Political Books: After the Culture War

A number of serious writers (these are not right-wing ax-grinders) have recently pointed out the chilling resemblances between this country’s ascendant left and the revolutionary movements that brought totalitarian oppression to Central Europe and, especially, Russia in the 20th century. Note particularly Abe Greenwald’s “Yes, This Is a Revolution” and Christine Rosen’s “You Will Be Re-Educated” in the September and October issues of Commentary magazine, and Gary Saul Morson’s “Suicide of the Liberals” in the October issue of First Things. Mr. Morson, a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern, doesn’t say a word about contemporary America because he doesn’t have to. Russian liberals in the years before the Bolshevik Revolution, he observes, capitulated to every demand of the radical intelligentsia, although the radicals openly advocated “the seizure of all wealth, the suppression of dissenting opinion, and the murder of class enemies.” “Evidently [the liberals’] professed beliefs,” Mr. Morson writes, “were less important than their emotional identification with radicalism, of whatever sort.”

The devout will perhaps feel these warnings most keenly. To be accused of racism by an anti-racist ideologue may be a harrowing experience, but you may take comfort in the fact that you are not a racist. But if you are a member of a religious body that, for instance, refuses on principle to marry same-sex couples, as indeed all religious bodies did only a few years ago, you are now, according to a lot of very influential people, a bigot. Things may be OK for a time, but what if the spirit of coercion intensifies? Asked last year at a town hall by CNN’s Don Lemon if churches should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage, Beto O’Rourke answered, “Yes,” to cheers from the audience. What Mr. Lemon didn’t ask is: What if those churches still resist? Somehow I doubt that paying taxes will mollify that crowd.

A number of cultural and political writers, operating on the assumption that the “culture war” is basically over and that religious traditionalists have lost, suggest ways in which the faithful ought to think about it. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., has written   “The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church” (Thomas Nelson, 240 pages, $26.99)   to clarify for his co-religionists the forms in which coercion is likely to come. Mr. Mohler paints a dark picture: a social and political culture no longer inclined to allow dissent on the basic matters of marriage, adoption, abortion and employment and a generation of young Christian believers who appear (like their unbelieving coevals) not to grasp that there is an objective reality outside their own experience. 



“Many people in the most privileged sectors of our modern societies do not even  know   a believing Christian,” Mr. Mohler writes. “They are no longer even haunted by the remains of a Christian frame of mind.” The first statement is surely true. The second might be usefully probed. Today’s radical intelligentsia—unlike Russia’s of a century ago—is far more influenced by Christianity than they are prepared to admit. Where, I wonder, do the angry leftists of university campuses think they got the idea that diversity and inclusion are virtues? Science? 
If their worldview ever develops into full-on totalitarianism, it will be what Rod Dreher calls “soft totalitarianism.” “Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression,” Mr. Dreher writes in   “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents” (Sentinel, 240 pages, $27) . “It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of ‘victims’ in order to bring about ‘social justice.’ ” 



In the bleak future envisioned by Mr. Dreher, infantilized Americans happily repeat dicta they know to be lies—whatever ludicrous “isms” about race and gender the academic and media elite care about at the moment—and eagerly submit to constant surveillance by hyper-progressive Big Data companies. I have no idea where an ascendant left will take America, and, as he freely admits, neither does Mr. Dreher, but he is right to dismiss the commonplace notion that young progressives are “snowflakes” and “SJWs” (social justice warriors). They are, many of them, savvy and ambitious political operators. “Unlike their Bolshevik predecessors,” he writes, social-justice cultists, as he calls them, “don’t want to seize the means of economic production but rather the means of cultural production.” 

Throughout “Live Not by Lies,” Mr. Dreher relates the experiences of Eastern European and Russian dissidents, many of them religious believers, who suffered appalling persecution for their refusal to endorse the lies of communist regimes. He has traveled to Moscow, Prague and elsewhere to interview survivors and historians. Many of them offer different versions of the same paradoxical lament: that although life under communism was terrible and they are grateful that it is gone, the faith of the young was stronger in the face of persecution than without it. Mr. Dreher quotes Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s lines from “The Gulag Archipelago”: “And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: ‘Bless you, prison! . . . Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!’ ”

Mr. Dreher, an editor at the American Conservative magazine, is widely known as the author of “The Benedict Option” (2017). In that book, he urged religious believers and conservatives generally to consider a limited, strategic withdrawal from nationalized culture-war struggles in order to build “intentional communities.” Here, in keeping with the earlier book’s ethos, Mr. Dreher understands “free-market liberalism” as a kind of analogue to Marxist communism, gentle rather than brutal but similarly corrosive to human connectedness. This is the one false note in an otherwise provocative book. “Capitalism” is not an ideology; it wasn't created when some intellectual wrote a free-market version of “Das Kapital”; nobody forced it on an unwilling society. Failure to grasp this point has tempted many conservatives in recent days to believe they can refashion the capitalist “system,” as they understand it, into something more humane. If only   they   would take the Benedict Option.