Displaying items by tag: Culture Wars

The response of governments to the Covid "crisis" has been a revelation.  They have grabbed supreme power and have diminished freedoms and crushed the economy.  How did they get away with it, with such little push-back from we-the-people?  They had six strategies.  Strategies that appear to have worked.

The enemies of freedom are coming for the past.  Exposing the fallacies of their claims, and the poverty of their understanding of history, is an urgent and ongoing task.  But it may not be enough.

Cancel culture is all around.  It crushes rational debate and destroys freedom of thought and speech.  The latest victim is the eminent British historian David Starkey, caught up cruelly in the Black Lives Matter debate.  His cancellation raises important questions for how those who value freedom fight against leftist revolutionary thought and practice.

The re-emergence of Mark Latham has been one of the most interesting developments in recent Australian politics.  Latham's common sense centrism and his push-back against the ruling elites has struck a chord with voters of all stripes.  Populism, perhaps, but also, maybe, a much needed reality check in these troubled and inauthentic times.

The modern culture wars have their genesis in a most unfortunate marriage of convenience between two intellectual and political movements.  The proponents of economic liberty and the cultural marxists who emerged in the 1960s found common cause in radical individualism, in the 1980s.  And we have all suffered since.

Do we inhabit times where it is "no country for old men"?  For old virtues?  For Judea Christian conceptions of good and evil?  Cormack McCarthy's epic novel, and its stunning if gruesome movie adaptation by the Coen Brothers, offer valuable lessons for our crazy and evil postmodern world.

There is a theory of politics called the "Overton Window".  It explains a lot about modern politics in the age of madness and badness.  It does not explain everything, but it offers fresh insights into the way our modern, diminished politcs function.

The Cancel Jesus Project is well and truly underway.  The killing of the statues proceeds apace.  The attentions of the revolutionaries have already turned to Christian icons.  Killing God is an old project.  We are now witnessing the final phase.

There is a madness to crowds, as writers such as Douglas Murray have observed, with great perception.  To explain the modern world's predicament only as a problem of madness is to miss a big point.  The problem of evil.  Christians understand this.  It is time for the world to catch up.

Australia's battle of ideas - the culture war - seems lost, to the forces of progressive liberalism.  Those who would fight this battle seem preoccupied with getting the Liberal party into office, and keeping it there.  While the bigger battles go by, without a fight.  Understanding where we are going wrong is the first task in understanding the war we are in.