The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds

Opinion|The Right Is Winning the Battle for Hearts and Minds

The full-scale assault by the conservative movement on liberal domination of the nation’s culture has begun to deliver key victories.

The right has gnashed its teeth for decades over the leftward tilt of academia, the literary world, the press, television and streaming video.

Thirteen years ago, Rod Dreher published “Yes, Liberals Do Control Culture” in The American Conservative: “The hegemony of cultural leftism in American popular culture, and the resulting epistemic closure among American culture producers, is a critical challenge to conservatives.”

In a 2012 essay, “‘Sexual Careers’ in Late Roman America,” Dreher added, “I am tempted to believe — more than tempted; in fact, I do believe — that there is very little to be saved in our decadent culture, only things to be suffered, and endured, and preserved through this present darkness for a more sane age to come.”

The world Dreher described has radically changed, if not flipped on its head, according to Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts. In a Jan. 2 essay, Drezner posed the question: “Has the Right Won the Culture War?”

“Over the last five years, the cultural ground has shifted dramatically to the right,” Drezner writes. While this does not mean that “the right is now culturally ascendant,” he added, “it does mean that neither progressive nor ‘nonpartisan’ elites possess the cultural cachet they did even a half-decade ago.”