Culture wars are long wars

Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation. No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

America’s future is godless not because the God-fearing were convinced of the errors of their faith, but because their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren never adopted their faith to start out with. Cultures do not change when people replace old ideas with new ones; cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones.

Cultural insurgents win few converts in their own cohort. They can, however, build up a system of ideas and institutions which will preserve and refine the ideals they hope their community will adopt in the future. The real target of these ideas are not their contemporaries, but their contemporaries’ children and grandchildren. Culture wars are fought for the hearts of the unborn. Future generations will be open to values the current generation rejects outright.

Culture wars are long wars in Scholars Stage

After populism

Humans are willing to accept hierarchy as fair, if they can see a reason behind the inequalities that ensue. Few people are satisfied with ‘being a loser’, but most tend to accept failure if they perceive the game as unbiased. In order to satisfy a sense of fairness, inequalities must be perceived as justified and as not violating the principle of equal respect for persons. This is a condition that contemporary capitalism is increasingly unable to fulfil. The reasons are simple: social inequalities are too great and growing too fast for people to accept that they are the result of corresponding differences in performance or skills.

Furthermore, the financial crash in 2008 exposed an astonishing degree of incompetence and cynicism among the ruling and propertied classes. It transpired that supposed ‘experts’ were incompetent, and that this applied to reckless financiers as much as to the inept politicians expected to supervise them. The 2008 financial crash impacted on neoliberal capitalism much as the Chernobyl disaster affected the Soviet state: it exposed a fundamental, underlying lie and the fact that the existing system had been drained of any legitimacy it might once have possessed.

After populism in Eurozine

How the European Union's migration policy is broken

From solidarity in dealing with migration to organizing deportations, the system no longer works. Since the 2015 migrant crisis, attempts at reforming the 20-year-old system have divided the EU. So why is the system broken, and can it be fixed?

How the European Union's migration policy is broken by Into Europe

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