by Thaddeus McCotter
America is in a Culture War. Détente is not an option, and surrender is unconscionable, for it would mean the end of our free republic.
As the presidential campaign speeds past what was once its
traditional kickoff date, Labor Day Weekend, many on the right continue
to argue that engaging in the “Culture War” is either a distraction or
that it is already lost. In both instances, waging the good fight to
protect and promote a virtuous culture will ineluctably lead to the
Right’s electoral defeat.
Instead, they aver, dispense with cultural issues, such as abortion,
euthanasia, protecting parental rights, etc., and focus solely on the
economy, immigration, and the weaponization of government. If these
Republican Cassandras prevail upon the Trump campaign and GOP
down-ticket campaigns to stand mute on critical cultural issues, what
will victory in November accomplish for MAGA and conservative populists?
The disintegration of our free republic by an erosion rather than an
avalanche. And, in truth, the erosion would prove more painful by not
only being slower but by being done by our own Republican hands.
A vibrant, virtuous culture of life is indispensable to the liberty
and prosperity of Americans and, indeed, all of humanity. To attempt to
divorce culture from democracy and the economy is to agree with the
left: government and the economy are essentially mechanistic,
materialistic, and deterministic—shaping the human person more than the
individual shapes these institutions.
This explains why the left injects its ideology and uses the tools of
both government and the economy to indoctrinate the citizenry into its
collectivist ideology, and, in its secular atheism, denigrates and often
infringes upon the liberty and property of dissenters who cherish
faith, family, community, and country—people who are committed to
defending and expanding a virtuous culture of life.
The left is waging a culture war on America—indeed a war against the
very concept of truth, itself—that aims to impose its collectivist,
materialist, secularist ideology upon society; and subordinating and
suppressing traditional culture and its adherence to moral truths. Since
the left believes it is winning, if largely by default, and is hellbent
on finishing its mission, in this Culture War the Republican Cassandras
are laboring under the delusion they are seeking a Détente. What they
are really calling for is unilateral disarmament on the path to
unconditional surrender and serfdom.
In his masterful biography, The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II – The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, George Weigel examined the late pontiff’s social magisterium and, notably, his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus
[The Hundredth Year], which issued a clarion call for a “free and
virtuous society and the priority of culture;” and warned of “the
dangers that awaited democratic polities and free-economies that cut
themselves loose from sturdy moral-cultural moorings.”
Per Weigel, the crux of John Paul II’s argument was tripartite:
The free and virtuous society [is] composed of three
interlocking parts: a democratic polity, a free or market-centered
economy, and a robust public moral culture. The third component part,
[John Paul II] insisted, was the key to the proper functioning of the
political and economic sectors. It took a certain kind of people,
possessing certain virtues, to make democracy and the market work so
that human beings were ennobled by their participation in free political
and economic life.
Yet, what was it that enabled an individual and their society to
thrive within democratic states and free market economies? “As always,
recognition of the truth about the dignity of the human person was the
key to the ultimate success of any human activity.” States that
incorporated and protected these moral truths, for example, human
rights, by circumscribing the powers of its government; and that allowed
for the flourishing of human creativity and responsibility within a
free market, would engender the most virtuous and salubrious citizenry.
But, John Paul II was acutely aware of what would happen when secular
atheism and/or virulent moral relativism in “democracies that declared
wrongs to be rights” impaired a society’s ability to adhere to the moral
truths that spurred its virtuous accomplishments.
As Weigel noted, John Paul II discerned the problem at its
post-modern root, namely “a world striving for freedom had not learned
to live freedom nobly because it had lost touch with the nobility of the
human person, which consists in our ability to know, choose, and adhere
to the truth.”
And the historical horrors humanity wrought and suffered provided a
crystalline vision of where a Godless, vice-addled society would dead
end.
John Paul II located the deepest wound of modernity in a
defective humanism that had left the world morally adrift and had
created a global charnel house in which great hopes had been burnt to
ashes. Life had become fragmented and atomized. The alienation
experienced by the men and women of late modernity was far deeper and
more complex than the alienation analyzed by Karl Marx: men and women
had become alienated from their own interiority, having lost sight of a
transcendent spiritual and moral horizon against which to live their
lives. This deeper alienation had profound public consequences. Like his
friend Henri de Lubac, Wojtyla was convinced that defective humanisms
had created a situation in which men and women could only organize the world against each other. Ultramundane humanism inevitably became inhuman humanism.
St. John Paul the Great wrote this in 1959. Sixty-five years later,
the inhuman humanism has metastasized throughout our country and our
world, in which we are more rapidly and readily being organized against
each other in a death of a thousand keystrokes in a cyber-cesspool of
disinformation, envy, and animus.
Yet there is life, and yet there is hope. The hope for John Paul II,
Weigel wrote, was that “the truth about the human person was ultimately
revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom we discover the truth about the
merciful Father and the truth about ourselves.”
Thus, in 1976, it was this conviction that led then Cardinal Wojtyla
to declare that he and his peers stood “in the front line in a lively
battle for the dignity of man.” A quarter century later, the Cold War
was over. Through the grace of God and the work of his earthly servants,
the “conscience revolution” that affirmed the primacy of everyone’s
human dignity had destroyed the evil empire of the totalitarian Soviet
Union and its communist satellites.
Today, over thirty years, America is in a Culture War. Launched and
waged by the left, it is a Culture War without quarter. Détente is not
an option, and surrender is unconscionable, for it would mean the end of
our free republic and all we have cherished for generations and hope to
bequeath to future generations.
In brutal truth: we cannot make America great again unless we make America good again.
Thus, the heirs of Lincoln and Reagan must dismiss the Republican
Cassandras, and engage and win the Culture War. We must proclaim our
support for a free and virtuous culture of life and moral truths. We
must trust in the innate decency of our fellow citizens. And we must
realize that whatever the immediate electoral danger, the greatest
danger is to abandon our principles. For we will not only lose our
liberty and prosperity.
We will lose the truth about ourselves.
***
An American Greatness contributor, the Hon.
Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional
district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House
Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and
moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John
Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.
Thaddeus McCotter
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2024/08/31/laboring-under-a-delusion/
Follow Middle East and Terrorism on Twitter
