Doing What Conservatives Do Best

In the wake of the 2012 presidential election, I have seen overwhelming despair and pessimism on the part of conservatives.

“Our country has become morally vacant.”  ”The land of the free has become the land of unrestrained licentiousness.” “President Obama is the incarnation and catalyst of the American decline.”

Well, what are we going to do about it? Hopefully not write more blog posts utterly devoid of a single flicker of hope for the future of our country or the Rupublican party. Yet neither should we, as my colleague Anna Williams mentions below , turn to proverbial warfare. We can leave the “war on [insert cause here]” verbiage to the Left.

Are we fighting a war on culture? Are we fighting a war on religious liberty? Perhaps. But I’m afraid that to go about declaring warfare with the Left seems particularly anti-conservative.

Rather, we should go about this the best way we know how: by conserving and upholding the values and ideals instilled in this country, second, by our Founding Fathers, but first, by God.

Practically speaking, we need to play what Andrew Klavan calls, ” the long game .”

Some of our beloved values that have been lost in the political sphere are expressed with words like “responsibility,” “duty,” “honor,” words we seldom hear these days. We must bring these back first by practicing them. We now have a responsibility, a duty, especially young people, to step up and fill the gaps left in mainstream news media. Klavan asks:

How is it possible that the mind-boggling success of Fox News has failed to spawn half a dozen imitators at least—especially venues for the libertarian young with their antic sense of political incorrectness? Rupert Murdoch, God love him, can’t live forever. It’s time for others to step up.

This election demonstrates that liberals are by no means afraid of standing on a platform of blatant propaganda, and Obama certainly didn’t win by remaining hush-hush about his stance on social issues. But that goes for mainstream entertainment as well as news media. “It’s not that conservative ideas don’t make their way into popular entertainment,” Klavan says, “it’s that they always come in disguise.”

We don’t need more conservative artists. We need an infrastructure to support them: more funding, more distribution, sympathetic review venues, grants and awards for arts that speak the truth out loud.

We need to support events like the San Diego Christian Film Festival  in a market that is “not hungry, [but] starving for good quality films” to raise artistic and moral standards in entertainment.

We need more organizations like Makoto Fujimura’s International Arts Movement with lectures, performances, exhibitions, screenings, projects, and workshops that seek to “rehumanize our world” through the good and the beautiful.

We have a duty to bring truth into the world in attractive ways so that the Truth may draw others to himself, not so that we may beat others over the head with it.

The results of the 2012 election are not cause to lament the Republican party’s crushing electoral defeat, but rather a call to act—with urgency but not hostility—with honor and truth so that for ourselves and future generations America may be, in its fullest sense , the land of the free.