Who's the Aggressor in the Culture War?

For the last fifty years or so the left has been employing an interesting strategy in what has come to be called the culture war. The left attacks and undermines some traditional institution of the culture - marriage, abortion, sexual practices, gender, free markets, religious freedom, Christmas etc. - and when people try to resist these encroachments upon these long-held ways of doing things the left complains, indignant that anyone could be so divisive and confrontational.

It's like a man about to be slapped in the face throwing up an arm to ward off the blow and then being criticized for unwarranted aggressiveness and violence because he resisted.

It's hard to believe that the tactic has worked so well for so long, but it has, largely because the general public seems indifferent to what's going on in the culture until it's too late to do anything about it.

Emily Jashinsky, the culture editor at The Federalist, has a column on this in which she writes that,

By the essence of their mission and the definition of their moniker, progressives are on offense. There would be no cultural battles were it not for changes demanded by the left. Those of us so-called “culture war-stoking” conservatives in media are on defense. Almost always.

We focus heavily on culture because it’s what our audience finds useful. It’s what our audience finds useful because they, too, are on defense—and that’s because the left is focused even more heavily on culture. This kind of coverage is entirely a response to the left’s broad and deliberate cultural offensive, which honest progressives should fully own. The left raises proposals (or demands, more often) for cultural change. In response, we stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” (Or we’re supposed to, at least.)

Of course, media conservatives are blamed for stoking the flames of a culture war because center-left elites wouldn’t dare admit their own hands have been dirtied by something so asinine and lowbrow. Yet, curiously, they own all of these politicized initiatives to alter the culture. But you can’t have it both ways.

She's right about this as well as the rest of what she says in the piece. The "culture war" is a war of aggression and attrition waged by the left on much that America has traditionally valued. To the extent that anyone, conservative or even liberal, seeks to offer resistance to the left's ideological scorched earth march through the institutions, they can hardly be called "culture war-stokers," at least not by any honest observer.