Culture War Update

Today seems like a good day to do a culture war update. After all, yesterday witnessed the winning Super Bowl field goal kicked for the first time by a player who had possibly been under investigation by the FBI:

Harrison Butker was wearing a Scapular when he kicked Super Bowl-winning field goal

Butker, a devotee of the Traditional Latin Mass, once again gave 'all glory to God' following the victory.

Based on his post game comments he sounds like a dangerous RadTrad.

This morning The Federalist is running an article that gets into the question of how Christians should respond in a political and cultural environment that is relentlessly hostile to Christianity. This paragraph summarizes the dilemma well: Should Christians simply give up on politics or—given the fact that the ruling class is not about to leave them in peace—do they need to find some way to work through politics in self defense?

Welcome To The Culture War, Tim Keller

America is neck-deep in a culture war, and some of the most prolific instigators of it are in our highest political offices. Keller’s right that no political party is perfect and that Christians should not make an idol of a party or of politics in general. But unless we go the way of the early 20th-century fundamentalists, we’re going to have to meet the cultural onslaught — and some of the biggest arenas of the cultural fight have been made political. I’m sure Keller would agree that it shouldn’t be a partisan position to protect kindergarteners from being coached into sexual confusion by their teachers, but alas, that is where the political left has chosen to draw its battle lines.

Yes, they’re coming for the kids. It was only a few years ago, literally—in the sense of the numbers years that could be counted on one hand—that I was being dismissed as an alarmist, but this is where we are.

The good news is that by at least one significant metric there appears to be more pushback by normals. I say “appears” because the situation and the metric involved are complicated. The metric has to do with the number of children enrolled in government schools—which are hotbeds of grooming. Many government school systems are reporting fairly dramatic drops in enrollment—that’s beyond doubt. The question then becomes, how to account for this? For example, in some major metro areas that are experiencing major declines in the student population, such as Chicago, it appears that large numbers of students, even at young ages, have simply dropped out. That’s a depressing fact, and we can expect the consequences to develop and worsen over the coming years. Those kids are on the streets, shoplifting, carjacking, engaged in all types of criminality.

On the other hand, other parents—and polling indicates that minority parents are leading the way—have transferred their students out of the system, whether through home schooling or to various types of non-government schools. It has become clear that this phenomenon, perhaps spurred by what parents learned during the Covid lockouts of students or perhaps by more general dissatisfaction, is nationwide. Home schooling has increased dramatically, as also has enrollment in non-government schools during the last two years. Most recently, Seattle is reporting a 10% drop in the student population in government schools:

Washington school district considers closures as student enrollment plummets

Seattle schools lost thousands of students during pandemic, and they aren't coming back

The city's school system has lost more than 3,500 students since the pandemic and expects to lose another 3,000 by the 2025-2026 school year, according to data from the district. If that happens, it will mark a 12.5% decrease in enrollment over six years.

…

It's not entirely clear where students are going, said Jen Garrison Stuber of the Washington Homeschool Organization.

Homeschooling rates in Washington nearly doubled at the height of the pandemic, according to state data, and currently sit at about a 43% increase over the 2019-2020 school year. But in Seattle, there are actually fewer registered homeschoolers than before the pandemic, Garrison Stuber said. 

"I really think that what Seattle's seeing, where those students have gone are either to private schools or they've left the school district and have moved elsewhere," she said.

Clearly this development isn’t uniformly positive, but within the statistics there are real positives, reflecting a desire on the part of significant numbers of students to escape the toxic environment of the government schools. A small step, perhaps, but we’re not get out of this cultural crisis in a matter of a few years. If we ever do, it could well be a matter of multiple generations. Any help that normal parents get from the political establishment will probably be incremental, simply because the forces of social dissolution are so well funded and the decline in a sense of a positive cultural identity has been generations in the making. Americans—by no means all, but to a great extent—appear to be adrift on a belief and values free sea. Those who cling to some semblance of traditional human nature often lack the ability to articulate their stand, a result of generations of Cultural Marxist indoctrination through the controlled popular culture and social institutions—churches, schools, universities, government at all levels.

My own sense is that it’s probably too late for a strong reaction to make a difference in the short term. We are probably looking at many years of increasing social turmoil and national decline. Christians will need to find ways to band together and pass on their beliefs and culture in some social setting, while also finding a way to defend themselves from the increasing pressure of the ruling class and the co-opted political and social institutions.

Related: Next on Dems' hit list: The suburbs. Running away won’t be easy. We need to think a bit deeper than that. “Affordable housing” is simply the thin end of the cultural wedge.

Perhaps some readers will find this somewhat offbeat comparison, coming as it does from a scholar outside the bounds of what remains of Western culture, interesting and useful. The American Conservative features today an article by a regular contributor, Sumantra Maitra. I’m not sure where Maitra fits within the world of Indian society. He has been largely based in the West. Heres the link:

India’s Majoritarian Turn

Modi finishes the work of decolonization left incomplete by generations of Anglophile elites.

The reader might get the impression, initially, that Maitra is an advocate of India’s Majoritarian Turn—which I take to be his euphemism for Hindu Nationalism. It turns out that that is definitely not the case. On the other hand, it would be an over simplification to suggest that Maitra is an Anglophile who longs for the days of the Raj. It would probably more true to say that Maitra argues from his reading of Indian history that India will abandon the heritage of the Raj—the English language, the embrace of British style legal and political institutions, the national unity that came with the Raj—only at great peril. It’s a longish and, in my opinion, well argued article by someone who obviously cares deeply for India’s future.

At the same time, based on other articles on strictly Western matters that Maitra has written, I believe that Maitra understands that there is no recovering the past. British culture as it was during the period of British involvement in the subcontinent simply no longer exists—certainly not in India, but not in the UK either. In a sense, therefore, I would suggest that “conservatives” in America are in a bit of a similar situation, strange as that may seem. The culture of the American Founding no longer exists—or only vestigially—in an institutional sense. It has passed away with the passing of the Christian culture of those days. America is, to a great extent, a battleground on which the main players are radical “wokesters” of an overall Cultural Marxist cast and, on the other hand, a largely inchoately agnostic lowest common denominator of humanity that finds itself incapable of articulating any programmatic view of human being.

Obviously, the remnants of Christian culture in American probably retain more vitality than the culture of the Anglophile elites does in India. Maitra’s own view of the Woke West is well captured in another recent article, which also well describes the forces arrayed against Christians in America:

Speak Loudly and Carry Someone Else’s Big Stick

Sumantra Maitra

January 20, 2023

The efforts of figures like Sanna Marin [Finland] and Kaja Kallas [Estonia] are a grating combination of sanctimony, arrogance, historical ignorance, philosophical ineptitude, and ceaseless demand.

Marin and Kallas are typical examples of the current Western political class. They are driven by an ideology that cuts them off from the Western cultural tradition as a matter of principle. Which is to say, that they reject on principle to consider the reality of the history that lies behind all that the West built up—and is now tearing down. It’s ideologically driven, by the conceit that Man can easily remake and reinvent himself at will. Man becomes God, through the power of Will. Maitra sees this. He surely knows that India cannot look to the current Woke West for guidance in navigating the perils of its own future. The West, even if it ultimately rejects these empty shells of human beings, will be hard pressed to reclaim its own tradition, faced as it is with the betrayal of its key institutions—religious, social, political.

Here are two additional articles by Maitra that are worthwhile:

Lessons from the Musking of Twitter

If Twitter can survive without woke bureaucrats, maybe the national security state can, too.

Of course, nothing is that easy. Not when the forces of cultural dissolution are so well funded.

Maitra also offers a thoughtful take on the current balloon/UFO hysteria in America:

Unified American Hysteria

State of the Union: Promises and perils of a peer rival

But there is a broader point about republics and a united polity. A republic by its very structure is fractured and tends to be chaotic in spirit, lacking external rivals. That is by democratic design, opposed to an enforced discipline that might lead to outright despotism. Republics are also often united when faced with an external threat. That is also a historic fact and at times a historic need, and, sometimes, a historic opportunity for smooth demagogues. Those factors are complementary and feed on each other, although not always in a good way.

...

The promises and perils of a peer rival here are twofold. On one hand, it is true that China as a peer rival, strictly by manpower, GDP, and production capability, is far, far greater a threat ever posed by imperial Spain, imperial and Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. China is also, however, surrounded by powerful nations either allied or in alignment with the U.S. Asia in 2023 isn’t Europe in 1949. While the rise of China belatedly provides a sense of purpose and priority to an internally fractured, overstretched, and utopian American republic, it could also be dangerously exploited by those seeking to transform the globe. Any disunity or dissent can then be considered unpatriotic. The key to a rational grand strategy is about a sense of proportion, and loyal and stoic elites. As the Athenians found out, it is hysteria and blunder, which is often more fatal than the enemy’s devices.

Trollstoy @Trollstoy88

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