. But the idea that we're witnessing a liberal implosion seems pretty dubious.

Social conservatism is politically dead, but the Right is not -- but it does need to grow past social conservatism. We can never go back; we can make something new.

In the film I'm watching the woke are exercising greater and greater control over a rapidly shrinking sphere. There is broad agreement amongst members of both sexes that the "liberation" of the sexual revolution was nothing of the sort. The idea of rational technocratic rule by academics and experts has been utterly discredited. and at least where I'm at, church crowds are growing and skewing younger, lots of couples with kids.

Accordingly I say "stay the course" and "Go with God".