I did a Q and A with Dr. Charles Camosy on this subject for Crux. We had a really interesting exchange. Check it out.
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[Editor’s Note: Jonathon Van Maren is a pro-life activist, podcaster, and commentator. His work has appeared in First Things, The American Conservative, The European Conservative, National Review, and elsewhere. His writing can be found at thebridgehead.ca. He spoke to Charles Camosy about his article in The American Conservative on ‘left-wing social conservatives’.]
Camosy: Congratulations on your new, creative, and challenging article with The American Conservative. Can you give us the short version? What, for instance, is a ‘left-wing social conservative’?
The short version is that not so very long ago, most people agreed on the fundamentals of life and family — in short, agreed on what it was that needed conserving while differing strongly on how to do so. “Left-wing” wasn’t shorthand for “woke,” and plenty of economic leftists were strongly anti-abortion and pro-family. In the West, however, pro-lifers have been pushed out of left-wing parties and even feminists who disagree with gender ideology are getting cancelled. That hasn’t happened in Latin America and elsewhere.
In my piece for The American Conservative, I pointed out that economic leftism is not intertwined with the sexual revolution in Latin America as it is elsewhere — and that the loyalties of Western leftists are actually primarily to the abortion industry and the LGBT movement rather than to workers and families. Two journalists actually said that socially conservative leftists are worse than tinpot dictators. Woke Western leftists would like to colonize their erstwhile ideological counterparts in other countries, but hopefully they will continue to fail as the insanity of gender ideology and other aspects of wokeism becomes more apparent. These leaders face enormous pressure from their Western counterparts.
