What are we unhappy about today? We are unhappy about many things--if, by "we," you mean American conservatives. Let us air a few of their grievances.
For one thing, conservatives are unhappy about DEI: that is, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. According to Nicholas Waddy, who teaches history at SUNY Alfred:
Higher education’s abject submission to the gods of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is now assured. Many colleges and universities are building into their hiring, promotion, and tenure schemes a requirement that candidates show “DEI competencies” in order to advance. What’s more, the rubrics assessing whether a candidate has hit the mark are saturated with the terminology of leftist identity politics. More importantly, they take for granted the central assumptions of modern cultural Marxism and critical race theory.
Professor Waddy’s concern isn’t limited to the halls of academe; it extends to the epidemic of “woke” corporations, corporations which were once the backbone of America but are now spineless, craven servants of Moloch (DEI):
Conservatives and Republicans should ask themselves: if every institution in modern society submits to cultural Marxism and identity politics—from education and entertainment to big business and even mainline Christianity—then what are the long-term prospects of a political movement that dares to dissent from such a pervasive orthodoxy?
If we once thought we could afford to scoff at the woke antics of professors, the looming conquest of the corporate world by the Left should be seen for the grave threat to America that it is. In the battle for corporate America’s soul, failure simply cannot be an option.
That is enough to make anyone, and not just Nicholas Waddy, unhappy.
DEI Will Be the Death of Us › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)
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Also at American Greatness, where dissatisfaction with the status quo seems to run rampant, Robert Curry, a conservative, is unhappy with the Seventeenth Amendment (election of U.S. senators by popular vote), which, along with the rest of the Progressive agenda, pulled the rug out from under America's carefully constructed, perfectly balanced, and finely tuned system of federalism. “Today,” writes Curry, “the central government rides roughshod over the states and regulates the lives of every American citizen to an extent that would have horrified the founders.” Speed limits! Gun regulation! Voting by mail! Dire consequences for removing mattress tags! Pronoun indoctrination! Black people being paid for working! The Communist Manifesto being recited at gunpoint by schoolchildren!
Curry goes on to explain how this came about:
When exactly did America abandon federalism, and how were the states neutered? We can date the turn with startling precision. The United States abandoned federalism on April 8, 1913, the day the 17th Amendment was ratified. It provided for the popular election of senators by the people of the individual states, the system we have now. Up until that day, the two senators from each state were chosen by the state legislatures. Consequently, before April 8, 1913, because the legislatures of “the several States” controlled the Senate, they had some control over the federal government.
Curry sets forth a commonsense agenda for American reform:
The states must be restored to their proper place in the federal system if we are to live again in the liberty at home and the peace abroad that the founders intended for us. Much will be required of us to accomplish that noble purpose. Not the least of our tasks will be the repeal of the 17th Amendment. Repealing that amendment, of course, will not be enough. What is required of us as a nation is re-dedicating ourselves to the American idea. Then all can be accomplished. We can restore the states to their rightful place in the American system of liberty and reclaim American liberty for ourselves.
If that doesn’t bring you to your feet with tears in your eyes, well, you just might be a Progressive.
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Lastly, Adam Ellwanger, who teaches at the University of Houston, is unhappy that conservatives refuse to fully embrace their countercultural identity. Writing at The American Conservative, Ellwanger insists that “People on the right need to learn to relish being part of the counterculture, and to jettison the bad connotations that this term implies. Counterculture can be bad, but that depends on the virtue of the culture that it opposes. Our cause is just. In 2022, being vanilla is about the most transgressive identity you can inhabit. In a culture that openly opposes the very notion of virtue, counterculture becomes a moral obligation.”
The counterculture of the Sixties left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, Ellwanger concedes, but the truth is that, like it or not, “the countercultural left won. Their offensive against America’s traditional culture overwhelmed our defense, and now they sit in the seat of institutional power; meaning, traditionalists and conservatives are now the counterculture. It’s our job—if we care—to play offense and undermine the new culture wherever we can. We must understand that voting alone is insufficient as members of the counterculture. We need to be willing to openly live and express the norms that oppose the left’s cultural paradigm.”
Alas, too many on the Right have already surrendered:
Some conservatives are still trying to play defense. They don’t yet grasp that their enemies won the culture war on traditional American values. They rant and rave about violations of norms that are obsolete. Their values are not obsolete, but those values no longer operate as norms because the state and other institutions openly support the new norms (which only a few decades ago were the values of the left counterculture). Others on the right grasp that the old counterculture has become the new culture—that it now dictates the norms of our society. But many of them have not yet come to grips with the fact that this makes us the new counterculture. Some try to quietly maintain traditional values in their personal lives but pay lip service to the new culture when required at school, work, or elsewhere. These people are intellectually conquered.
The challenge of openly living according to countercultural norms is daunting. It will require conservatives, for instance, to maintain their cisgender identities in public, regardless of the shaming they will endure; to use traditional pronouns for themselves, regardless of the confusion for which they will be blamed; to emerge from the heterosexual closet and admit their transgressive attraction to the opposite sex; to not have (or perform) abortions, even when infanticide has become a secular sacrament; to bring children up in accordance with their religious beliefs, even though atheists control the Deep State; to attend the church of their choice and to pray on their own time (and without state subsidy) to the god in whom they believe, despite godless secularists' constant attempts to prevent them from doing so.
Traditionalists are now the people their parents warned them against, or the people our parents wanted us to be, or something like that. Next thing you know, they'll be insisting on powdered wigs for our judges, government business to be transacted exclusively in Latin, and the return of bastinado for nonviolent offenders.
Worse, they might vote (again) for Donald Trump.
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Counterculture Warriors - The American Conservative
Bastinado for Dummies
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