I am posting an article by a British journalist. The article makes some interesting points, but in the end I found it facile, superficial and unconvincing.

There is a type of conservative--I assume the author Ed West is a small "c" conservative--who always wants to throw in the towel and declare the other side victors before the fight has even started. That way you get the best of all words. You receive praise from conservatives because, well, you sound like a conservative. And of course you receive praise from liberals for paying due deference to the winning team. Invitations to TV studios naturally beckon. It was a genre of writing perfected by the late Peregrine Worsthorne.

The author's thesis, in so far as I understand it, is that there once existed a moral consensus that the 1960s shattered. After 50 or so years of social and moral revolution we have more or less settled on a moral consensus, with fierce moral guardians enforcing the new woke norms with the same puritanical zeal that their 1950s predecessors had once applied.

It's a clever conceit, worthy of the late Peregrine Worsthorne. In fact, I am sure Worsthorne had written stuff like this himself over the years. However, I am not sure we have really reached a moral consensus, the enforcement of which will be all that straightforward. You could argue it the other way: It was during the 1960s that a consensus of sorts was forged. Back then, the guardians of society decided that it was silly to ban James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence and the movie "Clockwork Orange." The guardians decided that it was silly to outlaw homosexuality and abortion, that it was absurd to expect nice girls not to have sex before they got married and that it was reprehensible to be a racist. The public wasn't happy about it, but eventually accepted the new moral order.

What's happening today though is beyond what anyone could have imagined to be reasonable back then. Did anyone back then think that we would be forced to accept gay marriage as normal? Did anyone think that everyone would be free to decide what gender he or she is and would have the right to force others to accept it? Did anyone think that it would be reprehensible to object to late-term abortions? Did anyone think that taking down statues of anyone from the past with retrograde views would be acceptable? Did anyone think that children would be taught that whiteness is a debilitating condition? Maybe the guardians of the old pre-1960s order thought so, but their concerns were of course dismissed without too much effort.

So is everything settled now? Is there a new consensus? Are the views of AOC and the knee-taking English footballers the new normal? Maybe so. Countries such as Spain or Ireland, from whom you might have expected resistance to the new mores, are now among the wokest countries in the world. On the other hand, there is pushback against all of this in--of all places--France. No footballers other than those of England and Belgium have taken the knee. There is serious pushback from Russia. There is pushback also from Hungary and Poland--but they are small countries and will probably succumb once serious pressure is applied against them.

There is a wild card though: geopolitics. Within the next few years it will become increasingly apparent that the West is failing to keep up with China, that China is racing ahead in one field after another. China's social, economic and, above all, moral model is very different from that of the West. Will this cause a change in attitude in the West? Will the West suddenly decide: "Hey, maybe white men aren't so bad after all, maybe tearing down the past isn't the best way to build a future, maybe changing genders isn't the best way of ensuring population growth, maybe preoccupying yourself with rectifying past injustices is not the most effective way of reviving manufacturing industry?" I don't know.

What West fails to appreciate that the new moral consensus is one that appeals to very few people. Ultimately, a consensus can only take hold if more people benefit than lose from it.

https://unherd.com/2021/07/the-wests-cultural-revolution-is-over/