Culture is Downstream from Morality
Morality is the basis for preventing a second French Revolution.
On my drive home from Salt Lake International, I mulled over the curmudgeonly mini-rant I posted from the MSP Delta SkyClub and realized I’d missed a crucial point. The younger generation of Democrats has cultivated a crop of radical collectivists, blissfully ignorant of what collectivism truly entails.
They never witnessed the horrors of East German police gunning down desperate souls scrambling over the Berlin Wall. They’re clueless about the Cuban Missile Crisis, fallout shelters in public buildings, or "duck and cover" drills in elementary schools. They’ve never heard of Boris Yeltsin’s 1989 visit to Johnson Space Center, followed by his unscheduled stop at a Randalls grocery store in Clear Lake - a suburb of Houston. There, the Soviet leader stood awestruck by shelves bursting with food - an abundance unimaginable in his collectivist homeland. These young idealists haven’t seen bread lines, chronic food shortages, or electricity blackouts that defined life under the systems they romanticize.
They champion collectivism while decrying the deportation of illegal immigrants or the incarceration of criminal aliens as "crimes against humanity." Wait until they learn about Stalin’s Holodomor, where millions were deliberately starved, or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which killed tens of millions through forced collectivization and famine. Their ignorance of history’s brutal lessons is staggering.
They’ve never seen the "glories" of the socioeconomic systems they advocate, nor the human cost of utopian promises – but hey, Zohran Mandani has an exotic name, a sexy backstory, is disarmingly eloquent and good looking, is radically chic, and all the right people are supporting him – and the Democrat leadership is caving to a communist, so he must be OK, right? Right?
Equally disheartening is their disconnect from the sacred. They don’t remember when churches and synagogues were true houses of worship, not profit-driven enterprises for televangelists or progressive indoctrination hubs. These institutions once anchored communities in shared moral frameworks, fostering humility and reverence. Now, they’re often stages for self-aggrandizement or political agendas, leaving a spiritual void filled by secular dogma.
What we’re experiencing today echoes the secular humanism of the French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety, rippling through time. That era’s zeal for "reason" over faith birthed guillotines and tyranny, and its faint reverberations persist in our cultural decay. At the heart of it all, as always, lies abortion - the sacrament of secular humanism.
If you convince people that sex is merely recreation, stripped of consequence or sanctity, you’ve already won half the battle. If you frame pregnancy as a disease rather than the creation of life, you’ve eroded the instinct to protect it. If you absolve men of responsibility and brand the killing of an unborn child as "healthcare," you’ve severed the moral tether entirely. Once you’ve sold that lie, you can convince people of anything - collectivism, moral relativism, or the erasure of individual liberty.
Andrew Breitbart was right: politics flows downstream from culture. But culture itself is downstream from morality. Without a spiritual foundation - without a belief system that commands reverence for life, responsibility, and truth - culture becomes a hollow shell, easily molded by ideologues. The absence of such belief leaves us adrift, vulnerable to the seductive promises of systems that history has proven disastrous. These young collectivists, raised on sanitized narratives and divorced from the realities of the past, are ripe for manipulation. They champion ideas they’ve never seen tested by fire, unaware that the ashes of collectivism are littered with millions of graves.
The moral high ground must be reclaimed, rooted in timeless truths, before culture - and the politics it shapes - falls further into chaos. The stakes are nothing less than the foundation of our civilization.
All you write here is on point. I am, however, encouraged and hopeful when I meet the friends of my grandchildren -- and they profess there are growing numbers like them -- who understand the greatness of our Republic and reject all that Mamdani and others propound and represent.
I think sometimes conservatives fondly think our young socialists are drawn by inchoate humanitarian motives and are just unaware of the brutalities inherent in any collectivist scheme. “If only they knew of Stalin’s purges or of the Holodomar then their minds would be enlightened” But actually the late Stephen Brown got it right: our young socialists are attracted to collectivism precisely because they thirst for power over others and are driven by hatred. Think about Antifa in action in Portland: were they going door to door soliciting canned food for the poor and homeless and then distributing these in Antifa-run soup kitchens? No! They were blocking traffic in downtown streets, harassing senior citizens who did them no harm and battering Andy Ngo causing him a brain bleed. It is the evil in their own blood that draws them to embrace the evil that is collectivism. And as youths, thinking themselves immortal, they have no inkling that it may be them who are carted next to the guillotine.