Maybe It’s Time to Take Conservatives Seriously
Conservatives tell us what they believe, but far too often liberals simply dismiss what they say.
Over the last few months, the nation has watched as many conservative states have debated and enacted laws dealing with transgender children. Many of these states have banned gender affirming medical treatment for gender dysphoria. As I’ve watched, I’ve been surprised by how the arguments by liberals in general, and the opponents of these bills in particular, completely misunderstand what conservatives, and those pushing these bills, are doing. Liberals talk about medical care and the struggles of these children (which are valid issues) but this is so far removed from what conservatives are thinking that it falls on deaf ears. In not a single state have the liberals’ arguments swayed enough conservative lawmakers to alter the outcome.
Know Your Enemy
The ancient Chinese military philosopher, Sun Tzu famously said, “know your enemy.” He was specifically addressing military combat, but his point can — and should — be applied to other battles, including political battles. Knowing your enemy means knowing not just their military strengths and weakness, their weapons and tactics, but also understanding why they’re fighting and what they’re fighting for. This clearly is important for politics, and it’s in this regard that liberals are woefully ignorant of what their conservative opponents are doing, and more importantly, why they’re doing it.
It’s screamingly obvious that liberals don’t really understand conservatives. They don’t understand their worldview, their viewpoint and their concerns, and they clearly don’t take any of it seriously. Why’s this so obvious? Well, if nothing else, the repeal of Roe v Wade proves it. Liberals and conservatives are fighting different battles. Liberals are fighting policy battles: conservatives are fighting an existential battle for the soul of the nation.
The fight over trans rights is just the most recent battle in the Culture Wars, which began in the early 1960s. So, to really understand what conservatives are saying and why they view politics as an existential battle, we should briefly review the history of the Culture Wars.
The Changing Culture
In 1962 and 1963 the Supreme Court, in two loosely related opinions, banned school sponsored prayer in public schools. Religious conservatives were horrified. According to a prominent Christian group, “removing prayer and acknowledgement of God from our classrooms has been the primary cause of the devastatingly serious decline in the lives of students … families … and our Nation.” Conservative Christians saw a nation turning away from God, and they predicted that society would suffer. The decadence of the 60s — sex, drugs and rock and roll — was the inescapable consequence which seemed to prove conservatives’ point.
Liberalizing trends continued in the 1970s, and liberal politicians joined the fray when Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification in 1972. Conservatives saw this as a direct attack on the traditional family and suggested that this would lead to the further decline of society. Various conservative groups, led primarily by the conservative activist Phyliss Schlafly, joined forces to fight the ERA.
Then in 1973, in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that women had a Constitutional right to abortion. For many conservatives it seemed that all sense of values, all belief in right and wrong, was being abandoned. The conservative theologian Francis Schaeffer said that the inevitable consequences of the loss of Biblical values was “degeneracy, decadence, [and] depravity …” Schaeffer said this is what brought down the Roman empire, and given the same maladies the same fate might befall the United States.
Many conservatives, like Scheaffer, were horrified and knew they had to fight back to save their country. They saw these liberal actions, now fully supported by the government, as a threat to the very existence of the nation. And so they began to see politics as an existential fight, which brought a new urgency and zeal to politics.
Many conservative religious denominations were not initially bothered by the Roe decision, but Schlafly began working with prominent conservative religious leaders and the soon became allies in opposition to both Roe and the ERA. They began to organize, forming groups like the Moral Majority, and Focus on the Family, to push back. They also develop alliances between various Christian and Movement conservative groups. By the late 1970s their efforts to fight against the changing culture became known as the “Culture Wars.”
The Equal Rights Amendment
The ERA was sent to the state in March 1972, and within a year 30 states (of the needed 38) had ratified the Amendment. But once Schlafly and her conservative allies got involved only five more states ratified the Amendment while five revoked a previous ratification. Conservatives were engaged, in the words of the conservative writer and one-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanon in a 1992 speech at the Republican National Convention, “in a struggle for the soul of America.” Liberals, at the time and since have largely ignored this, if not scoffed openly at the very idea.
Conservatives were horrified by what was going on in their country. In their view, the culture has collapsed when the nation turned away from God. Pornography moved from the back-alleys to the mainstream, promiscuity is now the norm and in some communities a majority of babies are born out of wedlock. Drug use has spiraled, crime is out of control, and as our once great cities are tawdry and decaying. The conservative historian David Barton published a book called “America: To Pray or Not to Pray,” that is chock-a-block full of charts and tables that purport to show that every social ill and malady — from the rise in crime and of out-of-wedlock births to declining SAT scores — spiraled dramatically after the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools.
Fresh off their victory over the ERA, many of these conservatives threw their support behind the Presidential candidacy of former actor and California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s victory seemed to signal a turn in the tide, but in many regards he didn’t go as far as many conservative activists hoped. In economics, however, he did transform the nation’s thinking. Taxes went from “the price of civilization” to “theft,” and government went from the creator of the Merril Land Grant College system, the victor of World War Two, and the builder of the Interstate Highway system, to “the problem,” in Reagan’s words.
Ronald Reagan and the Birth of the Culture Wars
Much of the groundwork for the conservative plan to rescue the nation was laid during the Reagan Administration. Driven by their existential dread at the decline of the nation, conservatives continued to organize, funding scholars, think tanks, and eventually media outlets. Some of these legal scholars created new legal theories, and conservative lawyers founded The Federalist Society, which allowed like-minded attorneys to network, share ideas, publish papers, and advocate for conservative legal policies. By the late ’90s there was a generation of conservative lawyers who had spent their entire legal careers working in these conservative organizations and with conservative jurists. There are now five former members of the Federalist Society on the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly they formed the core majority that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
As the world and the nation changed, conservatives were disturbed but not surprised as America’s industrial base and military standing crumbled in the 1990s. They were certain that the nation’s social, economic, and military decline were the direct product of the nation’s moral decline. Conservative scholars wrote books about it and conservative politicians gave speeches about it, but liberals largely scoffed. Many older and rural Americans also wondered what had happened to their nation, and conservative media had a ready answer: liberal economic and social policies. This story found a ready audience across the de-industrializing American heartland. And so, throughout the 1990s and 2000s conservatives slowly made inroads in state legislatures, particularly in the south and west. Now they dominate the governments of most rural states.
Conservatism Ascendant
It’s been a hard-fought sixty-year fight. Liberals have seen conservative economic theories take over the nation’s fiscal policy. They’ve seen conservative politicians take over the Republican Party, the Republican Party rise to parity nationally and now Republicans control Congress and the White House as often as Democrats. Liberals have seen conservative legal theories rise to dominance, and now conservative judges and justice are in the majority on the Federal and Supreme Courts. And liberals have seen the Republican Party largely take over Southern and Intermountain West states.
Liberals see a conservative sweep, but conservatives see it very differently. The primary purpose of their efforts since the 1960s was to rescue the American culture, and conservatives believe that the culture is now worse than ever. And so, in their mind, they’ve taken one hit after another, as society became more permissive, and as the once taboo became accepted, then common, and now the norm. The nadir seemed to be in 2015 when the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on gay marriage. It also seems likely that the obvious failure of their political success was maddening.
An Existential Battle
But conservatives are indefatigable because they see this as an existential battle. They truly believe that they are fighting for the survival of American society. And their fight finally seemed to come to fruition when the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022. Conservatives felt the tide was now finally turning. Liberals shouldn’t have been surprised that conservatives took this ruling as a green light to push back on what they see as other forms of social decay.
In conservative’s view, liberals never stop. There is always a new norm that liberals seek to alter and a new outrage to address, and conservative must be vigilant and ready to ight. (I’d argue that there’s a difference between the liberal cultural changes that occur because of a changing society, and the laws and policies promoted by liberal politicians, but conservatives don’t see this distinction. They see “liberalism” as a unified force, a vast conspiracy between “liberal elites” in the media and Hollywood, and liberal politicians at every level of government.)
The latest cultural flashpoint is “trans rights.” Conservatives believe that liberals are now trying to alter the very foundation of society: the gender norms that define the family. As Jesus said: “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female.” (Mark 10:6.) Conservatives say that a nation that doesn’t know the difference between men and women can’t know the difference between right and wrong. The battle rages: conservatives are duty bound to fight.
The conservative politicians pushing these anti-trans laws are not doing this — in their view — to harm children. They’re doing this to save the nation. Certainly, there are opportunistic politicians pushing these laws for self-serving reasons, but millions of well-meaning believers truly fear for the well-being of their society, and they feel a moral imperative to stop these trends.
I’ve watched as liberal activists in Kentucky shouted “shame” at the conservative legislators pushing these Anti-Trans bills, but many conservatives believe that it is liberals who are shameless. They believe that it is liberals who have banished the Bible from the public square and mock its teachings, and are therefore singularly responsible for the decline of this once great nation. They truly believe this. They say it out loud. But liberals don’t believe them.
It seems clear that liberals lost the fifty-year battle over abortion rights because they didn’t take conservatives seriously. They ignored their concerns and dismissed their arguments. They lost because they failed to adhere to Sun Tzu’s simple admonition: “know your enemy.”
Liberals are kidding themselves if they think they can win the battle over trans rights by shouting “shame,” or by focusing on the plight of struggling children, just as they kidded themselves that they’d won the fight over abortion by talking about women’s autonomy and opportunities. For conservatives this is an existential fight for the soul of the nation, and so liberal arguments are irrelevant.
Liberals scoffed when Pat Buchanon said this is a fight for the soul of the nation, but many conservatives truly believe it. That should be clear from their tenacity, their zeal, their doggedness, their indefatigable fight.
Maybe now it’s time for liberals to take conservatives seriously. Maybe now it’s time to try to understand their underling concerns and to honestly address their arguments. The idea that banning prayer in school has cause the nation’s decline is, on one hand nonsense, but it’s an argument that has gone unchallenged for sixty years because liberals didn’t take it seriously. But millions of Americans did, and because liberals never offered a counterargument, conservatives were able to ride this simplistic argument to political dominance across much of the nation.
Conservatives are fighting a Holy War. This may sound silly to liberals, but for conservatives it is deadly serious. And they’re winning, so liberals had better start taking them seriously.
