This Is What Happens When You’re Ceding The Fight
By ceding the fight on education, the right planted the seeds for losing the culture war.
Marco Rubio’s feels philosophy is the pre-eminent example of a useless college major. He wants more welders. The anti-intellectualism that runs through the GOP and much of society today is reinforced in the critique of the protests at University of Missouri and Yale. Whether it’s apathy, genuine disinterest, or some combination of the two, conservatives have ceded higher education to liberals, and thus have ceded the task of educating young adults.
The Ivory Tower
The fact remains that it owns the culture, and people’s livelihoods are entirely at its mercy. For example, you want to practice your religion as you see fit? In an existential respect, this is at the whim of students educated for 20 years that become the established structure deciding what that looks like. As we have seen with florists and bakers who’ve had to close up shop for failing to participate in same-sex weddings, interpretations of public accommodations laws superseding discriminatory religious practices is established. This is all a matter of interpretation influenced by the way we are taught to think and learn. The hordes of lawyers, judges, and politicians who’ve been elected received all of their professional training and academic foundation from teachers and professors. This reality will not go away, and will only intensify, until conservatives discard their disdain of education and do the hard work necessary to reclaim it.
Ceding The Fight
The expression “culture war” entered the vocabulary of United States politics with the publication of Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James Davison Hunter in 1991. Hunter perceived a dramatic realignment and polarization that had transformed United States politics and culture, including the issues of abortion, federal and state gun laws, global warming, immigration, separation of church and state, privacy, recreational drug use, homosexuality, and censorship.
This is the root cause of why the culture war is being lost by conservatives. Liberals have shown capability in affecting change through law and government while conservatives have abdicated and condemned both institutions. The Constitution was written with the express idea that the masses should have their voice filtered through a ruling class. That ruling class is receiving a liberal education.
