United Liberty

By its very nature, conservatism looks towards the past and engages in nostalgia. However, this has become a fatal flaw of modern conservativism.

If you take a listen to the talk show of religious conservative Dennis Prager, you will hear an intelligent man reliving cultural battles of a bygone era. In many episodes of his show, Prager will rant on and on about the feminism of 60s radicals like Gloria Steinem, which argued that men and women are inherently the same and are only different in behavior due to cultural conditioning. To hear Prager talk, you would think that this was still the gospel preached at today’s universities.

Prager still talks about how he was opposed to the lowering of the voting age to 18, because 18-year-olds “don’t know anything.” The twenty-sixth amendment, which granted this right, was adopted in 1971.

Prager still rants constantly about the 60s and 70s era phrase that said “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30” and his outrage over radicals who seized control of Columbia’s campus in 1968. To listen to Prager, you would think that America was still undergoing Woodstock, the Vietnam Era and Watergate, because that is still where he is mentally.

The same phenomenon of relishing over past victories was prevalent in Ann Coulter’s book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. In her 2006 book, Coulter spent an entire chapter talking about the myriad flaws of Michael Dukakis, a Democratic presidential candidate from 1988. Coulter didn’t write about Dukakis in a historical manner, but with passion and immediacy that would only have made sense 20 years ago.

We saw this re-living of the past on display during the presidential campaign. Barack Obama’s aquaintance Bill Ayers was brought out by the McCain campaign due to his involvement in a domestic terrorist group called the Weather Underground. The Weathermen, as they were also known, were in operation in 1969 and 1970, when Barack Obama was nine and 10 years old. McCain was purposefully attempting to wake up the passions of the “Silent Majority” that backed Richard Nixon. It failed because the irrelevance was clear. Barack Obama is of a generation for which phrases like “Weathermen” and “Silent Majority” were a thing largely of history books.

These cultural battles were long ago won by conservatives and may have been a significant reason for their victories up to 2006. However, America and the world are changing. Gloria Steinem, Bill Ayers and Michael Dukakis are not relevant in any shape or form. Conservatives need to catch up or they’ll find themselves left behind.

What won elections twenty years ago will not win them today.