How hippies won the culture war… and drove the evangelicals to fascism

Back when Paul Weyrich partied like it was 1999, he made a monumental admission that explains the ferocity of today’s evangelical right.

In an open letter to his extreme conservative cohorts, he acknowledged that they “probably had lost the culture war.”

Yippie!!

He was right. And today that reality means that American democracy—and the human race—may actually survive.

Weyrich was mourning… a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics … the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.

The counter-cultural heathens against whom Weyrich ranted were shaped by the Vietnam war, rock music, LSD, and so much more … a ‘60s Boomer generation (76-million-strong) that utterly shattered the established mores on which the right wing depended.

The “alien ideology” Weyrich feared was feminist, LGBTQA+, post-White Supremacist, and at war with Trump misogyny, sexual Puritanism, imperial arrogance, fascist autocracy, and ecological insanity.

Weyrich died in 2008. A cohort said he was nasty enough to “get hate mail from Mother Theresa.” His Calvinist fervor helped inspire the bumper sticker “Mean People Suck.” Had he been alive, he would’ve loved Trump’s Brown Shirt assault on the Capitol.

His reincarnations are the likes of Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Ben Shapiro (the King of Lashon Hara).

Like them, Weyrich was a 1630s Puritan, a medieval relic. He demanded that rich, straight, white, male, evangelical theocrats run a “Christian” state … but without all that turn-the-other-cheek / love-thy-neighbor / feed-the-poor hippie stuff that Jesus was always spouting. In fact, if Jesus Himself had spoken up at any Weyrich-style rallies, he would have been immediately re-crucified.

Weyrich’s astounding surrender 22 years ago served notice that the pot-smoking, sex-loving, tree-hugging, Digger/Leveller egalitarian, feminist, LGBTQA+, pro-choice, rock ’n’ rolling, multi-ethnic/racial left had won the hearts and minds of two new generations: the Millennials (b. 1981-1997) and the Zoomers (b. 1998-2011).

The Millennials today are 72 million strong; their younger-sibling Zoomers are 67 million. Together they comprise more than a third of the American population. They are the most diverse generations in history, with strong predilections for social justice and for saving our democracy and our ability to survive on this Earth (after all, it’s THEIR future).

If just Millennials and Zoomers had voted in 2016 and 2020, they would have buried Trump both times by more than 400 Electoral ballots.

Which is exactly why the Republicans are trying to keep them from voting.

But there’s more. Since 2009, the aging evangelical movement has been losing strength … by some estimates as much as half their numbers. Similar polls are coming from the Catholic Church.

As the geezers die off, young people aren’t buying in.

Maybe it’s that evangelicals demand sexual abstinence and monogamy but produce a steady stream of predatory preachers and pederast priests … not to mention Trump himself.

Or that the evangelical movement loves the “unborn” at the same time as the death penalty and the military budget … while also hating birth control and sex education, which have peacefully prevented millions more abortions than the “Right to Life” movement has by shooting doctors and forcing women to act as Handmaidens.

Or that the evangelical movement sees vaccinations and masks to prevent the COVID as “government interventions into human freedom,” but demand that the government seize womens’ reproductive organs and control of their own pregnancies.

For whatever reasons, Weyrich’s culture war surrender two decades ago resonates today with the demographic declines of America’s extreme right wing, in both general population and evangelical troop strength. It helps explain the desperation of their assault on democracy.

Sometime in the 2040s or earlier, the US will become a majority non-white nation (many states are already there). The “un-churched” will dominate. So will women, whose 57% showing for Biden in 2020 ousted the Christian right’s beloved Titan of Testosterone (whose primary mobster function was to let the fascist priesthood launder big donor money without being taxed).

Thus the ferocity of the White Supremacist, straight male, “Christian” assault on the right to vote. Having lost America’s youth and culture, only a dictatorship can keep this Lost Cause minority in power.

Just ask Paul Weyrich.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.

Harvey Wasserman’s The People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org. He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection zooms (www.electionprotection2024.org) every Monday at 5 p.m. EST.