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I'm old enough to remember when social issues were supposed to be toxic and untouchable. Moralizing was among the worst of public sins. Now we get moralizing lectures and social activism from big corporations on a weekly basis.
Of course, the truth is that social issues were never inherently toxic. It was just a successful ruse to intimidate conservatives out of discussing them for a crucial generation or two. The Left only wanted the other side to unilaterally disarm in the culture wars.
The result was the bloodless, dispassionate, disengaged "fiscal conservatism" that lost major elections to left-wing demagogues. Nothing wrong with fiscal conservatism, mind you, but disconnecting it from social issues robbed it of emotional resonance.
Now you've got lefty groups turning big corporations into shock troops for social activism, which is exactly the opposite of the old imperative for conservatives to keep economic issues hermetically sealed from social issues and never discuss the latter.
The Left does this stuff because they know it works, contrary to what they told conservatives for decades. They CAN do this stuff because frightening conservatives away from social issues for a generation created an influence vacuum in corporate culture they could exploit.
Of COURSE it's possible to influence culture through everything from advertising to public policy. In fact, every public policy of significance shapes culture in some way. It was foolish to ever believe otherwise.
Conservatives of the past generation were willing to believe they should avoid social issues because they seek government small enough to separate public policy from social engineering. In the small-government America they envision, the State would not engineer the people.
But that isn't the America we live in right now, and it's impossible to get there without policy actions that have profound social consequences. I wrote about this during the 2012 presidential campaign in response to remarks from Newt Gingrich: humanevents.com/2011/05/18/con…
For me, that debate over "conservative social engineering" was the beginning of the populist divide among Republicans today: the difference between an idealistic world of "fiscal conservatism" - public policy without social pressure - and the nation we actually live in today.
Yes, the people should shape government, not the other way around - but that's not how it works right now, and that state of grace cannot be achieved without winning elections and implementing policies that shape public attitudes - what the Left derides as "legislating morality."
Meanwhile, the Left has already moved on from using government to socially engineer Americans and expanded into using private corporations to impose its morality. The goal is to surround people with inescapable pressure to create an artificial, illusory "moral consensus."
"Keep your politics out of the bedroom!" the Left instructed cowed conservatives for 30 years... while they stormed the bedroom and scarcely paused before pushing on to the bathroom. /end
