The Most Important Votes Are Yet to Be Cast

The choices we make in our daily lives shape our culture and the type of country we have. After all, politics is downstream from culture.

By Selwyn Duke

With President Donald Trump’s historic and resounding election victory, many are relieved. His supporters may feel, “Mission accomplished!” while his opponents (those not throwing tantrums) might’ve resigned themselves to reality. There’s a sense that we can breathe easier now, relax, and return to “life as normal.” Yet overlooked is that the most important ballots are yet to be cast. 

What am I talking about? We cast votes every time we buy a product or service, pay for a movie or imbibe other entertainment, watch a news broadcast, purchase a newspaper or view a website, use a search engine, send a child to a school or college, or express a belief. These choices are daily “votes” because they determine what will prevail in our culture. If a news station peddles propaganda, a university destructively indoctrinates youth, a corporation funds perverse agendas, or a Big Tech company nefariously influences our elections, it’s only because too many of us are patronizing it in some way. If the entity’s customers/users disappeared, so would it. If activists are effectively spreading destructive ideas, it’s only because too many of us are tolerating it. In other words, our daily market/social-realm votes serve to shape our culture, and this matters because, as the late Andrew Breitbart famously put it, “Politics is downstream from culture.”

Under representative government, you cannot do politically what’s rendered impossible culturally. Moreover, while elections are important, how much substantive and enduring change will a political outcome deliver if our culture continues deteriorating? To analogize it, conceptualize civilization as being like a large ship. This ship is steadily drifting toward a great waterfall at the ends of the Earth (or, to use our conventional terminology, is drifting “left”), at whose plunge-pool terminus lies the final resting place of deceased civilizations. This drift is cultural movement, but there is political movement, too, where on the ship itself people move left or right. And being on the right side is preferable, as the starboard view is that of the promised land. Yet even if you can stay on the vessel’s right side, the steady drift ensures that this land of milk and honey becomes ever more distant, ever more elusive — and that, without restoring the culture, destruction will draw ever nearer.

And, oh, our culture is listing badly. Our most recently appointed Supreme Court justice answered the question of what a woman is with, “I am not a biologist.” One could wonder, too, if she’d say she knows what a dog is; she isn’t, after all, a veterinarian or zoologist, either. And how could she possibly adjudicate whether a person was a victim of sex discrimination if she could not know definitively what the person’s sex was? Perhaps we could hear a defense attorney now: “We contend, your honor, that our client cannot be guilty of shutting plaintiff out of an ‘old boys’ network’ because the assertion that plaintiff is a woman is unproven — and neither you nor plaintiff’s counsel nor I is a biologist.”

Really, though, can we completely blame Ketanji Brown Jackson? She almost assuredly knows what a woman is. At her confirmation hearings in 2022, however, she was responding to a pseudo-elite cultural imperative: Kowtowing to the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) agenda, which holds that we must respect men who “identify” as women and not espouse a definition of “woman” that would exclude them. This agenda says a little boy or girl can become the opposite sex just by willing it and that, if we dispute this, we’re bigots. This agenda also insists that schools must aid children in “transitioning” — behind their parents’ backs if necessary — for their mental health’s sake. This agenda further demands that males claiming female status must be allowed in girls’ and women’s sports and locker rooms. Of course, this agenda is far from the only indicator of cultural decay, but nothing illustrates ours better. For however detached from reality Jackson is, she’s not nearly as crazy as the cultural forces to which she was compelled to genuflect. Oh, there’s one more thing about this agenda: The wider population has not effectively scorned and ostracized those pushing it, which is why they could push it. Americans at large didn’t cancel the sexual devolutionaries — before the sexual devolutionaries could cancel them. And, yes, unlike wealth creation/distribution, culture wars are a zero-sum game governed by a simple rule: If you don’t control the culture, the culture will ultimately control you.

Now, many have said that with the 2024 election, America “has moved right.” But all movement is relative. If we were on the “right,” we should ask: On the right of what? Are we merely on the right of the people on the left side of that left-drifting ship? The reality is that the only consistent definitions of “liberal” and “conservative” relate to, respectively, “a desire to change the status quo” and “a desire to preserve the status quo.” Hence, as the status quo changes, so do the policy positions characterizing “liberal” and “conservative” in the given time and place. This is why European “conservatives” are more like our moderate liberals, often embracing, for example, nationalized healthcare and a so-called right to abortion (“so-called” because it violates the unborn baby’s right to life), and socially “liberal” positions generally. It’s why while a 1950s American conservative was staunchly anti-communist, a Soviet conservative at the time was a communist. Yet who determines the status quo? Under representative government especially, it reflects the consensus positions of the people, of course; it reflects the culture. This determines the practical political spectrum, which itself is reflected by the “Overton window,” i.e., “the range of acceptable political discourse.” This window has widened noticeably in America in recent years in both directions (to use our lacking left-right way of framing matters), for good and for ill. But is it what it should be? More significantly, even if it were determined entirely by American conservatives — even if they were the only people existing in the country — would it be as it should?

Consider here what our current culture is compared to that of the ’50s: Virtually everyone back then was what we’d now call a “conservative,” of one stripe or another. Why, people will sometimes point out that in his speeches, Democratic President John F. Kennedy sounded more like Ronald Reagan than like his brother Teddy during the latter’s 1980 White House run. But two examples perhaps perfectly epitomize our cultural change. First, on YouTube you can find an old public service announcement, produced in 1961, titled “Boys Beware!” It unabashedly warns teen lads of, and portrays examples of, homosexual predation and grooming, calling same-sex attraction a “sickness” as dangerous as smallpox. The kicker: It was produced with the cooperation of the police and school district in Inglewood, California. Now, just this year, 2024, Inglewood hosted its “First Annual Pride Festival” — also with the government’s cooperation. The only thing shocking about it, too, is that it took the city so long. Also to the point here, many if not most of today’s conservatives would join in disavowing the ’61 video, perhaps calling it “over the top” or even “intolerant.”

As for the second example, ’50s Americans were so vigilantly anti-communist that we had at the time the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which among other things sought to root out communist subversion in government. Today’s times have seen communists/communist sympathizers in government; Anita Dunn, the Barack Obama administration communications director who called Mao Zedong one of her two “favorite political philosophers,” is a case in point.

Now, though, let’s get to the point. Even if enough Americans have recently been “red-pilled” so that we have actually “moved right” as a society (for now) relative to seven years ago, how significant is this? It’s a bit as with health. Research informs that American men’s testosterone levels have dropped 30 percent over the last three decades (perhaps this explains much!) and that the populace is notably fatter than in 1960. Given this, a guy whose testosterone level is only 15 percent lower and who has two fewer rolls around his waist than average may say, “I’m doing great!” But is he? Should he use as a yardstick today’s average fitness level — or even that of 1960? Likewise, while knowing where we’ve been culturally and where we are can tell us where we’re going (projecting the lines), where should we be? As with fitness, is a ’50s measure the gold standard? That’s all relative, and “better than this, that, or someone” doesn’t necessarily mean “ideal” or even “good.” So the point isn’t to aim culturally for our time’s best Overton window, though politically, this is sometimes necessary. The point also isn’t to merely resurrect the nostalgia-inducing norms of another time. The point is to cultivate the timeless.

While this is much easier said than done, it must first be said, and can be said with specificity because the objective not only exists, but has been defined for us by our ancestors. That is, we have a yardstick for determining national goodness, and I often put it this way: If morality came in a jar, what would be on the ingredients label? The virtues would be. They are, to present a list that’s mostly a combination of the theological, cardinal, and heavenly virtues, Faith, Hope, Honesty, Charity, Fortitude (Courage), Justice, Temperance, Prudence, Chastity, Diligence, Patience, Love, Kindness, Forgiveness, and Humility. Let’s now go through each one and evaluate, sometimes briefly, how today’s America measures up.

Faith

Unlike the saying “Might makes right,” faith breeds a right that makes might. That is, when you know not just that you’re on the right side of history (which, really, is too often just the right side of current events), but that what you embrace is objectively, eternally, universally right, it emboldens you. The bravest culture warriors don’t risk martyrdom for a flavor of the day, but for the ultimate fact for all days. Authentic faith also informs that there is such a reality, that, no, everything is not relative, because Truth is real and eternal. This orders one’s thinking in the same way that knowing the laws (truths) of nutrition, and that not everything is governed by taste, orders one’s diet.

Now, though, spiritual junk food is the order of the day. Christian faith has declined like testosterone levels, with Pew Research Center informing that only 65 percent of adults in 2018-19 described themselves as Christian, a figure down 12 points in just a decade. In fact, “nones” (as opposed to nuns) — people who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” and are generally apathetic and sometimes even hostile toward faith — are now the largest religion-related cohort in the United States (28 percent of the population), according to 2024 Pew research. What’s more, today, America’s pagans outnumber her Presbyterians.

Does this matter? Our second president, John Adams, said it certainly does. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people,” he warned in 1798, expressing a sentiment common among great thinkers. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We now have one (or many?) of “any other,” which is why we today epitomize an observation made by Belgian playwright Émile Cammaerts. To paraphrase, it goes, “When people cease believing in God, it’s not that they then believe in nothing. It’s that they’ll believe in anything.”

Hope

A 2022 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that 44 percent of American teens experience “persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness.” Is this surprising? They’re initiated into soul-darkening sin while young, and are bombarded with doom-and-gloom, Chicken Little warnings about a climate-change-induced end of days. Add to this that it is the young people who are most rapidly abandoning faith, and it makes sense. What’s the message, after all: Eat, drink, and be merry, you soulless organic robot, for tomorrow you disappear into oblivion?

Honesty

“Honesty is such a lonely word,” laments a famous 1978 Billy Joel song. Bearing false witness is nothing new, which is why it’s proscribed in a divine Commandment. Yet today’s America is increasingly descending into Soviet Union-level dishonesty. Just recently, in fact, the Democrats and mainstream media claimed that President Trump called for ex-Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s assassination; in reality, he’d merely demanded that she herself fight in the wars she would send other people’s children to die in. This wasn’t misinterpretation but gross prevarication — and evil.

Charity

Americans have long been the world’s most charitable people. The bad news is that, as during recent Hurricane Helene, government increasingly tries to supplant charity with government action (and often inaction). This is tragic because, as I wrote in “Charity Disparity: The Virtue That Can Only Be Practiced Privately” (The New American, 11/11/2024), “Charity doesn’t just feed a man, but feeds the souls of recipient and giver; it doesn’t just clothe a child, but clothes him and his helper in fellowship; it doesn’t just quench a woman’s thirst, but quenches that deep desire to show and receive love; it doesn’t just connect the needy with life-giving aid, but connects beneficiary and benefactor, more closely, to the spirit of God.”

Fortitude (Courage)

While many intrepid souls do still reside among us, too many Americans are capons or frightened hens — who encourage their own deficiency in children. Thus do we have “safe spaces” with stuffed animals on college campuses, and “trigger warnings.” Thus did we treat a glorified flu as if it were the Black Plague. And thus did we recently see snowflakes melting down on social media, wondering how they “can go on” with their lives, because their preferred presidential candidate lost. Coming to mind here, too, could be author G. Michael Hopf’s recently famous quotation, “Tough times create strong men. Strong men create easy times. Easy times create weak men. Weak men create tough times.”

Justice

Weak men also enable injustice. And what is witnessed today? The term “justice” is now, sadly, perhaps most associated with “social justice,” which has a quite contrary effect. And with our two-tiered “justice” system — one standard for the pseudo-elite, another for the street; one for the regime’s enablers, another for dissenters — justice is as lonely a word as honesty (not surprisingly, as the latter is a prerequisite for the former). Our injustice is so egregious, in fact, that there’s a newly popular term for it: lawfare.

Temperance

This virtue relates to control over excess, and some today do prioritize modesty in food and drink. It’s not just, however, that we’re not more obese than ever for nothin’. Rather, in matters far more important, we need a good dose of temperance. Just consider outlandish behavior’s ubiquity. Professor Thomas Sowell once implicated late boxer Muhammad Ali, who was inspired in his brash showmanship by “heel” professional wrestler “Gorgeous George,” in the normalization of sporting-arena trash talk. But today being a flamboyant heel, in athletics and beyond, is common. Put on a dress (as a man), curse people out, be sexually explicit or otherwise shocking, and you can become a social-media sensation. A sense of propriety is now sorely lacking — and intemperate behavior is rewarded. Oh, and part of this, too, is the complete mainstreaming of vulgarity and sartorial immodesty.

Prudence

Years ago, while offering a left-handed defense of the then-assailed, pre-fall-from-grace Boy Scouts (i.e., when they still knew what a boy was), comedian-cum-commentator Bill Maher said that the “nerds need some place to go.” This profound lack of wisdom, lack of a sense of what is good, reminds me of the famous line by C.S. Lewis, “We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” Yet Maher merely reflects this time, in which, owing to imprudence, good is called bad and bad, good.    

Chastity

Speaking of which, a woman close to me once said, “Years ago, you knew who the bad girls were; now you know who the good girls are.” In the grip of our Great Sexual Heresy, sexual content, sexual innuendo, and depravity are everywhere. Why, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris even featured at an early November campaign rally a performance by Cardi B, an entertainer (in)famous for singing the song WAP (which, incredibly, stands for Wet A** P***y). This is how low we’ve sunk.

Moreover, with millions of people, women particularly, having voted in the election based on the so-called right to kill an unborn baby, something must be explicitly said: Prenatal infanticide will never be sufficiently frowned upon by the larger society until our Great Sexual Heresy is put to bed and chastity is restored as a civilizational norm. Why? As philosopher G.K. Chesterton put it, “Men do not differ much on what things they call evils; they differ greatly on what evils they will call excusable.” It’s plain when you speak to even people who’d be inclined to oppose abortion generally — staunch conservatives — that they may cede that prenatal infanticide is “not good” (they’re disinclined to use a strong term such as “evil”), but they nonetheless find it excusable. This is because the vast majority of Americans, even many “Christians,” have an emotional vested interest in keeping it legal. They accept at least first-stage sexual-devolution norms: fornication, cohabitation, and, let’s say, great “latitude” in heterosexuality’s practice. (This, not to mention that many are supportive of homosexuality and other sexual aberrations.) Were sexuality still restricted via strong social codes to authentic marriage, out-of-wedlock pregnancy would be rare (it was four percent in the 1940s) and, hence, the emotional vested interest in escaping its consequences would be rare. Because the demon of desire has been loosed of its fetters, however, and libertinism reigns, the escape hatch of abortion is demanded. Under representative government, you cannot legislate against what a majority’s powerful passions lobby for — as illustrated by the majorities that voted on November 5 for pro-abortion ballot measures. Moreover, while former UN Ambassador Alan Keyes correctly called prenatal infanticide “the slavery issue of our time,” it is profoundly different in a most significant way: Slaves were visible, walked among us, and could complain about their plight. Yet as the title of a famous 1984 pro-life film informs, the unborn baby’s instinctive complaint is a “silent scream.” It is, too, as with that proverbial question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Of course it does; sound waves are emitted. But no one pays it any mind; no one even flinches. Likewise, the baby’s silent scream is unheard and unheeded; neither police nor ambulance ever comes. It’s out of sight, out of mind — and, most significantly, out of heart.

Diligence

Entities such as the Pacific Educational Group make millions devising school curricula “informing” that hard work, planning for the future, and punctuality are “white norms.” There’s also the ascendancy of “anti-work ideology” online among some younger-generation individuals who clearly don’t embody William Bennett’s saying, “There are no menial jobs, only menial attitudes.” These phenomena and many others today reflect a profound lack of diligence.

Patience

A want of this virtue, along with a spirit of entitlement, helps explain the aforementioned young people, many of whom believe they should earn $300,000 right out of college. Of course, when modern parents pander to children’s desire for immediate gratification, patience may not develop.

Love, Kindness, and Forgiveness

Love is the greatest virtue, and kindness and forgiveness flow from it. In fact, in what He said was the most important Commandment, Jesus instructed that you must “love the Lord your God” and “love your neighbor as yourself.” Of course, no one disputes love’s importance; the disagreement arises over what constitutes true love (and kindness). For example, echoing the pagan Romans, who called Christians “haters of humanity,” many today label those who won’t facilitate the MUSS agenda “haters.” Thus, for Love to actually be more than a mere pretense, it must be informed by other virtues, such as Faith, Honesty (the intellectual variety), Justice, Temperance, Prudence, Chastity, and Humility. Detached from Truth, efforts at love are often just self-delusion.

As for forgiveness, we must remember that it doesn’t obviate worldly consequences. Were it otherwise, we’d face the dilemma of punishing an unruly child or forgiving him. Administering punishment, however, can be the loving course.

Humility

Humility may rank only below Love in importance because it forestalls pride, known as the “father of all sin.” It’s thus labeled because the prideful person will often be unwilling to see flaws in himself — or his own sins — and, therefore, can’t self-correct.

Tragically, though, pride is exalted in our time, masquerading, quite devilishly, as “self-esteem.” This, which began to be pushed in schools decades ago, was originally justified (at least in part) with the idea that girls’ academic performance allegedly declined during adolescence due to declining self-esteem. Sure enough, too, girls scored worse than boys did on the “self-esteem tests” social engineers designed. But forget about causation; even their correlation didn’t truly exist. After all, while black teen boys performed the worst academically, they also scored highest of all on the self-esteem tests. But, hey, why let facts scuttle a fancy new theory?

Restoring the Culture

Much more could be said about our civilization’s decline vis-à-vis the virtues; the above are just examples. However, the most important point is not how we measure up to them, but that we must again start measuring ourselves with them. To draw an analogy, if you aim to become proficient at tennis or make your child so, you learn the game’s principles and then, respectively, cultivate or inculcate them. Likewise, the virtues could be said to be the principles of morality. And, obviously, the remedy for our moral decay — for demoralization — is moralization. This is effected via application of the virtues.

This also matters because, while it’s fine exposing what ails us, determining the prescription for the cure is imperative. Regarding this, we should heed the words of famed late architect Buckminster Fuller. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” he said. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

As to our existing model, moderns believe in “shallow things, shallowly,” to quote commentator Bret Stephens. The West currently exalts ideas such as tolerance, equality, environmentalism, progress, pleasure-seeking, and open-mindedness. All these priorities are widely misunderstood, are actuated incorrectly, and have to a degree become destructive — and none are virtues. They also are accepted axiomatically. But how can we know when our tolerance enables turpitude, that emphasizing equality yields laxity, when our environmentalism becomes paganism, when progress is progression toward error, when our pleasure may invite perdition, and when our minds are so open that our brains have fallen out? By applying the virtues. And how can we break the instinctive attachment to the aforementioned faux virtues, such as equality? Again, by applying the real ones.

There is, however, a prerequisite for this: believing in Truth. It’s no wonder we ignore the virtues yet talk much about “values”; the latter is part of the lexicon of atheism. Values are variable and thus can be vagaries or even vices; they’re simply things people happen to value. Virtues reflect Truth, which transcends man and is objective by definition. Ah, but there’s the sticking point. How many today even believe in Truth? I’ve often cited 2002 Barna Group research showing that most Americans don’t; they fancy morality “relative” and are likely to make decisions based on what feels right. But this way lies madness. Real things aren’t relative — they’re real. Boiled down, saying “morality is relative” is to say it doesn’t actually exist; only human preference does. And what this is reflective of was well expressed by a 1977 New Yorker magazine cover. It featured the Devil addressing a large group of arrivals in Hell and saying, reassuringly, “You’ll find there’s no right or wrong here. Just what works for you.” Anyone who’d restore the culture must start by restoring belief in Truth — first in himself, if necessary.

Then there is one more matter. How can we encourage, or dare I say enforce, virtue’s embrace? Well, this brings us back to those votes still to be cast. Question: What is political correctness, or the intensification of it called “wokeness”? And how is it so effectively imposed?

Wokeness amounts to a set of social codes that are enforced the way social codes have always been — via social pressure — with the social-pressure regime being called in this case “cancel culture.” But all groups, from the ancient Greeks to the Amish to the Victorians to the wokesters, have effectively used social pressure to control behavior. All groups, that is, except conservatives.

Explaining this phenomenon well was Chesterton. As he wrote in his 1908 book Orthodoxy:

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.

And for this we must be revolutionary — as the Founding Fathers were.

So what of the votes? If conservatives had refused to cast ballots in our election, the cultural devolutionaries would’ve won and would be devising our governmental laws. Is it any different if we recede from the cultural sphere, refusing to “vote” on our social laws, and leave that field to the devolutionaries?

Triumphing politically over the long term requires that we win the culture, and to win the culture we must first show up for the battle. Regarding good and evil we must, respectively, prioritize, emphasize, legitimize — and stigmatize. We must cancel the cancel cultists.

“Live and let live” applies only to tastes, never to Truth. And forget not that immutable law of human civilization: If you don’t control the culture, the culture will control you.

                  This article was originally published at The New American.