Southern Slant | Exploring cultural imperialism’s domestic impact

Graydon Gordian Columnist

Cultural imperialism is a dangerous thing: dangerous because of the injustice it does, and dangerous because of the kind of reaction it may inspire. The values and traditions of a people are complex, built up over generations, and oftentimes, to the people who practice them, represent something more than the kinds of issues we subject to rational policy debates. To rob this from a people, whether they be from Lebanon or Louisiana, is a great injustice.

One of the most brilliant parts of our consitutional system is federalism. But the virtues that sustain a federalist system are difficult to practice, because it takes a certain humility to admit that political and cultural differences may be about individual upbringing and preference, rather than moral superiority. Traditionally, the abscence of those virtues has been most prominently on the left, an absence that they will soon come to regret.

In the past, theses virtues were not virtues at all. A stance of decentralism and political humility only becomes virtuous once the fruits of our political heritage are shared by all. The Abolitionist cause, the Civil Rights movement—these are not what I mean by cultural imperialism. Ensuring the freedom and equality of the whole of our citizenry is among the noblest of causes. However, the left has failed to see that the way that cultural, moral and political crises such as slavery and segregation were dealt with should now be the exception, not the rule. Ensuring that the entire nation is built upon a classically liberal order equally applied to all people is appropriate, but attempting to subvert the way that order flowers in different regions amongst different cultures is another issue altogether. The left has failed at making the critical distinction between what is a rejection of the blessings and promises of the Constitution (such as slavery or segregation) and what is just an alternative version of those blessings.

The other evening I was debating with some friends of mine about gun control, and some of my friends of them could not understand why owning a gun inspired any interest whatsoever, even if it was statistically highly unlikely that the gun would even harm someone.

This conversation is a classic example of cultural imperialism. The fact that some of my friends could not understand why one would even wish to own a gun has no bearing on whether I, a Texan, should be able to own a gun. In my culture, gun ownership is a right of passage, a symbol not merely of my liberty but of my responsibility, and a source of mutual enjoyment with my family and friends. To be confused or intrigued by this is understandable; to be offended is inappropriate. gun control vs. gun rights is a classic example of an argument that should be waged at the state level, where different cultures and different communities can, through self-governance, represent their values.

The inability of the left to value this has grave consequences for the future of progressivism in this country. Conservatives in this country never used to want to dominate social and political life the way they feel they need to now. For most of their history, conservatives have been focused on themselves and their communities. Their concern is for their schools, their towns, their states, and not those of the Northeast or the Pacific Coast.

But the left systematically changed the stakes and has made every issue into a federal issue. For most Democrats, no subject is too small for the federal government. And that is exactly the political situation the left now has. Rather than having prayer in some schools and not in others, the left may risk prayer in every school. Rather than having legal abortions in some places as opposed to others, the need to make abortion legal everywhere may have opened the door to having abortions nowhere. You must remember: Conservatives don’t care what you do in your state and in your town. However, in order to protect what they can do in their state and in their town, they will go to the greatest of lengths.