School boards

Sunday

Daniel McCarthy

How conservatives concede the culture

Conservatives suffer from a short attention span, and it largely explains their defeats in the culture war. They fight every battle as if it’s the only one they will ever have to fight. And so, win or lose, they are unprepared for what happens next. If they lose, they forget how all-important the last battle was, learning no lessons from defeat, nor about what’s vital and what isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, conservatives were adamantly opposed to putting women in combat or admitting them to institutions like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel. In recent years, conservative Republicans have celebrated the aspirations to office of female fighter pilots like Arizona’s Martha McSally and female graduates from Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel.

conservatives

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The peculiarly American attitude toward change

Future historians will marvel, if history is not abolished and historians themselves canceled — or worse — before then, how so many Americans at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st came so suddenly and with apparent certainty to believe in such human and scientific impossibilities as homosexual marriage and the multiplication of the two biological sexes into a unlimited number of them; the ability as if by magic to transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man, and for a man to give birth to a baby; the possibility for Homo sapiens to exert direct control over the terrestrial climate, as if the earth were a suite in a luxury hotel; and other manifest absurdities.

change