Kevin Drum
riffs on a theme that has truly interested me of late:
Over the last half century, various branches of government
have also taken plenty of proactive steps to marginalize religion.
Prayer in public school has been banned. Creches can no longer be set up
in front of city hall. Parochial schools are forbidden from receiving
public funds. The Ten Commandments can't be displayed in courtrooms.
Catholic hospitals are required to cover contraceptives for their
employees. Gay marriage is legal in more than a dozen states and the
number is growing rapidly.
His point is that liberals have won the culture war, and we have.
Conservatives are left trying to justify their cultural relevance by
pathetically disassembling box office receipts like
this. (Did you know that Tina Fey and Ricky Gervais are "two of the most divisive actors working today"?)
And it goes deeper than what Drum writes. Liberal social values are
deeply embedded in our culture, from pretty much everything on TV
outside the Christian channels at the fringe of the channel lineup, to
any movie of note. In that Breitbart link above, Nick Nolte waxes about
God's Not Dead,
an indie Christian film that has grossed $41 million on a production
budget of $2 million. Good job! Then again, it's a blip. Captain America
has grossed nearly half a
billion in 10 days, with its overtly civil-libertarian and anti-neocon
message. I mean,
Captain America is saying that a fear-based (read: Republican) foreign policy is not the "American Way."
For a crowd that flinches at any notion of sex, it's gotta be
impossible to escape sexual imagery, from advertising to media to Miley
Cyrus' latest whatever-the-hell she is doing. And seriously, don't
listen to song lyrics. I flinched hearing my six-year-old daughter sing
along with Flo Rida's "Whistle." She was too little to understand what
that song was
really about, but at some point, she will. I'm not
the kind of parent overly concerned with "protecting" her from that sort
of thing, but if you are, it's a tough world out there.
On economic matters, the pendulum is swinging hard against the
financial elite. There's a reason we get regular installments of
"billionaire calls economic populists Nazis." They were used to being
paragons of society. Now they are the enemy. And with populism on the
rise, and with talk of income inequality routine, Reaganesque "trickle
down" theories are decidedly out of favor. Why do you think Republicans
are afraid to roll out their "solutions" to our problems? It's because
they know their views, whether on health care or immigration or pretty
much anything else, are out of touch with public opinion. Sure, there is
infighting in their caucus, but it's a fight between those who
think
conservatism is popular and being loud-and-proud will be politically
advantageous (e.g. Ted Cruz), and those who know how to read the polls.
That's not to say that we've WON won. We certainly have won the
battle of ideas. But power isn't just about ideas. It's about wrestling
the institutional levers of government from the retrogrades. Those
entrenched economic and conservative interests wield power via the
Supreme Court, through gross gerrymandering, through voter suppression
efforts. So we've got a lot of work ahead of us.
But if you wonder why conservatives seem to carry perpetual
grievances, it's because they know they have lost. The entire world
around them has left them behind. Heck, they've created an entire
alternate media world in which to cocoon themselves. But they know
they've lost. They may still alternate between the "denial" (Ted Cruz)
and "anger" (Bill Donohue) phases of acceptance, but the only question
left is how long will it be before our government truly represents the
public will. And when that happens, we'll be truly able to ignore the
perpetual tempter tantrum from the Right.
