Wednesday, December 20, 2006

On This Modern Warrior Archetype Part Six.9.3

9c. On the other hand, the Right is also guilty of attempting to hold onto a dead past. By doing so, ironically, it undermines its own values. The world changes. In the past, before mass communications, those not wishing for such changes could more easily opt out. In the current era, the alternative was seemingly limited to Backlash. However, by engaging in such a tactic, the resultant noise simply reminds everyone about what they disliked so much about the past in the first place, and thereby provides an incentive to stamp it out once and for all. Unwinnable, culture wars are detrimental for defenders of the old guard. In these battles, by its failure to compete through adaptation, tolerance for its values is eroded to the point of demolition. Like an octogenarian slugging it out with a teenage street gang on its terms, the herd cultural conservative, being a product of something older than mass communications technology, can never win against a trend nurtured by mass communications will come up short. Inevitably, unless the fight is defined on its own terms, the weak perish. In the process, perhaps in desperation to hold onto something, the Right has turned to the very corporations that produce that which it finds so objectionable, and, like a starving cat, laps the spoils of its own demise. By worshiping the consumerist market, a false god if there ever was one, the Right reduces its ideals to reactionary broadcast filler for corporate advertising. No wonder the political Right has been divided and devoured by plutocrats and fascists.

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