Challenging liberal assumptions By Alan Roebuck

The conservative movement has focused more on winning political contests than on winning the war of ideas. As a result, liberalism is increasing its dominance as the Unofficial State Religion, the system of thought that serves as the basis for all important government decisions and provides most people with their basic understanding of reality.
Therefore we conservatives need to aim at winning the war of ideas. Specifically, we need to identify the fundamental errors of liberalism, prove them to be errors, and state the conservative truths that correct these errors. Our message should be: "We conservatives know how things really are, the liberals don't, and here's why." This will catch the attention of a postmodern, truth-denying world.

We need to change minds. The main impediment to a person's changing his mind is his intellectual presuppositions. Conservative apologists therefore need to do something that they rarely do now: concentrate on the presuppositions of liberalism. For example, when speaking of Darwinism, we should ask, Is naturalism true? When discussing multiculturalism, we should ask, Why is "diversity" good? When discussing homosexuality, we should ask, How do you know that homosexual conduct is morally acceptable? These and other questions that go to underlying presuppositions are the weak points of liberalism, partly because few people can even identify their own presuppositions, and partly because liberalism cannot defend its presuppositions with the usual liberal intellectual apparatus.

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