The alternate title for this post would be a riff on Kurt Schlichter's "Liberals May Regret Their New Rules" theme, but the actual inspiration was this post by Andrew Klavan.
Before getting into quotes, I will first provide some original content.
My generation is probably the youngest one that can still remember what used to be called "decency." There were things that people simply didn't say.
My grandparents didn't smoke, drink or swear - limitations that seem quaint today but were still common in my youth. A political candidate who had an extra-marital affair was immediately disqualified from holding office, which is why those that did took great pains to keep it secret.
No one wrote these rules out, it was just understood that certain things were off limits.
In my youth, those limits were under assault by smarty-pants liberals who liked to poke fun at them. There's nothing inherently wrong with that of course - people have made fun on societal conventions since they had societal conventions, but the difference was that this was all mean-spirited humor. Liberals viewed the conventions as stupid and wrong, and wanted sweep them away.
As this process unfolded, the defenders of the old values tried to resist, but they were hampered by their adherence to those values. To refer back to a personal example, my grandparents believed it was deeply wrong to insult people. Because of this, they put themselves at a disadvantage against those for whom insult and ridicule were the the go-to weapons.
This was a major factor in the degeneration of their church, the United Methodists. Despite the howlings of the progressives, the old-timers didn't hate gay people, and they recoiled from repeated insult and abuse. Their opponents exploited this advantage and so the Methodists effectively purged the people who were once the pillars of their faith.
The same dynamic was in play in the broader society. Gangsta rap, increasingly pornographic-style sex scenes in movies, ultra-violence being glorified for its own sake, and the common theme that conventional values were worthless hypocrisy made a remorseless advance across the cultural landscape.
In 1988, Gary Hart's political career was destroyed by the revelation of an affair. By 1992, Bill Clinton was able to survive the scandal by saying it was in the past. By 1998, he was able to survive an affair consummated in the Oval Office by arguing that personal character no longer mattered.
This progression was essentially how we got President Trump.
After decades of losing and watching their values get trashed, the cultural conservatives came to understand that adhering to the rules of decency was a sucker's game. We learned that our grandparents tactics were self-defeating.
To be clear, most conservative people never changed their views on appropriate tactics. The change came because the old generation passed away and the new generation grew up with the rules as they saw them.
A Christian conservative born in 1925 would never in a million years have voted for Trump, but one born in 1980 can do so with glee.
As Klavan puts it:
The left wants us to reel in shock that Donald Trump chased women or praised Russian strong men? Who was it who defended the infidelities and possible rapes of Bill Clinton? Who was it who turned a blind eye to Barack Obama consorting with terrorists and hate-mongers like Farrakhan?
That last passage reminds me of the time the Obama White House hosted a rapper whose album featured a dead judge. The future Quisling Never Trumpers clicked their tongues, but the rest of us took note that this was now the new normal. Obama had just formally endorsed making fun of dead judges.
I mention this specific example because one can't help but notice how much of the progressive agenda and The Resistance is being advanced by judicial overreach. Should (God forbid) an activist judge get the same treatment meted out to the GOP Congress at baseball practice, I'm sure that album photo will get prominent placement in right-wing media and that the left will completely ignore it.
I was interested to see that my co-blogger's post got linked by Fark and - as one would expect - the two comments they left consisted of a personal insult and a pathetic straw man. Such is the intellectual rigor of our opponents. (Our resident troll - as usual - offered a link rather than coming up with an original argument on his own.)
Turning back to Klavan's quote, the long-suppressed photo of Barack Obama grinning with Louis Farrakhan carries particular import in our tempestuous times. Within hours of the school shooting (which the FBI could have stopped, but didn't), the mainstream press was speculating that a white nationalist did the dirty need. Law enforcement subsequently said there's no evidence of this, but progressives got their smear out there, so mission accomplished.
The problem for them is that the cry of "racism" has lost its power and again, this is not because conservatives became suddenly bigoted but because the left has been showing their own bigotry non-stop for the last decade.
The younger generation has come of age steeped in anti-white rhetoric and at the same time knows that black nationalism is treated as a positive good. Another cultural more has been destroyed.
Great job, progressives.
I miss the old culture - the campy conventions where people used euphemisms and clever insults rather than dropping f-bombs all over the place. The movies were better, the music was better and society was better.
Back then, people of goodwill across the political spectrum were working towards racial reconciliation. Don't tell me the 80s were a nightmare of segregation and bigotry when the three most popular people were Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson and Bill Cosby.
Despite a more diverse population, race relations are now the worst I've ever seen, and that's because the left made it okay to hate. They thought that exception only applied to them, but the common culture cuts both ways.
Schlichter is right - liberals are going to hate the world they created.
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