Conservatism and the Culture

This article is adapted from a piece originally published in the Fall 1999 issue of the Intercollegiate Review.

The need for smaller government is obvious and urgent. “It is a commonplace,” Pierre Manent writes, “that totalitarianism is defined as the absorption of civil society by the state. . . . One of the sources of the totalitarian project is found in the idea that it is possible for man to model society in accordance with his wishes, once he occupies the seat of power and possesses an exact social science and employs adequate means for this task.” Nazism and communism are the obvious examples.

There are, however, slower, less well-marked roads to totalitarianism that are more acceptable to a democratic people. Rather than being actuated by an exact social science or an explicit desire to remake society, the impelling force is a set of quite amorphous, but urgent, ideas about social justice coupled with a sense of moral superiority.

Tocqueville sounded the warning about government that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided. . . . Such a power . . . stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

As government regulations grow slowly, we become used to the harness. Habit is a powerful force, and we no longer feel as intensely as we once would have constrictions of our liberties that would have been utterly intolerable a mere half century ago.

We are all too familiar with heavy governmental regulation of private property and economic activity, as well as federal, state, and local taxation that takes well over half the earnings of many people. Statutes pour out like the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Agencies with the zealotry of the EPA turn environmentalism into a pantheistic religion, while medical care is made less effective by a web of bureaucratic controls. Our bureaucracies grind out 70,000 pages of new regulations a year. Common law tort actions increasingly control product designs and the delivery of services. Useful and harmless products have been driven from the market altogether by the costs of litigation.

The New Liberal Morality

Economic freedoms are not all that is under assault, however. In other areas, the force of government is augmented, and in many ways surpassed, by that of private institutions and communities enforcing new and destructive moralisms. Government, businesses, and universities practice affirmative action or quotas for ethnic groups and for women. Corporations, universities, and even primary and secondary schools police speech and attitudes to prevent expressions that might offends various newly sensitized and favored groups. Multiculturalism, which attacks America’s traditions as well as its European heritage, insists that all cultures are equal. A person who offends this new morality, even inadvertently and tangentially, may be sentenced to sensitivity training—America’s version of Maoist reeducation camps. . . .

The new liberal morality demands freedom from restraints in ways that produce moral anarchy. The facts are familiar: the sexual revolution, births out of wedlock, drug use, crime, popular entertainment reliant on sex and violence. Soft-core pornography is everywhere and the hard-core variety is not far behind. More ominously, what John Paul II calls the “culture of death,” the practice of killing for convenience through abortion and now assisted suicide, which rapidly becomes euthanasia, is gaining ground. . . .

Roger Kimball wrote of the depth and power and devastation wrought by the cultural revolution that has swept America:

[T]he radical emancipationist demands of the sixties [have] triumphed throughout society. They have insinuated themselves, disastrously, into the curricula of our schools and colleges; they have dramatically altered the texture of sexual relations and family life; they have played havoc with the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; they have undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national self-understanding; they have degraded the media and the entertainment industry, and subverted museums and other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high culture. They have even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life.

We are now two nations. These are not, as Disraeli had it, the rich and the poor, or, as presidential commissions regularly proclaim, whites and blacks. Instead, we are two cultural nations. One embodies the counterculture of the 1960s, which is today the dominant culture. Their values are propagated from the commanding heights of the culture: university faculties, journalists, television and movie producers, the ACLU, and major segments of the Democratic Party. The other nation, of those who adhere to traditional norms and morality, is now a dissident culture. Its spokesmen cannot hope to match the influence of the dominant nation. The dissident culture may survive by withdrawing, so far as possible, into enclaves of its own. The homeschooling movement is an example of that, an attempt to keep children out of a public educational system that, in the name of freedom, all too often teaches moral relativism and depravity. . . .

Conservative Fortitude

Robert H. Bork’s A Time to Speak

According to James Q. Wilson: “In the mid-nineteenth century England and America reacted to the consequences of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and affluence by asserting an ethos of self-control, whereas in the late twentieth century they reacted to many of the same forces by asserting an ethos of self-expression.”

The difference between the two centuries was the presence in the last century of religion and church-related institutions that taught morality. This suggests that a society deadened by a smothering network of laws while finding release in moral chaos is not likely to be either happy or stable. . . .

In our current cultural wars, perhaps the most important of the virtues for conservatives is fortitude—the courage to take stands that are not immediately popular, the courage to ignore the opinion polls. Otherwise, we will never change the polls. That is what true conservatism means, or it means nothing. Read the full article…

Robert H. Bork (1927–2012) stood for decades stood as the legal and moral conscience of America, reminding us of our founding principles and their cultural foundation. He served as the United States Solicitor General from 1973 to 1977 and as a Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1982 to 1988. President Ronald Reagan nominated him for the U.S. Supreme Court in 1987, leading to one of the most controversial and consequential judicial nomination battles in history. Bork was the bestselling author of several books, including Slouching Towards Gomorrah, The Tempting of America, and A Time to Speak.