Published in Washington, D.C. 5am -- May 18, 1999 www.washtimes.com
How we lost the culture wars
By B.K. Eakmanaul Weyrich, Cal Thomas, and Ed Dobson recently announced that the culture wars are lost, that most people don't defend, or even necessarily believe in, the values that characterized the Moral Majority and the Reagan revolution. They say social conservatives have failed politically since virtually none of their agenda items have seen the light of day in seven years.
Indisputably, the polls surrounding the Clinton scandals reveal a vastly different public reaction from parallel events under former administrations. Recall the outrage at Richard Nixon's enemies list; the knee-jerk indignation during the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. One can only imagine the howls if, say, North Korea had conducted a money-laundering operation to underwrite the Reagan or Bush campaigns. Even the recent atrocity in Littleton, Colo., attests to an acceptance of behavior that would have incensed us 20 years ago.
Why did we lose?
We lost because we failed to apply the strategic lessons of warfare to the attack on our culture. We lost because we gave away the psychological environment. We spent 30 years playing by our opponents' rules of engagement instead of forcing them to play by ours. During that time, we imagined that all we had to do was be right, present our views logically, and provide reams of documentation. We were under attack, whereas we thought we were merely under disagreement. We said we just needed to understand each other. The truth was, our adversaries understood us better than we knew.
We started off by violating the most basic principle of warfare, iterated as long ago as 550 B.C., by (ironically enough) a Chinese philosopher named Sun Tzu in "The Art of War":
"Those skilled in war bring the opponent to the field of battle. They do not allow themselves to be taken or drawn there," wrote the Chinese strategist. We fell all over ourselves for the privilege of debating issues on our adversary's turf. Our opponents proceeded to frame all the debates and dictate to the public what it would think about, and for how long.
We care about integrity i.e., the end doesn't always justify the means. The opposition doesn't. We anguish over aligning ourselves with those who might disagree with us on some nonrelated issue. Our adversaries work with anybody, including pornographer Larry Flynt, on an issue-by-issue basis. We worry about our families getting hurt. The counterculture doesn't care who gets hurt -- i.e. Hillary Clinton, Vince Foster -- as long as the larger agenda moves forward. We don't wa nt our spouses maligned, our privacy invaded, and our good names dragged through the mud. Mudslinging is our adversaries' forte.
Our counterculture adversaries replaced the old-style liberals as a political force and elevated the sales pitch to an art form. They bought up every source of media they could in the 1960s and 1970s, and slapped their messages on everything that stood still. Newspapers, magazines, billboards, movies, op-eds, or grant proposals: They understood that psychological impact is paramount -- not facts, not anybody's principles, not right and wrong.
Our counterculture adversaries learned important lessons from totalitarian regimes. Redefining terms through media repetition, isolating and labeling holdouts, provoking opponents to irrational rage -- such tactics virtually guaranteed the marginalization of any political or social faction, driving its members to a comfortable anonymity for fear of ridicule and ostracism.
People think because they aren't stepping over dead bodies in the streets that we are not at war. They don't stop to think that people are, in fact, dying physically, emotionally and spiritually in the schoolyard, via sick video games and Internet stalkers, through Prozac-style drugs that steal the will and compromise judgment. Today Americans are conditioned to view juvenile crime, illegitimacy, abortion, suicide and drug addiction as mental problems instead of moral problems. We can't tell the difference between a love affair and exploitative sex, between flirting and sexual harassment, between white lies and perjury, between a schoolboy carrying a butter knife and a 6-inch switchblade.
What Americans bought were critical changes in behavior, beliefs and world views. By applying advertising and agitation in just the right proportions, our adversaries learned they could create a mob mentality and suppress independent thinking. Technically, this is called the science of coercion. If done properly, one can fool nearly all the people all the time. Looking back, we can discern a pattern whereby unpopular policies first were legitimized, then institutionalized, before average people knew what hit them. Every societal faction was presented a different pitch: business, the intelligentsia, religious organizations and lawmakers. Counterculture leaders incorporated Karl Marx's "Theory of Alienation," Theodor Adorno's "Theory of Thought Disruption," Erich Fromm's "Authoritarian Personality" and James Rawlings Rees' experiments in mass neurosis to reorient American values, eventually generating what Messrs. Weyrich, Thomas and Dobson now see as political and moral impotence.
Today, the war against authority, parents and the American dream has taken a blatant and frightening turn, as students from Littleton to Paducah, Ky., run for cover. Like the proverbial frog that eventually meets its demise in the simmering pot, our society has moved from the innocent relaxing of school dress codes and removal of "Yes, Maam's" to police roaming school hallways and pornographic, sado-masochistic Web sites. We cocoon behind gated communities, install remote locks in our cars, and when our kids go to school dressed like something out of "Nightmare on Elm Street," we just shut up.
How did we lose? We lost by basing our strategy on wishful thinking instead of on the realities of war, by allowing turf battles to split our alliances, by treating our allies like competition instead of welcoming them as friends. If we are to save our way of life in the coming century, individuals of principle will have to don the mentality of the resistance fighter. We no longer have the luxury of time for righteous indignation.
B.K. Eakman is executive director of the National Education Consortium and author of a new book, "Cloning of the American Mind: Eradicating Morality Through Education" (Huntington House).
Copyright © 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
