Death of Freedom?
by Michael D'Virgilio
Issue 112 - July 23, 2008

We live in a time when most Americans have lived their entire lives immersed in a culture that is positively hostile to their values. Public and higher education, every venue of entertainment, media, and the arts, and the ubiquitous legal environment all conspire to undermine the values that created the greatness that is America. To this point the predominant attitude toward culture on the right has been open hostility, given voice and popularized in a speech by Pat Buchanan at the 1992 Republican convention in Houston.

The right and left have indeed been at war, but the former has been using popguns while the latter has been using tanks. The real problem, however, is not that the other side's guns are bigger. The problem is that the war metaphor assumes the right wants the same or similar mechanisms that the left now has in place, only with different results. In war, after all, the victor takes the spoils and calls the shots. The winners take over and control the society. The left does indeed seek to do that, and it has effectively achieved it. Witness the consequences in a wonderfully sad article by Dennis Prager recently about the death of freedom in America.

This mentality is perfectly understandable given the beating traditional values take daily in all of American culture. The problem is that "war" in this realm is counterproductive. Those American who self-identify as being on the right side of the political/cultural spectrum assume they are in the minority. When their friends, who are mostly apolitical and not culturally engaged, are not distressed by the barrage of negativity coming from the left-dominated culture, they assume all is lost.

This feeling of isolation brings frustration and the attendant hostility many feel is justified by the circumstances. Yet we know that the vast majority of Americans, or people of any society, will never be politically and culturally engaged. It's just the way it is. We've all heard the 80/20 rule; 80 percent of the people do 20 percent of the work; 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work. It's human nature. The political/cultural corollary of this is probably not much different, but let's be generous. Maybe 20 percent on the right are engaged, and 20 percent on the left. If my math doesn't fail me, that means 60 percent of Americans are up for grabs.

What do I mean by this? It goes back to cultural influence; something the right has effectively abdicated over the last fifty years while putting its focus on politics and intellectual pursuits. In those areas the right has done a tremendous job of building something from nothing or at least very little. Yet in a culture dominated by the left, the 60 percent of unengaged Americans will never be sufficiently influenced by the intellectual and political right to move society in that direction. They won't hear enough from them.

Too many on the right have bought into the premise, consciously or not, that they can and should "control" culture. They assume that once we "take over," we'll have the right kind of culture, all sweetness and light. Of course, most halfway intelligent people know they can't control something so amorphous and complex as an entire culture, but the temptation is to think it can be done, especially given the left's ability to dominate things during the right's period of abdication from cultural pursuits. Outside of the use of force, control is an illusion. Even then, thought cannot be completely controlled. The only societies that approximate such control are totalitarian, and the left in America is dangerously close to that mindset. The process they employ is political correctness, and although it doesn't use the power of the state in quite the same way as traditional totalitarian societies, it nonetheless uses the force of law in a way that is almost as suffocating.

What is the answer? In a word: liberty. Consider, for example, academia. Higher education today is as insular and hostile to those on the right as it is possible to be. They believe the right is hardhearted and evil, and thus our ideas and presence are not welcome. The environment is monolithically leftward, and through the various levers of influence available to professors and administrators, those on the right, or even in the middle, are all but shut out.

If conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals were in the same position as the left today, would it be right to shut the left out in the same way? Some, maybe many, on the right might think so. They would be wrong. We aren't afraid of the left's ideas, as they are afraid of ours. We don't believe they are evil, just mistaken and wrong. So unlike the left we have no need to shut them out. In an academy committed to the pursuit of excellence and intellectual diversity, not ideological conformity, competition would reveal the ideas of true value and permanence.

The traditional values that made America great are not the province of a small percentage of people on the right, while the vast majority of Americans are innately hostile to those values. In fact the very opposite is true. The reason the left uses the cudgel of political correctness and legal jujitsu is exactly because their ideas have so little merit and cannot stand the light of day or real competition. Think about it. They have the entire persuasive power of every lever of cultural influence, and have for decades, and the party of the left cannot even get 50 percent of the vote in presidential elections! A certain presidential candidate will not allow himself to be called a liberal because he is afraid of the negative connotations of the word. No such trepidation exists on the right.

It wasn't litigation and the chill of political correctness that made this nation the freest, most prosperous in the history of the world. It wasn't a massive government that intervened in every area of life to keep us "safe" or to make life fair and equal. Instead it was the radical assertion that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our rights came not from the state or from 51 percent of our countrymen, but from nature and nature's God. This freedom with which we were endowed presupposed a self-governing people immersed in the morals and manners of the Judeo-Christian traditions. Ours will never be a perfect culture, nor will it always be pretty, but it will be the best we can hope for this side of eternity.

Therefore, what is really needed is not a culture war but a cultural liberation. The left is in effect holding America hostage. The only way we will liberate our culture and rebuild the foundation of American exceptionalism is by infusing American culture with multitudes of talented, foundational-thinking artists, academics, lawyers and legal scholars, filmmakers, novelists, musicians, fifth grade school teachers, high school principals, and hardworking journalists. The list could go on and on. Unfortunately for the frustrated, impatient many on the right, there is no quick fix. Emancipation is not an election away. But millions of Americans are currently doing great work within our cultural influence professions, and we need many millions more.

Imagine the same zeal, energy, and creativity that the right has given to political and intellectual pursuits these last fifty years focused as well on culture for the next fifty. The impact would be electrifying. Only then will we have a chance to bequeath to our children and our children's children a freer, saner, and uplifting American culture.

Michael D'Virgilio is the founder and Executive Director of The Culture Project