Always on the defensive

11 April 2009 @ 8:54 am | 2 comments

“Gays, guns put right on defense”

The culture wars are making a comeback, but this time around, social conservatives find themselves in an unfamiliar position: playing defense.

I’m not sure that the culture wars ever left, but when can you say that social conservatives are ever NOT on the defensive? They have had successes, and failures. Certainly right now, you can say they have suffered several recent setbacks and hold little influence in the halls of power.

But are social cons ever on the offensive? What radical social innovations do they have in store? If anything, their arguments are at an inherent disadvantage as they amount to saying “No” to a rising tide of opposition. It is not very glamorous to “[stand] athwart history, yelling Stop.”

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  1. B.’s avatar

    B. on 11 April 2009 at 1:46 pm

    It always has to be about wars doesn’t?

    The right/conservatives are always seeing wars somewhere or another, where the liberal/left aren’t.

  2. Euripides’s avatar

    Euripides on 11 April 2009 at 3:49 pm

    As a defensive comment: The expression culture wars appeared in the US in the 1920s as a response to urban versus rural values. The phrase has been around for a long time and has a general accepted use in the US to refer to differences of opinion about abortion, divorce, gay rights, and so on. In the case of this Politico headline, the author is left-leaning, not right-leaning.

    The same sex marriage issue, especially after the gay activists lost California and three other states, energized the group to spend a lot more money nationally and take an offensive position (pun intended).