Resisting Cultural Degradation

There's a recent onging gay marriage debate between Rod Dreher on one side, and Damon Linker and Andrew Sullivan on the other. Clicking around, I found this quote from Jim Manzi at The American Scene:

I think that the prevalence of the social conservative worldview, broadly defined, is on a long-term downward trajectory in the United States. I make this as an attempt at a descriptive, not normative, statement.

This obviously might change. To some extent, this trend is a product of increasing material abundance, and a truly catastrophic reduction in living standards would likely reverse it, as an example. But the environment in which we live increasingly is one in which it grows ever-more-difficult to maintain a national legal regime that permits any implicit or explicit preferences for a traditional way of life.

Three things: Yes, (1) this is a descriptive, but not empirical, statement, at least for the American case. The verity of the point depends on how the query is operationalized, and in the context of gay marriage, the point's demonstrably false; (2), that said, the normative element of Manzi's claim is certainly manifest in the great majority of left-libertarians, for example, among the Sullivan myrmidons at Ordinary Gentlemen; and (3) the "traditional legal regime" Manzi delegitimizes is a function of the a priori cultural "environment," and it's only "difficult to maintain" if respect for tradition is abandoned in the first place. Increasingly, those who want to overthrow tradition are the most active social constituency on the issue, so much depends on partisan mobilization.

It might help, in any case, to break down the "social conservative worldview" into discrete elements. If we focus on gay marriage - which seems like a useful proxy for one's position in the current culture wars - it's not so much that traditional values are on the decline, but that many people of moderately conservatives social views are not up to the fight, that is, folks simply are beaten down by the merciless and remorseless campaign of hatred directed against those averse to the radical nihilism championed by the secular progressives. I'll have more on this later, but for now recall Robert Bork's argument from a few years back, in favor of resisting cultural degradation, offerred in the context of the for a Federal Marriage Amendment to protect constitutionally the tradition of marriage as the sacred union of one man and one woman:

Social conservatives, Max Boot notes, have been fighting and losing culture wars for decades. That is obvious, but his recommendation that we acknowledge defeat on the issue of homosexual marriage and move on to other issues is bad advice. This issue seems to me so important that a fight against it, whatever the odds, is mandatory. Abandoning resistance here might nevertheless be seen by some as an intelligent strategy, but that would be true only if there were a more defensible line to fall back to. It is difficult to see what line that might be. The cultural left, including homosexual activists, will keep pressing for more. The BBC, as a foretaste of what is to come, has ordered its staff not to use the words “husband” and “wife,” since that might seem to indicate that marriage is preferable to other sexual arrangements. In Canada, a pastor has been charged under a hate speech law for publishing instances of the Bible’s disapproval of homosexuality. Church leaders who imagine they can negotiate immunities from laws applying to the rest of the population are almost certainly fooling themselves. Liberal autonomists have little or no respect for religion, except to the extent that some clergy can be recruited to advance their causes in the name of religion. The Catholic Church will be a particular target of attack, as it already has been in California, where the state supreme court ruled that Catholic Charities had to provide prescription contraceptive coverage in its health insurance plan for employees.

Boot’s advice to cut and run on this issue thus ignores the fact that there are fewer and fewer places to run to. The autonomous drive toward cultural degradation will not leave us in peace, ever. Boot may be right to predict that Republican support for a marriage amendment would make the party “look ‘intolerant’ to soccer moms whose views on this subject, as on so many others, will soon be as liberal as elite opinion already is.” But if that is true, it means that we will lose all the cultural battles of the future, as the soccer moms trail along behind elite opinion. If Republicans refuse to fight cultural battles on that reasoning, they will look cowardly to conservatives, which could be equally disastrous. It would be better to try to convince the soccer moms, who would not be at all happy if their children and grandchildren cohabited instead of marrying, or “married” persons of the same sex.