As the presidential campaign speeds past what was once its traditional kickoff date, Labor Day Weekend, many on the right continue to argue that engaging in the “Culture War” is either a distraction or that it is already lost. In both instances, waging the good fight to protect and promote a virtuous culture will ineluctably lead to the Right’s electoral defeat.

Instead, they aver, dispense with cultural issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, protecting parental rights, etc., and focus solely on the economy, immigration, and the weaponization of government. If these Republican Cassandras prevail upon the Trump campaign and GOP down-ticket campaigns to stand mute on critical cultural issues, what will victory in November accomplish for MAGA and conservative populists? The disintegration of our free republic by an erosion rather than an avalanche. And, in truth, the erosion would prove more painful by not only being slower but by being done by our own Republican hands.

A vibrant, virtuous culture of life is indispensable to the liberty and prosperity of Americans and, indeed, all of humanity. To attempt to divorce culture from democracy and the economy is to agree with the left: government and the economy are essentially mechanistic, materialistic, and deterministic—shaping the human person more than the individual shapes these institutions.

This explains why the left injects its ideology and uses the tools of both government and the economy to indoctrinate the citizenry into its collectivist ideology, and, in its secular atheism, denigrates and often infringes upon the liberty and property of dissenters who cherish faith, family, community, and country—people who are committed to defending and expanding a virtuous culture of life.

The left is waging a culture war on America—indeed a war against the very concept of truth, itself—that aims to impose its collectivist, materialist, secularist ideology upon society; and subordinating and suppressing traditional culture and its adherence to moral truths. Since the left believes it is winning, if largely by default, and is hellbent on finishing its mission, in this Culture War the Republican Cassandras are laboring under the delusion they are seeking a Détente. What they are really calling for is unilateral disarmament on the path to unconditional surrender and serfdom.

In his masterful biography, The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II – The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy, George Weigel examined the late pontiff’s social magisterium and, notably, his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus [The Hundredth Year], which issued a clarion call for a “free and virtuous society and the priority of culture;” and warned of “the dangers that awaited democratic polities and free-economies that cut themselves loose from sturdy moral-cultural moorings.”

Per Weigel, the crux of John Paul II’s argument was tripartite:

The free and virtuous society [is] composed of three interlocking parts: a democratic polity, a free or market-centered economy, and a robust public moral culture. The third component part, [John Paul II] insisted, was the key to the proper functioning of the political and economic sectors. It took a certain kind of people, possessing certain virtues, to make democracy and the market work so that human beings were ennobled by their participation in free political and economic life.

Yet, what was it that enabled an individual and their society to thrive within democratic states and free market economies? “As always, recognition of the truth about the dignity of the human person was the key to the ultimate success of any human activity.” States that incorporated and protected these moral truths, for example, human rights, by circumscribing the powers of its government; and that allowed for the flourishing of human creativity and responsibility within a free market, would engender the most virtuous and salubrious citizenry.

But, John Paul II was acutely aware of what would happen when secular atheism and/or virulent moral relativism in “democracies that declared wrongs to be rights” impaired a society’s ability to adhere to the moral truths that spurred its virtuous accomplishments.

As Weigel noted, John Paul II discerned the problem at its post-modern root, namely “a world striving for freedom had not learned to live freedom nobly because it had lost touch with the nobility of the human person, which consists in our ability to know, choose, and adhere to the truth.”

And the historical horrors humanity wrought and suffered provided a crystalline vision of where a Godless, vice-addled society would dead end.

John Paul II located the deepest wound of modernity in a defective humanism that had left the world morally adrift and had created a global charnel house in which great hopes had been burnt to ashes. Life had become fragmented and atomized. The alienation experienced by the men and women of late modernity was far deeper and more complex than the alienation analyzed by Karl Marx: men and women had become alienated from their own interiority, having lost sight of a transcendent spiritual and moral horizon against which to live their lives. This deeper alienation had profound public consequences. Like his friend Henri de Lubac, Wojtyla was convinced that defective humanisms had created a situation in which men and women could only organize the world against each other. Ultramundane humanism inevitably became inhuman humanism.

St. John Paul the Great wrote this in 1959. Sixty-five years later, the inhuman humanism has metastasized throughout our country and our world, in which we are more rapidly and readily being organized against each other in a death of a thousand keystrokes in a cyber-cesspool of disinformation, envy, and animus.

Yet there is life, and yet there is hope. The hope for John Paul II, Weigel wrote, was that “the truth about the human person was ultimately revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom we discover the truth about the merciful Father and the truth about ourselves.”

Thus, in 1976, it was this conviction that led then Cardinal Wojtyla to declare that he and his peers stood “in the front line in a lively battle for the dignity of man.” A quarter century later, the Cold War was over. Through the grace of God and the work of his earthly servants, the “conscience revolution” that affirmed the primacy of everyone’s human dignity had destroyed the evil empire of the totalitarian Soviet Union and its communist satellites.

Today, over thirty years, America is in a Culture War. Launched and waged by the left, it is a Culture War without quarter. Détente is not an option, and surrender is unconscionable, for it would mean the end of our free republic and all we have cherished for generations and hope to bequeath to future generations.

In brutal truth: we cannot make America great again unless we make America good again.

Thus, the heirs of Lincoln and Reagan must dismiss the Republican Cassandras, and engage and win the Culture War. We must proclaim our support for a free and virtuous culture of life and moral truths. We must trust in the innate decency of our fellow citizens. And we must realize that whatever the immediate electoral danger, the greatest danger is to abandon our principles. For we will not only lose our liberty and prosperity.

We will lose the truth about ourselves.

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An American Greatness contributor, the Hon. Thaddeus G. McCotter (M.C., Ret.) served Michigan’s 11th Congressional district from 2003-2012, and served as Chair of the Republican House Policy Committee. Not a lobbyist, he is a frequent public speaker and moderator for public policy seminars; and a Monday co-host of the “John Batchelor Radio Show,” among sundry media appearances.