Reality Is Reactionary

We haven't had some Steyn for a while, so here he is getting to the heart of the matter:

Let's take it as read that Rick Santorum is weird. After all, he believes in the sanctity of life, the primacy of the family, the traditional socio-religious understanding of a transcendent purpose to human existence. Once upon a time, back in the mists of, ooh, the mid–20th century, all these things were, if not entirely universal, sufficiently mainstream as to be barely worthy of discussion. Now they're not. Isn't the fact that conventional morality is now "weird" itself deeply weird? The instant weirdification of ideas taken for granted for millennia is surely mega-weird — unless you think that our generation is possessed of wisdom unique to human history. In which case, why are we broke?

Or, indeed, why is the education system collapsing, the crime rate skyrocketing or the myriad other things going south at a rate of knots?

In many ways liberal social policy is like a real life version of one of the UEAs dodgy climate models, where whatever you plug into it, the Earth turns into ball of fire. We're not supposed to notice that the Earth remains stubbornly inhabitable, just like we're not supposed to notice that increasingly large parts of our cities aren't. If there was as much evidence of carbon emissions damaging the global environment as there is of liberalism damaging the social environment, conservatives would be riding to work on Raleighs. Meanwhile, liberals climb atop the rubble and insist that they're the Smartest People In The Room, and anyone who disagrees is some kind of creepy wierdo.