Conservatives have long understood the importance of fighting the cultural war against the Left simultaneously with the much more straightforward and easily delineated economic and political wars. In many ways, the cultural struggle is even more important than the others: Long after both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have left the political scene, we will be living with buildings built either by classicists or by brutalists, listening to music composed either by tonalists or by atonalists, reading poetry that either scans and makes sense or doesn’t, and watching movies that either attempt to entertain and provoke thought or instead to disgust and provoke self-hatred. The cultural war frames our very existence, therefore, and marks out the parameters for the lesser struggles over what King Lear dismissed as “who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.”
When the Purple Hearts and Congressional Medals of Honor come to be awarded for courage in the face of the enemy in the cultural war, no breast will be more highly decorated than that of Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion magazine and author of books such as Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, and The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art. These books name names, and alongside this new one they make up an important body of work that now almost amounts to a new conservative political philosophy in itself. What Kimball is saying is not only right and important, but also can be used by conservatives as live ammunition in the frontline trenches of the culture war.
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