A Second 'Catholic Moment'?

The Catholic Thing

By John M. Grondelski
On November 5, The New York Times' headline proclaimed: "Victory Changes Nation's Sense of Self." Kamala Harris ran with the Democratic mantra of "American values" and insisted America's self-consciousness mirrors the party's radical woke agenda of abortion-on-demand-through-birth, pretending men are women and vice versa, and discriminating against people on the basis of race or sex.
On November 5, Democrats learned: Americans don't.
One would think that losing the White House to Donald Trump by a popular vote majority, the United States Senate majority, and likely the House of Representatives would cause Democrats to reevaluate why they lost even people they won four years ago. One would hope they might conclude it would be a good thing to allow some prolife candidates to run under the party banner, even if they likely would otherwise be quarantined in party circles.
Will they?
I doubt it.
My fear is that, behind the NYT headline "Victory Changes Nation's Sense of Self" is a further alienation of the "elites" from the American people. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris constantly complained of American "systemic racism." Control of the border is called "xenophobic." Refusing to pretend men are women and vice versa is "transphobic," even "hateful." "Women's rights" means not protecting preborn females from execution through their "sacrament" of abortion. And "choice" means not picking your school and your car make and model, but killing your baby.
As I hear it, the elites are convinced that Americans are now not worthy of their support and backing. Americans, in their mind, are abandoning their values - except to them, "their" means the elites' anti-values.
Contemporary Polish philosopher Zbigniew Stawrowski insists that the fundamental split in the world today is not "the West versus the rest" but "the West with itself." The "West," he insists, is divided by its tradition, rooted in Greece, Rome, and Israel, versus the "Enlightenment" cultural appropriation of that tradition. As he sees it, the atheist and secularist "Enlightenment" stole terms like "rights," "freedom," "choice," "marriage," "justice," etc. and turned them on their heads, making them mean the exact opposite of what they always did.
Like cuckoos, they took over the West's nest and laid their eggs in it, selling those cuckoo eggs as the legitimate progeny of the West.
Expect to see more of that - from "the Resistance" - over the next four years.
Expect to see more condescension from these folks that Americans, by popularly voting for Trump, have made themselves unworthy of the elites' respect. The Americans, in their minds, "abandoned" their "values." In their minds, the clinging, deplorable garbage really is just that.
And the Left is likely to conclude it has the mandate of heaven to resist. As Kamala Harris said in her grumpy concession, "while I concede this election, I do not concede the fight that fueled this campaign - the fight: the fight for freedom, for opportunity, for fairness, and the dignity of all people. A fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best. That is a fight I will never give up."
In other words, the elites will double down on their "ideals" - even if, in their minds, the majority of the American people don't "deserve" their labors. After all, as we repeatedly heard, the "college-educated" didn't do bad things like vote for Trump. It was those illiterate hillbillies in flyover country.
St. John Paul II was right to insist that culture is upstream of politics and economics: the values you espouse decide what you do with power and money. That is why the political expressions of things like abortion really reflect cultural pathologies.
The American people instinctively seem to understand that. Not completely, to be sure: in seven out of ten states majorities voted to promote prenatal murder through birth. But, in their gut, they recognize something is wrong.
And if we Cathol...