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By Paul M. Weyrich
December 20, 2005
In the last three columns, we have tried
to look at where we are as a country. The picture is not very
bright. The question facing the next conservatism is, how
can we turn the situation around? I want to try to address
that question in this column and the next.
The answer has to start not with politics
but with culture. As I have said over and over, culture is
more powerful than politics. We cannot keep winning politically
while the Left wins culturally. Somehow, we have to win the
culture war ourselves.
That in turn requires a new movement. I
hate to have to say so, but I think the old conservative movement
has somewhat played itself out. There are still some courageous
and effective fighters in it, people like Phyllis Schlafly
and Senator James M. Inhofe, but much of it has been co-opted
by the Republican Party, and much that has not been co-opted
seems to be out of new ideas.
To create a new movement, we have to have
a new idea to build it around. That idea has to speak directly
to our national decadence and offer a chance of changing the
culture. It has to offer a real potential of reviving the
America many of us remember, up through the 1950s. If it cannot
do that, it cannot serve as the basis of a new movement, because
anything less will not reverse the country's decadence. We
will just be papering over the cracks.
Is there such a new idea somewhere out
there? I think there may be. Bill Lind calls it Retroculture.
What it means is that, in our own lives and the lives of our
families, and eventually our communities, we would deliberately
revive old ways of doing things. Of course, we could not exactly
re-create the past, but we would use the past as a guide and
a benchmark.
I know America has always been a future-focused
country. But that may be changing. As early as 1990, the Free
Congress Foundation did a national survey about Americans'
attitude toward the past, present and future. The results
were a big surprise.
Even fifteen years ago, most people said the past was better
than the present and the future would be worse than the present.
I think millions of Americans might rally to a call to return
to the ways we used to live, in many (obviously not all) aspects
of our lives.
A good example is public education. Everyone
knows today's public schools are much worse than those we
had in the late 1950s. That is true in rich areas and in poor.
The education lobby says the answer is even more "new
math" and other modernist rubbish, plus of course oceans
of Political Correctness and money.
What if instead our new movement called
for "Schools 1950?" We still know how those schools
worked. We would go back to teaching the facts, reasoning,
and skills like adding and multiplying without a calculator,
instead of worrying about pupils' "self-esteem."
Of course we would teach some newer things as well, such as
computer skills. But the basic rule would be, "What worked
then can work again."
In fact, that might not be a bad slogan
for our new movement. It is true in so many areas of our lives.
It is true about families, marriage and sexual morals; finance,
both family and national (everybody used to know that debt
was dangerous); entertainment (it used to be both good and
decent); even in areas like public transportation, where streetcars
were better than buses. The old America, America before the
cultural revolution of the 1960s, was a pretty good place.
Even a lot of young people know that is true.
This movement would seek to re-build our
old culture from the bottom up, one individual or family at
a time. That is slow, I know. But I don't think there is any
other way to win the culture war. We have lost so much that
we almost have to start over again. It is too late, when it
comes to our culture, to conserve. We have to restore.
The restoration movement in architecture
points to where Retroculture might go. In the 1960s, it was
fashionable among architects and urban planners to rip down
Victorian and even federal and colonial buildings and put
up new ones. The new ones were usually awful. Now, most people
agree that older buildings can and should be restored rather
than replaced.
I really think that a next conservatism
that included a movement to recover our old ways of thinking
and living could win the culture war, which so far we have
lost. Still, politics remains important. In my next column,
I intend to talk about what we need to do in politics.
Paul M. Weyrich is the Chairman and
CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.
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