From the culture war to foreign policy, conservatives have been defeated on every front

[babylonsister]

http://politics.salon.com/2012/02/14/the_rights_lost_causes/singleton/

The right’s lost causes
From the culture war to foreign policy, conservatives have been defeated on every front
By Michael Lind

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Lori Campbell (L) and Maja Roble, who are engaged, kiss at a celebration rally for Tuesday's ruling on Proposition 8 in West Hollywood, California February 7, 2012 (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Alcorn)


American conservatives are deranged by anger — and why shouldn’t they be? For decades, they have been losing on multiple fronts. From the culture war to the welfare state to foreign policy, conservative initiatives have been rejected by the American people and repudiated by public policy. At most they have won a few battles while losing the war.

Consider what Pat Buchanan and other social conservatives called “the culture war” in the 1980s (after Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in 19th-century Imperial Germany). Even with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is in no danger of being overruled. The most that conservatives can do is back state-level initiatives like forcing pregnant women to view sonograms of fetuses — initiatives that are soon slapped down by the federal courts.

Gay rights? Since the 1970s and 1980s, when Miss America winner Anita Bryant led a nationwide crusade against gays and lesbians, public attitudes and public policies have been revolutionized. A center-right Supreme Court struck down state sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) and the ban against gay and lesbian soldiers in the U.S. military has been repealed. The push for gay marriage has provoked a backlash, but each generation of Americans is more tolerant than the older one. Now that Glenn Beck tells Bill O’Reilly that gay marriage doesn’t bother him, and O’Reilly defends the right of Ellen DeGeneres to represent J.C. Penney as a spokesperson, it is clear that, except for some mopping-up operations, this particular war is over and the liberal side has won.

Censorship? In the 1980s, Attorney General Ed Meese campaigned against pornography, symbolized by Playboy and Penthouse, and in the Clinton years Democrats supported the V-chip in televisions to allow parents to screen out smut. Now practically anything can be viewed on PCs and phones, and most award-winning dramas feature profanity and softcore sex scenes that would have provoked nationwide protests a few decades ago. This is a triumph for libertinism, if not liberalism.

Even as they have witnessed the collapse of their efforts to roll back the liberalization of laws governing sex and censorship, American conservatives have met defeat in their efforts to dismantle the middle-class welfare state created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. George W. Bush’s push to partly privatize Social Security was so unpopular that his own party distanced itself from it. Some on the right are still enthusiastic about replacing Medicare with a system of vouchers, but any serious attempt to do so would alienate many Tea Party supporters, who, according to polls, dislike government in general but support Social Security and Medicare. This contradiction was summed up in the Tea Party protester’s sign: “Get your government hands off my Medicare!”

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But the right isn’t going to repeal the great accomplishments of liberalism and remake America on the basis of sexual repression and censorship, free-market radicalism and American empire. Conservatives tried to do that and failed. No matter who wins this year, the right won’t get a second chance.

[TlalocW]

1. Two or three years ago, there was a link to a great essay

About how while conservatives will always be with us, they're ultimately history's greatest losers as ideas that are progressive tend to win out and become common sense. For instance, the idea that the Earth orbits the Sun was vehemently fought against by a conservative Catholic church, but eventually, it became the model of our solar system. Women's suffrage was fought against just as fiercely, but they eventually won the vote. Nowadays, you would be thought of as a nutjob (by the vast majority of people) if you supported an Earth-centered solar system or were against women's right to choose. And that is the conservatives' greatest saving grace - that it's one thing to read a dull page of history that people were against women's right to vote but to actually try to get into their heads, it's hard to imagine that there WERE people like that at one time, and so people don't make the connection between conservatives back then and conservatives now.

TlalocW