“Nobody cares about ‘social issues’ anymore, we have been told. Democrats have become the Pervert Party . . . and Republicans are now the Party That Dare Not Disagree. Morality is no longer a matter of the divine ‘thou shalt not’ that Jehovah declared to the Israelites at Mount Sinai. Nowadays, moral authority is determined by Hollywood, Harvard University and the New York Times. In post-Christian America, we have reverted to a sort of neo-heathenism, depending on guidance from secular wizards and a priestly caste of experts who gaze at poll numbers the way ancient astrologers looked for omens in the stars.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “The New Abnormal,” The American Spectator, July 31, 2013
Mike Huckabee gave a speech yesterday at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting that has been treated as scandalously controversial. Chris Moody of Yahoo News provided the full context of Huckabee’s remarks:
“I think it’s time for Republicans to no longer accept listening to Democrats talk about a war on women. Because the fact is, the Republicans don’t have a war on women. They have a war for women. For them to be empowered; to be something other than victims of their gender.
“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless and hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for them birth control medication.
“Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do. Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That’s not a war on women, it’s a war for them. And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it — let’s take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than Democrats have made them to be. And women across America have to stand up and say, enough of that nonsense.”
Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” — a quaintly Freudian term for “sex drive” — was the specific button-pusher here, but let’s face reality: No one can say anything about women that deviates from Official Feminist Dogma without committing Thought Crime and, because Democrats control the terms of what is accepted as Official Feminist Dogma, the Thought Police are always more vigilant in scrutinizing Republicans for deviations from the script. Allahpundit:
Does it really matter what he said? The liberal thought process on this works this way, I think: “Known social conservative + something about women + something about sex and birth control = outrage.” Right? It’s basically Pavlovian.
Allah links Ace’s rant against social conservatives:
The elevation of strictly personal decisions . . . into a major political issue is childish and tribalist.
Yes we all have a preferred mode of living. News at 11. The law is not about preferred modes of living, and neither should we make “political issues” about it.
The problem, of course, is that it was feminists and their Democrat allies who decided that “the personal is political,” so that radical messages about How We Should Live are the constant theme of propaganda from the news media, Hollywood and academia.
Children are being indoctrinated in public schools, at taxpayer expense, about How We Should Live. If you are a parent who doesn’t want your daughters living the Disney Starlet Lifestyle — or if you don’t want your sons performing in “bareback orgy” videos — who is on your side?
Well, certainly not the Republican Party, I guess, because if any Republican so much as mentions the Culture War nowadays, he or she will be denounced not only by the Left, but also by conservative pundits who insist that the GOP must cede the field to Democrats on social issues and never say a word about how The Pervert Party benefits from America’s descent into decadence.
This position of pre-emptive surrender in the Culture War seems to have begun in 1992, when the GOP ran for cover rather than to defend Dan Quayle’s critique of “Murphy Brown.” It seems to have escaped the notice of most Republicans when, a year after that controversy, Dr. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead declared in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly, “Dan Quayle Was Right.”
Whitehead developed that article into a fascinating book, The Divorce Culture, but apparently I’m the only conservative blogger who read that book, because I never see Ace or Allah or anyone else acknowledge Whitehead’s critique of the “Love Family” ideology which “liberates sexual, compassionate, and parental love from its institutional and cultural moorings in marriage.” For that matter, have you ever seen any conservative blogger mention Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism or Dana Mack’s The Assault on Parenthood?
My point is that social conservatism is more intellectually respectable than most people imagine, but for 20 years, those who are serious about fighting the Culture War have been shunted aside and told to be quiet, lest they cause Republicans to lose elections.
Oddly, however, the GOP’s active suppression of social conservatism has not translated to Republican electoral dominance. The nomination of John McCain — whose profound contempt for social conservatives is no secret — did not produce a GOP triumph, nor was the Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney able to dodge the remarkably counterfactual Democrat propaganda that painted him as an extremist Trojan Horse, an agent of the Republican Taliban.
The fundamental problem here is probably too large to be reduced to a blog post, and I’m not in a mood to tackle the whole problem today, but let’s say this: Systemic incentives encourage conservative writers to devote themselves to the day-to-day political headlines, and to identify as “important” only those issues which directly and immediately affect the Republican Party.
Meanwhile, liberals — who comprise 80%-90% of journalists and academics — are writing about Everything Else, including sexuality, marriage and parenthood. So it is that, outside of whatever issues bear directly on the daily R-vs.-D political battle, nearly everything you read is written by liberals. This explains how the cultural “mainstream” is dragged steadily leftward, and most people don’t even notice the shift until Phil Robertson creates a firestorm by quoting the Bible, or one day you click an Internet link and find people arguing that high-school boys getting bareback butt-humped in porn videos is no cause for concern.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, says Glenn Beck.
Almost unnoticed, a posture of enlightened non-judgmentalism has become compulsory, because liberal dominance of the intelligentsia means that nearly every articulate person has been indoctrinated in the Egalitarian Orthodoxy, and no critic of the Left’s social agenda has access to a vocabulary of rational dissent.
One afternoon last August, I found myself amid a crowd of feminists marching down the street and chanting about rape, and I was denounced as a misogynist for noticing that several of the marchers were displaying their bare breasts during this political parade.
“Nice tits” is now hate speech, even if the aforesaid tits are brandished naked in broad daylight in downtown D.C. By the same token, a Republican may not suggest a connection between “libido” and the demand for taxpayer-funded contraception.
What we are witnessing is the abolition of common sense and its replacement by a political ideology. Common sense tells us that it is unusual — indeed, the word abnormal is appropriate — for women to parade bare-breasted through the streets. Common sense likewise tells us that the Contraceptive Culture is directly related to the prevalence of licentiousness and promiscuity in society.
Has it been only 10 years since Lawrence v. Texas? Has it been only 15 years since Nina Burleigh said she would cheerfully give Bill Clinton a blow job to thank him for keeping abortion legal?
Am I the only one who has noticed how rapidly the “Emerging Awareness” doctrine has gained a death-grip on our culture?
Huckabee’s use of the word “libido” caught my attention for reasons entirely different than the reasons that made him the object of a leftist Two-Minute Hate. Huckabee is 58 years old. He graduated from Ouchita State University in the mid-1970s, and is therefore old enough to remember when Freudian ideas about “libido” were entirely respectable. Nowadays, Freud’s categories are mocked as obsolete, and neurobiology is made to explain what was once attributed to “Oedipal complexes,” repressed impulses and so forth. Whatever way you are, we’re now told, you were Born That Way, and never mind if this biological determinism is vaguely redolent of Nazi race doctrine.
This is Science with a capital “s,” and Progress with a capital “p,” and no enlightened person is ever supposed to question whether today’s ideas of Scientific Progress are really any more valid than the discarded ideas of yesterday’s Scientific Progress.
Lost somewhere in all this is the old-fashioned understanding that humans are creatures of habit, and that if one gets into the habit of indulging certain unruly appetites, those habits may become the shackles of lifelong slavery, impairing the individual’s capacity for happiness, and inflicting various forms of misery on society at large.
Where did Kathryn Camille Murray get the idea that having sex with a 15-year-old boy was a pleasant and harmless amusement?
Perhaps the answer is to be found somewhere among the penumbras and emanations where Justice Douglas found a “right to privacy” in Griswold v. Connecticut, a few decades before Justice Kennedy invoked the hitherto unknown doctrine of “emerging awareness” in striking down the Texas sodomy statute. And who knows whither the emerging awareness shall henceforth emerge?
Not ruddy surprised.
RT @smitty_one_each: TOM ‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’ http://t.co/1UELhW8yC3 #TCOT
An excellent article. The GOP has become the Diet Democrats. Liberal progressive philosophy but now with moderation! (Extremism and fall out for the next generation but eh…) In the end a small government Liberal that doesn’t really appeal to anyone but a “not the democrats” vote anyway.
Would it be churlish to note that you have children and ace, and presumably allah, do not?
For most people it really does change your view of the world.
Though in unexpected ways in Florida.
Ace is intelligent and entertaining to read but will fold in the crunch, usually blaming us for making him do it (not unlike Althouse). Huckabee was right about this but he has just too damned much baggage (about four dead cops’ worth) to make his moral judgments trustworthy. But any Republican who talks moral issues will be attacked this way, by both parties, who are steeped in the “sophisticated” moral equivalencies of the Boswash corridor. (Why do you think so many New Yorkers are talking about moving to Florida and so few to Texas? The Floridian degeneracy you write about here is, er, right up their alley. Or vice-versa.
It is a false controversy and a classic Alinsky attack. The Dems are on the offensive. We need to respond like Patton at the Battle of the Bulge.
I absolutely do not want Huckabee as a leader of the GOP or a candidate for major office, but he is not quite the back stabber as Kristiekreme (although Mittens might disagree, but whatever…). We need to fight back on this false attack. Huckabee was not wrong with what he said, Dems do treat women as helpless.
I don’t think they treat women as helpless. I think they treat them as too lazy and stupid to manage their own lives. And a lot of Democrat women seem good with that.
I doubt Huckabee would have been better off if he described them quite that way! That is not to say it isn’t true for a lot of them.
If RINO-bee had merely stopped after the word “Democrats”, it would have been a brilliant speech.
[…] ‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’ […]
This is not about bashing Ace who, as you know, is basically my favorite blogger in the world. I have zero use for Huckabee as a GOP presidential candidate, but I think it was the awkwardness of his language rather than the wrongness of his ideas that caused the problem here.
Libido? Who says “libido” anymore?
And this is the problem I’m pointing to: The inability to express correct ideas about the value of moral tradition in a language that the general culture can accept is a function of the way social conservatism has been marginalized in academia and journalism. The Articulate Classes can’t speak the language of moral tradition, because no one who adheres to moral tradition has been welcome in academia or journalism for the past half-century.
BTW, having fraternal twin boys offered some harsh lessons in nature-vs.-nurture.
You might want to re-think that in light of his talking about conservatives calling out RINOs and then immediately bringing up Nazis. In the same speech.
It’s not just women, either – they treat everyone like that. Especially minorities. Then, they (and their media collaborators) portray those of us who want American citizens to be treated as adults as being racist/sexist/homophobic/etc.
This! Let’s stop trying to get along with the Democrats and spend our energies on defeating them.
+1 for “churlish”…
Ace is great but he’s pretty much always been a libertarian on social issues, at least in the sense that he is uncomfortable emphasizing them. I’ve always seen him as a conservative metrosexual.
Part of the problem the GOP has on social issues is that the black community (not the leaders) is largely in tune with social conservatives, but thanks to leftist Democrats they will pretty much never vote Republican. This means polling on social issues always looks like it will favor Republicans but it never works out at the ballot box for Republicans running on those issues.
I would ask people like Ace, who has a somewhat relaxed moral code, shall we say, if “we are better off now than we were 60 years ago” when divorce was discouraged, casual sex was discouraged and abortion was discouraged?
With relaxed social mores we now have gained a large amount of destroyed marriages, which wreaks havoc on children. 55 million abortions hardly makes abortion “safe, legal and rare” and std’s are a matter of course and rampant in society.
So, everyone can complain all they want about socon’s and morality, but, considering what the alternative has wrought, the socon’s just might have a case.
Obviously, there are things that just cannot be legislated and should not be legislated. However, other things certainly can be, such as getting rid of “no fault divorce” and instituting some form of “the person who wants out leaves with the clothes on their back.”
Just possibly, 55 million abortions says that perhaps there needs to be a few more limits on abortion.
Of course, the inevitable “socon = theocracy” bogeyman is always the first monster discovered under the bed.
You don’t have a tough job convincing us social conservatives of these things. The problem for Republicans is that the swing voters don’t want to hear it. Even when there was a huge majority of people opposed to gay marriage, for example, most of them weren’t really committed. The intensity was mostly on the other side.
If we could win elections with Republicans only, it would be one thing. We cannot. And the scare tactic of the Democrats has pretty steadily been the “Republicans in your bedroom/controlling your private life” one, and it has worked.
So the choice is to fight the Huckabee/McCain fight and hope the tide turns, or to emphasize the economic issues and deemphasize social issues. It doesn’t mean we accept abortion, but it does mean we recognize we don’t gain votes by telling single women or LGBTers they are violating God’s laws and they better repent.
Another note: how is NOT misogynist to call Selena Gomez a “psycho bitch” for basically cancelling a concert tour to get her own priorities in order? Justin Bieber goes ghetto, does thousands of dollars of damage to his neighbor’s house as a “prank,” drops $75,000 in one night in a strip club, blocks a public street for drunken drag racing, is busted for DUI and drugs – but he dumped Selena because SHE is the psycho?
It’s interesting how no one is permitted to interrogate the claims of Progress in these matters. For example, is it really true that we are the victims of hate if society criticizes or opposes our sexual preferences?
Back in the day — and I grew up in the Bible Belt, remember — getting away with something you knew would condemn you to Hell seemed plenty fun. Even with angry parents ready to skin me alive for corrupting their daughters, there was no political lobby claiming I was a bullied victim of anti-fornication prejudice.
Unfortunately, Ace seems to think (and I would posit incorrectly) that if only prominent social conservatives would stop saying stupid things, that there would be nothing for the media to latch onto. I have no idea how he came to that conclusion if he did (given that Romney never uttered any terrible SoCon gaffes and yet the media simply invented some) — he’s usually sharply observant about things. It’s more than likely it’s because social conservatives are a bit of a blind spot for him.
Though as intellectual as he is, I’ll give him that he doesn’t talk down to those Neanderthals in flyover country the same way Roger Simon does when he keeps pretending that the Millennials (that is, the political idea of them as a demographic) will ever see Republicans as “cool”. Conservatives who consider themselves “intellectual”, “hip”, and have their finger on the pulse of pop culture and all that keep forgetting this fact:
Republicans are uncool. Yes, even YOU, Mr. Hipster Republican. This is an image the Democrats have been cultivating for decades.
Being on the “right” side of gay marriage will not magically make us “cool”. How can we change this? Oh, the answer is simple enough: retake control of the public schools, academia, the press, Hollywood, popular music, literature…etc etc. It’s actually pulling it off that will prove much harder, require a lot more people dedicated to change it, and — and this is the hardest thing of all — time. Oh yes, it’s going to take decades to turn back the tide of destruction. Fortunately, the SoCons are already on it.
Of course, there’s always the other option.
Aaaaand that will teach me to do the AOS thing and skip to the comments, because you already said everything I did, Stacy, and in a much more coherent way.
I suspect that the fiscal conservatives have fallen prey to the Instant Gratification culture, where they seem to be expecting results within the next election.
But that certainly isn’t going to happen in the current culture. That has to change, and so far I’ve only been seeing that effort from the very people the Cocktail Party seems hell-bent on driving off. (Though not without leaving their wallet at the door. I may as well send money to the DNC; at least they’re being honest about their love of an out-of-control federal government)
I am not a fan of Huckabee, but I am not really in the mood of discussing his faults when it is clear the Dems are using him as a scape goat and the rest of us are next.
Huckabee is over rated, but he did managed to parlay his fame into a beach house on the red neck riviera of Florida. Good for him.
Yes of course his language is sloppy (Huckabee is not that smart) but it is not exactly Todd Akin either.
But I see what is going on. Obama care is imploding and the Dems are looking for targets to divert attention.
And I like Ace too, who is mostly a libertarian, not a conservative. I disagree with him that social conservatives are bad for the GOP. They are not although I think there are bigger issues we need to focus on (especially in blue states) to win elections and have a chance to make policy. I am not sure why Adjoran had to go call Ace a “metrosexual” though? Does Ace carry a man purse?
Here is a new girlfriend for Bieber.
Yichhh.
Mack the Knife had a choppadickoffame
THIS is why the Right needs to learn to HATE THE LEFT with as much fury as the Left does the Right.
Hucky is a pussy.
There’s FAR, FAR less of that on the right than ever before. In fact, ever since the 2000 election, people on the left are much likelier to castigate others for their beliefs than people on the right.
We must be winning!
No, that isn’t it at all, is it?
“no one is permitted to interrogate the claims of Progress”
Says who, the Progs themselves? How convenient. It’s high time we DO question all this “Progress”. Often, loudly and by those who know how.
The left misses out on such things because they leave “nurture” up to the grade school teachers.
Part of the problem with social conservatives can be traced directly to the educational system. Specifically, most pols have not learned the substance of Rhetoric in the classical sense. The modern (i.e. since the late Sixties) educational system has taught that all argument must be emotional, not rational. Thus, we get Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remark, instead of simply asking his interlocutor, “What is it that we are destroying? Is it innocent life, or not? If so, how does its destruction ‘heal’ anything?”
As for Ace’s (and others) unwillingness to speak of these things for fear of losing elections, we see the same issue we discussed in the Glenn Beck Post. Specifically, traditional marriage and the family were the foundation for everything this country achieved, including supporting personal liberty and autonomy. Personal liberty, of course, necessitates responsibility: to oneself and others. The Baby Boomers, however, wanted personal liberty without responsibility. Thus, we saw Social Security enacted to eliminate the responsibility of taking care of one’s elder family members; AFDC and food stamps eliminate the responsibility of supporting one’s children. The list goes on and on. And so, personal liberty becomes “libertine.”
The argument can be made easily and rationally, but fiscal conservatives don’t wish to do it, in part, because they wish to be seen as one of the “cool kids,” and in part because they secretly like being able to screw whomever they wish without social stigma or repercussions.
Spot on. Unfortunately, the leadership of the Black Community is heavily invested in maintaining the status quo in order to be able to continue to extort money from the rest of society. Thus, it does a very good job of keeping it’s own on the plantation.
The only thing Liberals hate more than Conservatives are benchmarks embedded in concrete. All of reality, through dispassionately applied data analysis, would quickly prove the folly of Liberalism. That’s the reason we have 50 years of pouring money down a rat hole called “The Great Society”, and we apparently will have 50 more. Nobody pulls up the numbers and states a simple, inarguable, dispassionate rebuttal of the failure that is Liberalism.
The Cowardly GOP™ is running around in a panic trying to find THE issue to run on in 2016. Simple. JUST RUN ON THE NUMBERS. Unceasingly, Relentlessly. Remorselessly.
Then again, that would take a spine, and the GOP is critically short of that at the moment.
Actually, I thought this was about the best string of sentences Huck has managed to string together in a long time. So I say good on him. If he now shuts up and lives out the rest of his life quietly, that would be double-plus-good.
This article was excellent, BTW.
I especially liked the McCain Proposition regarding focus of conservative writers. It’s so true that it “insists on itself.”
Ten conservative writers scratching and clawing each others’ eyes out over flat tax vs. fair tax simply cannot compete with a luxuriously written article about life on the French Riviera that continually drops in gratuitous references to green energy or global warming.
We need far more travel articles indicating that Germany’s wind experiment was a massive cluster****. Or more articles about diet that point out that utopian schemes about energy have made food prices go up.
he Christian epoch has reached it’s inevitable conclusion and the United States is taking on a more European, almost neo-pagan morality when it comes to sexual and social matters, and throwing off the shackles of uptight puritanism that has been the bedrock of American culture for the last few hundred years. All bad things must come to an end. You’re also seeing a permissiveness toward marijuana which comes along with this cultural shift from our puritanical roots, as it was the Puritans that destroyed native american culture which natural plants and herbs with psychedelic properties were a staple. There’s also decline of the so called traditional “Protestant work ethic” which is just another way of making people obey authority.
[…] ‘Helpless and Hopeless Creatures’ […]
And that is why, Mr. McCain, you should be a political speechwriter. I read your posts and I think “that’s exactly how I feel!” or even more “I wish we had a candidate who could talk like that”.
Please put me firmly into the camp of those disgusted of progressives’ vision of me as a helpless slave to my reproductive organs.
It’s beyond insulting to imply that we cannot figure out how to buy contraception, keep our legs shut, or otherwise manage to be participating members of society while fertile. It is misogynistic to say that men can figure out birth control and fatherhood, but women need Daddy Gummint to save the day.
I think if you want morality, you are going to have to be it. If you want role models, you’ll have to invent them, or look in a mirror. If you want civility, you’re going to have to be civil, and not just when you feel like it.
This appears to be the message of our connected age in which there are as many opinions about what constitutes the “right” morality as speakers of them, and no one is an authority any longer, nor is there any stomach for turning to invented ones. The old implied mystic threats no longer impress.
We’re all our own Walter Cronkites now. And practically no one is prepared for that reality. No one over 25, at least.
THIS.
I’m rather proud to be ‘uncool’.
Great article
I agree with Huckabee. Dems want women dependent on government…. just look at the government’s love child Julia.
You should hear what these Blacks you are speaking of believe about the vast conspiracy of whites to destroy them. And they hear it in their churches.
As long as they continue to buy into this nonsense, they are not worthy of being recruited to fight with us in the war to restore our freedoms and liberties.
For tips on how to do this, see ‘Burke, Edmund’ and ‘Kirk, Russell’.
It’s called Spine Bypass Surgery.
Last Republican to become POTUS without Social Conservatives was Gerald R. Ford. Bush-41 dismissed them during his reelection bid, and lost. So did Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.
Ace and Allahpundit are atheists, and can not acknowledge Social Conservatives as a positive force. Their view, which is shared by many Americans, is that the Progressivism of the Left is diametrically opposed to Social Conservatism – so there is no other place for SoCons to go but to the GOP. And until 2010, they were right! But with the TEA Party, SoCons have another place to spend their money, GOTV time, and other support.
The betrayal by the SoCons, by supporting the TEA Party, and staying home in 2012, is just a reaction to years of being told to shut up, pay up, and accept the disregard of their principles. That uppitiness enraged Ace and Allahpundit, given the histrionics of their essays during the 2012 cycle, and they are now as much Establishmentarian apparatchiks as Lamar Alexander.
While Patton anticipated the Nazi offensive through the Ardennes in winter, and prepared for it – but Patton was extremely pissed off at having to divert forces and logistical effort away from his race to Berlin.