Motus Mentis

On April 27th, Josiah Lippincott published an essay at American Greatness arguing that we’ve lost the culture war, and that the way forward is for the Right to focus squarely on the issues that got Donald Trump elected in 2016.

Lippincott’s article, which you can read here, stakes out the argument as follows:

Immigration, trade, war, and crime. Being right on these four issues propelled Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016 against all odds. The intervening seven years have changed nothing. The only way a candidate from the Right can possibly win the presidency in 2024 is by campaigning on limiting immigration (build the wall), increasing tariffs, getting out of Ukraine, and restoring law and order (especially in regards to elections and the opioid crisis).

These are the core issues for the center-Right coalition needed to win national elections. No supposedly conservative politician with aspiration for higher office should ever make any public statement without hammering at least one of these points. Journalist asks about Social Security? Talk about why we need to stop giving money to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Democratic opponent brings up climate change? Talk about why we need to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.

The issues of national survival are of primary importance. There is no point in fighting a culture war if we don’t have a country in which this war can take place. Conservatives do not have a viable path to political power any other way.

The Paul Ryan strategy of calling for lower taxes and deregulation is yesterday’s failure. Voters don’t have enough skin in that game to care. Calling for entitlement reform, i.e, cuts to social security and medicare, is political suicide. And as the 2022 midterms showed, campaigning on social issues like abortion is also a losing gambit.

Lippincott, who is a Christian himself, argues that Christianity has failed in its moral stewardship:

Trying to rehash these old battles in the present political moment, when institutional Christianity no longer has any meaningful political or cultural clout, is a waste of time—at least at the national level.

COVID-19 made the weakness of American Christianity painfully clear. Protestant and Catholic churches alike overwhelmingly declared themselves nonessential during the spring of 2020. That was, sadly, merely an acknowledgement of a longstanding reality.

Virtually no one today cares what the pope or any megachurch pastor, for that matter, has to say about political and cultural life. Their endorsements do not move the needle and their influence has had little to no bearing, even on their own flocks, when it comes to preserving the older standards of Christian morality and decency.

Since 1933, the American Right has posted loss after loss in the culture war. From blasphemy laws to pornography, school prayer to abortion, gay marriage to biological men using women’s bathrooms, conservatives and Christians have suffered a nearly unmitigated series of losses.

America’s pastors and priests couldn’t stop this decline. And, for the most part, they didn’t really try or seem to want to. Aside from a few metaphysical niceties and theological quibbles, I can detect no real difference in the innumerable sermons and homilies I’ve heard in my lifetime. The modern pastor wants little more than to issue platitudes and collect the tithe.

The vague admonitions to “have faith” and “follow Christ” that pepper the Sunday morning pastoral exhortations from America’s pulpits generally lack any practical core. America’s pastors, with few exceptions, shy away from fighting for the faith they supposedly love. They lack the sternness and fidelity of their forebears. Compare a St. Augustine to a Pope Francis or a Martin Luther to a David French. Our Christian forebears had iron in their souls. The modern pastor is generally soft.

All that’s left, then, for traditionally minded Americans, is to set the hopeless culture war aside, try to build a coalition around whatever’s left, and fight to wrest the White House and Congress away from the Democrats in 2024.

The AG piece has led to some discussion by some of our online friends. Writing at The Orthosphere, JM Smith acknowledges Lippincott’s gloomy assessment as further evidence that consensual government in America is dead, and that “we have clumped down another step in the basement staircase that leads to civil war.” Meanwhile, Arthur Roebuck, also at Orthosphere, presents a more nuanced version of what he thinks Lippincott should have said, and takes a slightly more optimistic position: namely, that if the culture war really is unwinnable, then there’s no reason to want America to survive anyway — but that to conclude that the war is really over is premature.

Over at Maverick Philosopher, our friend Bill Vallicella has posted two items recently that touch on this question: one in response to my own recent post on “accelerationism” (that one’s here), and another replying to Lippincott’s article (here). Both of these have lively comment-threads, including some excellent push-back against the “accelerationist” strategy by Vito Caiati, who is also an occasional commenter here.

In a comment on Bill’s latter post, I made an attempt at parsing the three positions:

a) “Accelerationism” is a laissez-faire approach that says that we should let the Left have its way until, in its lust for evil, it makes things so undeniably awful that the millions of decent citizens who are currently just “going along to get along” have finally had enough, and rise up as one to strike it down. Only by letting things quickly become truly intolerable will all those good people be awakened to their peril; otherwise, the Left will slowly keep “boiling the frog” until civilization is cooked.

b) Others maintain that even if we are doomed to lose, we must always resist the encroachment of evil, because it is the duty of a good Christian — or any righteous person — to do so. Any strategic cleverness Accelerationists might propose should be resisted on this principle.

c) Lippincott recommends what seems to be a hybrid “middle way”: laissez-faire on cultural/moral issues, while using an emphasis on immigration, war, trade, and crime to build a broadly Rightist electoral coalition that can actually seize effective political power.

Commenter “Ian” at Bill’s place made a strong objection to Lippincott’s strategy:

Lippincott’s strategy of a temporary cessation on social issues at the national level will turn into a permanent one: so we’re supposed to shut up about social issues at the national level until we secure power, at which point we can start talking about them again? And in the meantime, conservatives will have continued secretly to care deeply about these social issues when all our national leaders have agreed to stop making them issues? How is that supposed to work exactly?

If you stop making something an issue, it sends the message that it is not important. And guess what: people will start believing that.

It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. But for an election!

The great accomplishment of the pro-life movement during the Roe v. Wade era was keeping abortion controversial rather than surrendering it as a settled issue. This meant millions of people thought that abortion was murder, who thereby kept their souls from being corrupted. This all by itself justified the existence of the pro-life movement, even had Roe v. Wade never been overturned.

So: lots of good discussion. What’s the right plan? What is to be done?