Progressives have run out of empathy
A good American progressive is meant to disapprove of disparaging political stereotypes. But that hasn’t stopped them gleefully embracing the caricature of the enraged rural American. You know the tropes; they’re the last ones you can utter in respectable conversation: “white trash”, “redneck”, “hillbilly”, all them ignorant belligerents in stark raving anger ready to storm the Capitol.
We are swiftly approaching the consequences of our suicidal blindness.
Last week, Joe Biden issued a schoolmarmish warning to Israel, which he has been browbeating for months to placate his party’s anti-Israel left and Muslim American voters in Michigan, a critical swing state. Speaking to the press, he threatened, “There’s got to be a ceasefire because Ramadan – if we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous.”
Two-thirds of Canadians oppose “cultural socialist” attitudes, says a survey and study by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Key findings suggest that Canadians predominantly oppose the cultural socialist stance by a ratio of about 2 to 1, reflecting a “remarkable” similarity in opinion trends with their American and British counterparts.
The survey found minimal differences between Francophone and Anglophone Canadians on these issues. However, Canadians generally show higher trust in elite political culture, including journalists, teachers, and academics, than those in the broader Anglosphere.
Punk was as middle-class as a Labrador in a Volvo. It was invariably the posher kids who abandoned Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes
If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages – that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t.
An unpopular opinion? Not here.
When Punk crossed over to North America I found myself confused by its appeal.
I grew up in a working class home, we we’re poor.
Punk seemed a ‘Let’s play dress-up’ celebration of poverty and futilty and not by any poor people I knew.
On weekends the girls from Oakville were to be found in downtown TO dressed fashionably “Punk” for a night out.
I get the honestly passionate adherents with much invested in fond memory.
It just wasn’t a flag I could rally round.
Today it all makes me think of an ersatz culture piece by CBC.
The cancellation of classical music
Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa, I due Figaro, showed her influence in stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.
Two days before Tucker Carlson was ousted from the Fox News team, he gave a speech at the 50th anniversary event of the Heritage Foundation, arguably America’s most celebrated conservative public policy think tank. The speech was a remarkable example of gripping content delivered with rhetorical excellence, as he combined a reflective—almost rambling—style with acute lucidity. In his address, Carlson suggested that the political tradition which the Anglosphere largely perfected, namely that of ongoing democratic negotiation by various factions who together represent both the unity and divisions of the whole polity, was rapidly waning. Now, he claimed, politics is about good and evil.
Activists have been quietly promoting progressive issues for decades
Conservatives are losing the culture war and it’s because they are being divisive, argues John Burn-Murdoch in an interesting FT piece today.
The underlying message seems to be that conservative parties should go with the radical progressive flow in order to woo the next generation of voters, even if that means ushering in a wholesale change to the culture that most voters don’t want. This is a classic of the ‘it’s inevitable, so submit’ progressive neoliberal genre, which is deeply misleading.
The West is in the midst of a culture war which is often dull, sometimes hilarious, and always exhausting. Fighting Back: Defending Britain and the West in the Culture War, produced by The New Culture Forum, dispels such fatigue and whets the appetite for battle. With nine short essays, it aims to rejuvenate ordinary people with thoughtful reflections and practical advice on how to navigate a relentless culture war which otherwise saps them of strength.
Who is the enemy? It is nowhere near as brutal as the Nazi or Soviet totalitarian experiments, though its lack of solidity or a defined outline can make it more challenging to confront directly. The ‘wokesters,’ as they have come to be called, prefer Kafkaesque probes into alleged thought crime to the torture rack, they opt for digital cancellation before reaching for the iron rod, and they skilfully weaponize liberal values, such as freedom and equality, rather than dragging them through the mud like unsubtle tyrants.
A new counterculture with the potential to disrupt left-wing institutional capture
The idea of a conservative counterculture might seem like an oxymoron. The term itself has been colored by the 1960s, when left-wing intellectuals, revolutionaries, and artists captured the spirit of revolt against a supposedly homogenous, oppressive, conformist America. That old counterculture has become the dominant culture, having been absorbed into the bureaucracies of universities, schools, government, and now major corporations. The left-wing culture no longer carries a critique; it is the status quo.
In Against the Great Reset, Harry Stein asks how the Left has managed to subvert the culture and trample so effectively upon the fundamental concepts of decency, equality, justice, morality, and even human biology itself, not to mention humor and modesty. The answer may be found not only in policy and power wielded from the top but also in the gradual saturation of the public mind with a vast set of implicit assumptions regarding what constitutes enlightened societal advancement. In other words, a large part of the answer is the Left’s near-absolute domination of mass popular culture — music, film, sports, news media, entertainment, and so on — all infused with the values and conventions that reflect the progressivist worldview. “We have been slow to recognize,” Stein writes, “the extent to which the culture has been weaponized against us.”
When they said ‘build your own internet,’ some conservatives took it seriously
There’s a lot of rumbling about American polarization these days. Sometimes it takes the form of people advocating for a national divorce or dire warnings of a forthcoming civil war.
A national divorce seems impractical and America is too fat for a civil war. Better evidence that the country is already fracturing is the talk of the “parallel economy.” We’ve come a long way from the 2016 moment of self-awareness about needing to get out of our echo chambers. By 2020 it seemed everyone wanted their own. Now we’re redecorating the walls of the echo chambers. Adding some throw pillows. But as corporations go woke and all-in on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) and the Great Reset — an enormous market, consisting of average Americans, is being alienated or blatantly pushed out. While Big Tech and Big Government and Big Pharma increasingly operate in lockstep to censor any dissent, disagreement, skepticism or pushback, the free market is stepping up.
Toward a saner conversation about driving in America
Cars seem to be an emerging front in the American culture wars. Consider the reaction to an essay by Carlton Reid, written for the website Works in Progress, arguing that ubiquitous driving does not necessarily create happy, healthy communities. “Cars may seem dominant in many towns and cities right now, but that’s because choices were made to allow such dominance,” Reid noted. “Choices can be remade; minds can be changed.” That quote generated a backlash among conservative critics, who argued that the worldview it represented would “force serfdom on America” and coerce people into “a pod in some blue cesspool.” Any revision to our existing land-use and street-design regimes, the thinking implied, would make the American way of life impossible.
As a conservative profoundly involved in the “culture wars,” I have come to realize that the problem I have is not with liberals, Leftists, apostles of Woke, and other assorted ideologues and disreputables. I expect nothing from them but deceit, vulgarity, hate-spew, and ignorance, and so do not feel especially shocked by their behavior. The problem I have is with conservatives, too many of whom do not appear to fully honor conservative principles and values. They often seem to temporize with their antagonists, can act at times quite autocratically, and are occasionally distressingly superficial in their assessments of contemporary events. Human, all too human, of course; still, one might have thought better of those brave combatants in the political trenches.
The left thinks it was too white while the Catholic New Right sees much to admire
There is a war afoot, here in late civilization, over the meaning and legacy of the Middle Ages. Two distinct fronts have emerged from either side of our political spectrum. On the left, in the academy, medievalism is being diversified out of existence, its defining Western characteristics relegating it to a smaller place in a global mosaic. On the right, a certain breed of new conservative is reclaiming the Middle Ages as a keystone period in which order and reason ruled, instead of the swivel-headed “scientism” of pure observation brought on by the Enlightenment.
Conservative victories against Netflix, Disney, Subway, and more.
There have been war correspondents since Herodotus chronicled the Persian War of 499–449 B.C. Newspaperman Ernie Pyle famously embedded himself with American foot soldiers during World War II to give folks back home a welcome grunts’ perspective, before he died by enemy fire at the battle of Okinawa. Fox News reporter Benjamin Hall was badly wounded covering the Russo-Ukrainian War when his vehicle got shelled and two colleagues killed. Being a culture war correspondent is much safer than a shooting war one, yet no less historically valuable. As such, I can report that last week brought some major victories against the Left in several battlefronts I’ve covered.
