Now is the time for a strong social conservatism

President Biden’s recent interview with transexual TikToker Dylan Mulvaney is a clarifying event for anyone who pays attention to America’s culture wars. The first notable aspect of the interview was the mere fact that it happened — that the president of the United States, in the home stretch of a midterm election season, deemed it a prudent use of his time to sit down with such a radical activist. The second notable aspect of the interview is what our senile commander-in-chief said in the course of his conversation.

At one point, Mulvaney asked our hapless supremo if he thinks states should be permitted to “ban gender-affirming health care.” (NB: “banning gender-affirming healthcare” is Newspeak for “protecting innocents from the delusional, Hippocratic Oath-violative predations of those who seek to chemically castrate or hormonally pervert others.”) Biden’s extremely telling answer: “I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that — as a moral question and as a legal question. I just think it’s wrong.”

Translation: John has a “natural” right to chop off his sexual appendage if he wakes up one day thinking he is Jane, and Sally has a constitutional right to chop off her perfectly healthy bosoms if she arises one morning convinced she is Samuel. The states do not have the “right” as sovereign actors in America’s constitutional order to ban these “surgeries,” as both a “moral” matter and a “legal” matter. In this sense, the woke would have us believe that “gender-affirming care” is the next same-sex “marriage” — too pressing a “civil right” to be left to the democratic whims of the benighted citizenry. So much for “our democracy,” whose state Democrats invariably bewail when the topic turns to the January 6 jamboree.

In articulating his view that the “moral” (read: immoral) imperative to chemically castrate and hormonally bastardize vulnerable Americans is so great as to require removal of the issue from the realm of democratic politics, Biden paid faithful homage to the tenets of the woke catechism. If cultic wokeism is to be our new public orthodoxy, as the progressive faithful wish, then certain things must be legally mandated and certain things must necessarily be proscribed. Biden was only being candid with Mulvaney — his rejection of the foundational liberal paradigm of values-neutrality is emphatic and explicit.

Such a mask-off moment should galvanize the right to drop its nostrums and bromides about “live and let live.” It’s past time for a more muscular, post-fusionist approach to rightist statesmanship that is similarly comfortable using the levers of legislative and judicial power to pursue its own political vision. The public square will always have a regnant orthodoxy of some type — the denial of this fact is the fatal flaw of right-liberal fusionism — and the only way to push back against a substantively erroneous public orthodoxy is by proffering a better one. That orthodoxy should demand that legislation be enacted and judgments be adjudicated according to its conception of justice — the rewarding of good and the punishing of evil. Only under the right’s political stewardship, the good will be truly good and the evil will be truly evil.

Thus, if Joe Biden wants to start banning certain things, and banning the banning of certain things, the right should respond: game on. Let’s have that conversation. Let’s talk about “manipulating” the tax code (i.e., engaging in basic economic statecraft) to incentivize righteous behavior and disincentivize antisocial behavior. Let’s talk about whether we should ban chemical castration and the surgical removal of perfectly healthy body parts. Let’s talk about whether we should ban the indoctrination of impressionable minors into vogue nonsense about gender and sexuality. Let’s talk about whether we should ban drag queen story hours. Heck, let’s talk about whether we should ban pornography, for that matter.

The so-called New Right, in its sweeping rejection of liberalism’s manifold excesses, groks this new reality. And as Uncle Joe has now reminded us, the time has never been more important to bury any misbegotten nostalgia for “nicer,” value-neutral times. Sometimes the only way out is through.