by: F.R. Duplantier

Cornell Professor Jeremy Rabkin worries that "preoccupation with 'culture war' blinds conservatives to the very real victories they have recently achieved -- and to the reasons for their having achieved them. Roe v. Wade has not been overturned," he concedes, "but the Supreme Court has finally begun to allow some restrictions on abortion that register moral concerns. More strikingly," Rabkin continues, "the court has refused to extend Roe v. Wade into a right to assisted suicide, while voters have repeatedly rejected state referenda on this issue and Dr. Kevorkian's crusade has finally landed him in jail."

Writing in the current issue of Policy Review, published by the Heritage Foundation, Rabkin notes that "religious conservatives have built coalitions in a number of states to gain indirect public funding for religious schools, over tremendous opposition from teachers' unions." He emphasizes, however, that this victory "could not have been achieved by religious conservatives on their own. It could only have been done by building coalitions with people who share similar aims and attitudes on particular issues, for their own, sometimes divergent, reasons."

Rejecting the "culture war" model, Rabkin argues that America is "in the midst of many overlapping and cross-cutting social conflicts. Yes," he acknowledges, "there are deep divisions regarding public recognition or accommodation of religion and on sexual morals and 'family values.' But the same is true for attitudes about gun ownership. And also for views on multiculturalism. There are also deep divisions in attitudes about risk and security in economic affairs, about the aims of developers and the concerns of environmentalists, about animal rights and human needs, about the claims of children and the potentialities of phar-macology -- and on and on."

Rabkin insists that these disputes "don't all line up neatly as cultural divisions between religious conservatives and secularizing 'progressives.'" And he con-siders it "dangerous and self-defeating for religious conservatives to see popular culture as simply an arena for politics and then to see politics in terms of a single, overriding culture war. Wars force people to take sides," he warns. "That sort of polarizing politics is quite dangerous," Rabkin concludes, "if you do not have the majority on your side."

Whether we're fighting a war or not, the real problem with conservatives is that so many of us don't even believe in culture. We don't read fiction, we don't go to movies, we don't listen to music, and we don't buy art. No, we pore over newspapers and policy journals, we watch apocalyptic documentaries on our video machines at home, we tune in to talk radio, and we decorate our walls with campaign posters. We have no culture to speak of, because politics IS our culture. With no interest in genuine culture, we are oblivious to the neo-traditional renaissance going on all around us. Maybe it's time for the defeatists among us to step aside and make way for the visionaries.