Treating the cultural revolution of the ’60s as something planned or controlled or directed by some powerful and sinister ideological force is commonplace on the right. But it is a fiction.  (Though it is a very useful fiction, since it serves as a politically beneficial rallying cry for right-wing populist discontent with various social and cultural trends.) But it distorts our understanding of what really happened in those years. The relaxation of sexual taboos, the rise of youth culture, women’s liberation, the breakdown of the authoritarian-patriarchal family structure and its replacement by more egalitarian arrangements–there have been positive and negative consequences of these and many other social-cultural changes over the past several decades. But they were not planned or controlled, certainly not politically. (Just as there was no bohemian Comintern directing the quite similar cultural revolutions that took place all over the free world at roughly the same historical moment.)  ~Damon Linker

First, let me congratulate Ross on his ability to participate in a debate at a magazine that describes the ongoing debate with the title on its main page: “Are Christians at odds with democracy?”  Not even Linker at his most theocon-paranoid would ask such a ridiculous question (the question begs more questions–which Christians are we talking about?), so it impresses me that Ross has soldiered on in an atmosphere almost uniquely unfriendly to his perspective and acquitted himself admirably.  Ross and I have a few disagreements, but in the end we both recognise rather unhinged secularism when we see it, and I’m sorry to say that Mr. Linker is a representative of just such a secularism.

Now to the Linker claim above.  Ross has made a point in the past of specifically not attributing massive social and cultural changes that reached their crescendo in the ’60s on liberal intellectuals organising a revolution guided by a single ideology.  He is not the cardboard cutout of a Christian conservative that Linker still seems to think he is.  First of all, he is clearly too smart to have fallen into the trap of believing that broad social change is ever planned.  Basic common sense and a conservative appreciation for the complexity of human societies would tell him that this is virtually impossible.  Frankly, only social engineers, progressives prominent among them, even think that social change ought to be directed or planned according to ideological guidelines, or even that it is possible.  But that does not mean that the social engineers and intellectuals are ever actually in control, or that the transformation of cultures necessarily stems from their meddling.  They tend, on the whole, to magnify or exacerbate ongoing developments for the worse, but no one serious, on the right or elsewhere, thinks that social upheaval is planned.  Surely one of the reasons why conservatives are unnerved by upheaval is that it is chaotic and disorderly, without any clear direction or organising principle.  So right away Linker is boxing Ross into a stereotype that he, more than many Christian conservatives, does not fit.  Before he even gets to the substance of his response, such as it is, he has shown a tendentious and rather condescending streak that does him no credit.  He says to Ross, “Look, my boy, you seem to think that some sinister left-wing Blofeld was compelling people to use contraceptives through his mind control devices, and I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong!”  This is supposed to be persuasive? 

That said, did an ideology of emancipation and liberation prevail in this period?  Did it or did it not encourage, legitimise and empower all of the forces of dissolution then in ascendance?  Or are we supposed to believe that, because many of these changes took place as part of the transformation of private life, the “nonpolitical” spheres of life were left untouched by the adherents of the “liberal bargain”?  Has Linker not actually tried to seal off hermetically the “liberal bargain” from any negative social and cultural consequences that might be laid at the door of left-liberal ideas?  Isn’t his recourse to the allegedly noncomprehensive liberal view, in fact, a way to duck responsibility for the negative consequences of past secularist troublemaking?

Naturally, if I were on the side of the forces of subversion I would want to insist that there was no real subversion going on.  No one was actually trying to overthrow established mores and norms.  It just sort of happened!  It’s just “change.”  This doesn’t say much of Linker’s understanding of agency in history.  But it also takes away the theocons’ claim of being defenders.  No, they are not defending against the aggression of the subversives.  They are (gasp!) reactionaries!  He says so right here:

But the theocons look far less admirable in the light of reality, which shows them to be reactionaries incapable of coming to terms with the developmental logic of societies devoted to freedom.  

Well, no.  In fairness to the theocons, whom I have given a rather hard time over the past two years, they refuse to allow freedom to be defined acccording to the tiresomely selfish and passion-soaked values of secularists, just as they elsewhere refuse to allow reason to be reduced to the most meager of instrumental faculties deprived of any higher inspiration or illumination.  Just as they refuse to let reason be reduced to its barest minimum, they refuse to let human freedom be defined according to the deficient standards of self-will and choice.  Whether their entire vision with respect to liberalism is consistent with this is another question, but once again to say that they cannot come to terms with the “developmental logic” of free societies is to reduce them to a caricature and refute the caricature.  The use of the loaded term reactionary is telling.  No one serious can call Fr. Neuhaus et al. reactionaries.  As a reactionary, I disavow their claims to reaction, and I am confident that they want nothing to do with people like me.  What is so strange about this entire debate is that Neuhaus and Co. inhabit what seems to me to be a halfway house that makes room for liberalism on certain, important conditions.  Linker wants unconditional acceptance of the liberal order as he defines it; unconditional surrender is what he desires from the theocons.  Until they offer such a surrender to his vision of the “liberal bargain”–a bargain to which they are committed just as much as he is in their way–he will cast them as the blackest of reactionaries, fundamentalists with a view to wreck our entire political system.  I might note that Linker here replicates nothing so much as a reverse image of the caricature of the conservative view of the ’60s as “ideologically driven transformation.”  He sees the rise of the Christian right as just such an “ideologically driven transformation,” he casts the theocons as the central villains of the piece and assures us that they are here to break with all precedents and overturn the existing order–which is, according to him, what we say about secular liberals of decades past.  Whether we actually say this or not is immaterial; he has already called such a view ridiculous, and so indicts himself with his own attack.