More on why we not have a 'Christianist' dystopia

Look back to see where we were to see that is not where we are going. [Link]

Many younger readers will have trouble believing that anybody older than Andrew Sullivan exists, but I am not only a good bit older than Mr. Sullivan, I’ve been immersed in American life much longer, and I can remember when the Right was really Right.  I remember KKK billboards on the roadside, and I especially remember one showing a picture of Martin Luther King in a photograph captioned “Martin Luther King in a Communist training school.”  I remember when you couldn’t buy a drink in much of the South, when mixed race dating led to bloody beatings if not death, when the liberal position on homosexuality was that it was a terrible and destructive disease that might, possibly, be treated by years of psychotherapy, when divorced people couldn’t get re-married in mainline Protestant churches, abortion was illegal, Ulysseswas banned, marijuana was a life-threatening drug that beatniks and jazz musicians used in New York, and members of the Communist Party couldn’t speak on university campuses or hold teaching jobs.

In other words, I remember a United States where Andrew Sullivan’s darkest fantasies were fulfilled — and I’ve watched us move steadily away from that for nigh on sixty years.  (Yes, kids, people can be that old and still blog, but that’s only because my teams of underpaid, starving research associates can transfer my cursive Gothic script from the parchment I like onto one of those computational devices you young people use.)  In more than half a century of watching the ebbs and flows of American politics, I’ve seen this country steadily become more tolerant, more thoughtful, more open and in many ways more just.

The Christian right that apparently keeps Mr. Sullivan up at night shivering with fear is a pathetic, compromising bunch of namby pamby wimps compared to the holy warriors of my youth.  If Focus on the Family or even Michelle Bachmann scares him so badly, he should try listening to a standard Sunday morning sermon on AM radio circa 1956 — or read how Time magazine covered homosexuality back then.

There is still fear, but there is hope.

The Left has been winning most of the cultural arguments, but its fear of the Right grows even as the country continues by and large to move culturally toward tolerance and acceptance of diversity.  My guess is that this is due to the country’s equally pronounced drift toward the Right on a number of political and economic issues.  New Deal values and suspicion of unfettered free markets were much more widespread in those far off halcyon days when I first attended the still-segregated Pundit Elementary School: this was a much more collectivist country in 1958 than it is today.

If anything, what we are seeing is the continued triumph of individualism in American life — a force before which both the Christian Right and the Secular Left must bend.  The Right sees the advance of individualism and fears that all is lost, that the socialists are about to take over; the Left sees the rise of libertarian individualism in economic life and policy and fears that this is part of an impending total triumph of the Right.

The biggest victory for the Right in the culture wars has been the fight over guns and gun control: the libertarian principle won out there, as it wins out in the gay rights question. But where the Right or the Left seeks to limit individual autonomy in either economic life, sexual expression (among consenting adults), thought or the arts, the cause of liberty tends to win.

The true compromise that no one will be entirely happy with:

George W. Bush was the first president to choose a vice presidential running mate with an openly lesbian daughter; the dark night of fascism isn’t preparing to fall.  The Left likely must resign itself to a long term trend of less compulsory social solidarity and more individual economic freedom; the right must accept that individuals in our society can only be compelled by their own consciences on an ever growing list of social and cultural issues.  No one will be completely happy about the state of this society; Americans have been lamenting the downsides of American individualism for almost as long as we’ve been becoming more individualistic.  And the less we can rely on external forces (laws and mores with as much binding power as law) to govern our behavior the more we as a people must learn to manage our liberty wisely.

The Christianists (and the socialists) haven’t got a prayer of reversing this trend; American individualism has its positive and negative aspects, but there is little in American life more certain than that the trend toward greater personal autonomy is here to stay.

And that is a good thing.