Cultural Collapse Has Become So Great it Overwhelms Politics

It's been 25 years...Has it Happened?

Published in The Orlando Sentinel on May 27, 1999.

Paul Weyrich, a decent Washington conservative, sent out a private letter after the Senate failed to impeach Bill Clinton. In essence, he stated that conservatives have lost the political war.

The reason "is that politics itself has failed. And politics has failed because of the collapse of the culture. The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we're caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics," he wrote.

I think that he's right. I've long believed that the assertion that there is a conservative majority in America is a myth. I don't believe that there is. I also think that the assertion by Samuel Francis, another conservative, that there is a corrupt, dominant culture but also a traditional culture is wishful thinking. Where is this traditional culture in 1999? I haven't been able to find it.

The traditional American culture was, first of all, Christian. Where is there any evidence that this is still a Christian culture? What Christian influence do you see in art, the movies, television? Christmas is even banned from government schools.

I know about the numbers, but there are more professors than practitioners. And much of what purports to be Christian is Christian in name only and otherwise unrecognizable. (If you wish to see a Christian service as it was practiced at the time of the apostles, visit an Orthodox church. The Orthodox church is the most unchanged of all the Christian denominations.)

Another key aspect of traditional American culture was belief in minimal government. Save for a few libertarians, who could hold a national meeting in a small hotel, where are these Americans who believe in minimal government? I can find big-government conservatives and big-government liberals, big-government Republicans and big-government Democrats, but I can't find very many minimal-government folks hiding under any label.

Traditional Americans believed that the Constitution was a compact among sovereign states, that the federal government created by the compact was merely the agent of the states and that its powers were absolutely and strictly limited. Where will you find Americans who believe that any more? Not in either of the major parties. Certainly not in Washington.

People are trying -- but will fail -- to amend the Constitution just so they can make it illegal to burn or otherwise desecrate the flag. Listen, if it is safe to burn the flag in public, it's pointless to make it illegal. In the traditional American culture, you couldn't burn a flag in public, because passers-by would stop you and probably beat you to a pulp if not lynch you.

You can't impose on a people by law values that they don't already have. I think this is one of the things Weyrich has realized. Culture comes first, and politics are a byproduct of culture, an effect not a cause. Therefore, you cannot use politics and legislation to create a culture. A culture produces the politics, not the other way around.

I'm convinced that if the majority of Americans had to re-write the 23rd Psalm, it would read, "The government is my shepherd and I shall not want." I think that the American people today are by and large socialist and by and large decadent. Most of those not decadent themselves are tolerant of decadence. I also believe that government schools have succeeded in doing what Hanna Arendt said totalitarian schools do -- make it impossible for people to form and hold strong convictions about anything. And to keep us dumbed down. C.L.

Any hope for America's future will come from church and hearthside if it comes at all -- not from politics. Extant traditional Americans have indeed lost the political war. ~ Charlie Reese

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