Cultural Victories Won by the Left

Writing in the Winter 1996 issue of the Marxist journal Dissent, Michael Walzer enumerated some of the cultural victories won by the left since the 1960s:

• "The visible impact of feminism."
• "The effects of affirmative action."
• "The emergence of gay rights politics, and … the attention paid to it in the media."
• "The acceptance of cultural pluralism."
• "The transformation of family life," including "rising divorce rates, changing sexual mores, new household arrangements — and, again, the portrayal of all this in the media."
• "The progress of secularization; the fading of religion in general and Christianity in particular from the public sphere — classrooms, textbooks, legal codes, holidays, and so on."
• "The virtual abolition of capital punishment."
• "The legalization of abortion."
• "The first successes in the effort to regulate and limit the private ownership of guns."

Commenting on this, Walzer said that these victories were imposed upon our society by "liberal elites," rather than "by the pressure of a mass movement or a majoritarian party." He noted that these changes "reflect the leftism or liberalism of lawyers, judges, federal bureaucrats, professors, school teachers, social workers, journalists, television and screen writers — not the population at large,"

Hmmm.

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