Changing the terms of debate doesn’t seem possible… until it seems inevitable

Watching my children play competitive soccer, it occurred to me that the story of the low-scoring game is that it seems impossible to get a goal, right up until it seems inevitable. Something similar is true of the culture wars, at least from the point of view of a conservative defender.

I recently had an email conversation with somebody who shares many of my views; his support of same-sex marriage is the most significant difference. His contention was that the lessons that Progressives have learned from the same-sex marriage campaign will not be transferable to economic issues because such topics lack the “everybody has a sibling/cousin/child/friend” component that was decisive for many of those who might otherwise have opposed redefinition of the institution of marriage.

My reply was that the personalization of an issue is largely about framing. The real shift with marriage wasn’t to get people to love their loved ones, but to see marriage as applicable to them. Not that long ago, the majority of people with homosexual friends and family — indeed, the majority of those people — simply understood that marriage was not something that was possible, given the nature of the relationship, just as having natural children with their partners is not possible.

As I’ve said before, the same thing will happen with those issues on which libertarians and other “fiscal conservatives” agree. Two essays that I came across within the last couple of days on Instapundit illustrate the point.

The first comes from Reason‘s Nick Gillespie, who is arguably the poster boy for socially liberal libertarianism. Writing about an article in Rolling Stone:

Titled “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should be Fighting For,” here’s the list for those of you in a hurry (the explanatory chatter accompanying each entry doesn’t make them any more convincing).

  1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody
  2. Social Security for All
  3. Take Back The Land
  4. Make Everything Owned by Everybody
  5. A Public Bank in Every State

The only thing missing is a call for a light beer that really does taste great and is less filling.

Gillespie ascribes Rolling Stone’s rehashing of old, disproven socialism to a search for meaning, now that rock stars don’t have the cultural import they did back when the magazine was fresh. Whatever the merits of that analysis, to me he sounds a lot like defenders of traditional marriage in recent decades. Same-sex marriage was once the “oh, that will never happen” issue; it was the warning that was dismissed as crazy back when other issues were rolling through the culture, like sodomy and the Equal Rights Amendment.

To Gillespie, it seems obvious that these ideas are fantasies that can easily be explained as flawed, which brings us to the other essay, this one by Heather MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal:

… the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.” …

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.

It may seem as if I’m jumping from issue to issue in order to cull examples to suit my purposes, but what I’m picking out are the underlying principles. Looking at diverse fields of knowledge is a good way to get a sense of what we may not be seeing within our own.

Gillespie, like other fiscal conservatives, scoffs at the five economic issues as “an ahistorical and already-been-tried-and-failed-countless-times policy agenda,” but try explaining why that’s the case to a country of people who aren’t well educated about economics and really aren’t that interested in public policy until something directly and clearly harms them. Here’s a challenge: Try explaining to the same audience why Shakespeare is important to the formation of young adults, in comparison with “categories of identity and class politics.”

Now, as a dabbler and/or generalist, try to make your case while politically motivated people who are “experts” in those respective fields are chirping the “ahistorical” view in Americans’ other ears… and in harmony with popular TV shows, hip comedians, and the rulings of judges across the country. Oh, and reference to tradition or the “wisdom of the ages” is not allowed.

This is precisely the marriage debate. One of the functions of culture is to absorb ideas and rules that the society learns over time so that few people have to be able to articulate an argument for why complex, often subtle, things should be the way they should be. When the instruments of culture have been taken hold of by radicals, there is no structural defense against wild calls of “let’s just try it this way, now.”

If you don’t think economic issues have the personal heft of same-sex marriage, think of your own friends and family who might be struggling financially. Now imagine if simply redistributing money to help them out were not something that we just can’t do, but rather something of which popular experts tell us there is no evidence of economic harm.

And if you don’t think the other team can organize itself well enough to take on the allied forces of conservatives, libertarians, and “moderates,” I’d suggest that you should consider that the Left is flush with borrowed federal dollars and working on the messaging even as you and I stand here watching the teams kick the ball around on the other side of the field.

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