Memo to Conservatives: Abandon Culture Wars

New York Governor Roosevelt (1929-32)

"Never let your opponent pick the battleground on which to fight. If he picks one, stay out of it and let him fight all by himself."

--Franklin D. Roosevelt (1930)

Roosevelt was a political master, winning the White House four times while successfully hiding his inability to walk. Roosevelt’s advice to pick always your own battlefield and never fight on your opponent’s represents the soundest two sentences I’ve seen on winning politics. It echoes the teaching of Chinese 6th century BC military strategist Sun Zi, who in The Art of War wrote, “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.”

It’s time conservatives stopped losing the culture wars. It’s time for conservatives to leave liberals to fight “all by themselves” and move to a new battlefield.

There’s evidence conservatives are catching on.

From Ben Domenech, founder of the conservative "Federalist":

Most people speak about issues through the lens of culture, sports, and relationships, not based on elections and legislation. That's why our most popular stories are about sex, pop culture, faith, child-rearing, and more, and why we don't write gauzy profiles of congressmen. [T]he politics of Taylor Swift, Neil de Grasse Tyson, and John Oliver matter a lot more than the politics of another white guy in a Brooks Brothers suit who has a plan to save the country.

From conservative Heather Wilhelm, in “RealClearPolitics”:

Welcome to the culture wars, which have little to do with actual culture, and everything to do with harnessing raw government power. In the wake of [the marriage equality] Supreme Court decision, numerous commentators called on conservative Christians and other same-sex marriage “dissenters” to call the whole thing off. Here’s the weird thing: I suspect that many of them would if they could, at least in the political arena. Many Americans, after all, just want to mind their own business. It’s the ever-growing government, weirdly, that won’t drop the topic—and it’s the ever-growing government, ultimately, that won’t let the culture wars die. If current trends continue, we can expect more of the same.

From Kevin Williamson, writing in the conservative National Review:

there has never been a better time to be anything other than a straight white male in America. Women are thriving in higher education and the workforce. The Supreme Court just declared gay Americans can now marry anyone they please. We have elected and re-elected the nation’s first black president, and there is a good chance he might be followed by the first female president. [emphasis added]

You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective. . . Democrats argued that decency compelled us to pass a tax increase in the wake of the [financial] crisis, though tax rates had nothing to do with it.

And again from Benjamin Domenech, along with conservative Robert Tracinski:

The 2004 effort to push state measures designed to stop gay marriage in tandem with George W. Bush’s re-election effort was a Pyrrhic victory, one which contributed to the Great Sort that eliminated the last of the Reagan Democrats. The efforts of religious leaders and traditionalists to win the argument at the ballot box won temporarily, but could not last in a country where [conservatives] no longer controlled the culture or the courts, and where these non-traditional relationships were depicted as healthy and normal on a daily basis in mass media and social media. The eventual triumph of the Counterculture was ensured.

Time to fight elsewhere.

Iran Appeasement: Method Behind Madness?

Both the non-aligned movement -- founded by Yugoslavia’s Tito, India’s Nehru, Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Nasser, and Ghana’s Nkrumah -- and Barack Obama were born in 1961.

Barack Obama is successfully destroying traditional U.S. foreign policy. We used to lead the world’s most powerful alliance. Now, Obama has moved us toward a new home in the Third World, nations that grew together in the anti-colonial, anti-white man non-aligned movement that currently controls the U.N. General Assembly.

To over simplify, the Democratic Party is a coalition of government masters and workers, affiliated media, non-profits, crony capitalists, unmarried women, and minorities united against the capitalist white males who project the Republicans’ public image. Isn’t the GOP the party of imperialism, of corrupt, right-wing authoritarian regimes, of military spending over social welfare, of wasteful wars abroad? So why not ground Obama’s “transformative” foreign policy in the nonaligned movement’s traditional anti-colonial roots? Goodbye England, Germany, Israel. Hello Iran, Cuba, and non-aligned movement friend the Soviet Union Russia.

In April we wrote:

Obama has a consistent world view. Growing up as a minority half-black in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama took comfort in the anti-colonial, anti-European wave of nationalism that swept through the mostly non-white world at the time. He rode that affirmative action tide through Columbia and Harvard Law to safe landing with his impressive black wife in mostly black South Side Chicago. Race remained his co-pilot as he rose through the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate to the White House.

Don’t tell Obama the numbers are against him; he knows better. Israel is the past, much as Great Britain, Western Europe, and the Republican Party are the past. Time to align with a future that includes Iran, Obama’s own “Nixon goes to China” place in history.

The Iran deal makes no sense otherwise. Iran is militant, revolutionary, supporting anti-West, anti-Israel forces in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Lebanon (Israel’s enemy Hezbollah), the West Bank and Gaza (Israel’s enemy Hamas).  Iran's leaders have just won a big victory! Free to advance its nuclear and missile programs, Iran will threaten all its Sunni Arab neighbors and any Western country where terrorists with nuclear weapons can destroy cities. What madness has descended upon us.

               Neville Chamberlain                               Barack Obama                         

In 1938, the world stood by as Britain and France at Munich signed away the independent nation of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain was a sincere man who knew, as did his French ally, how in the Western Front trenches, the Great War (1914-18) had destroyed a generation of youth to no apparent purpose. Chamberlain would not allow that to happen again. Vietnam was America’s mini-Great War, and Democrats including Obama are determined the U.S. will avoid any such future wars. Sincere, maybe. Misguided, clearly.

“Better red than dead.” Really?