How in the hell would you reach out to this demographic and retain your principles anyway?

I kind of dashed off the post below.  I needed to get cleaned up and head out to the radio station, and collecting my thoughts was a bit of a challenge.

The point is not that one individual - this Barro fellow - has this smart-ass view of how to, in his estimation, drag the Republican party into the modern era.  He warrants discussion because he is symptomatic of a bizarre and warped mindset that has so permeated our culture that it has elbowed aside the entire range of what had previously been considered normal, and established itself as the premise from which society's agenda will be set.

I use the term "east coast" a lot when discussing people of his ilk, the trendsetters among whom do indeed mostly live in that geographic designation.  But it's also a metaphor.  Longtime LITD readers know that I'm occasionally compelled to go local.  "Local" is a smallish but growing midwestern city that is home to the world headquarters of a multinational Fortune 200 corporation (whose newly appointed worldwide director for corporate responsibility is an avowed atheist, I might note), as well as several other fairly high-tech firms that have sprung up as a result of the technocratic atmosphere fostered by the big company's presence.  This may be flyover country, but the Brave New Postmodern Human has consolidated its rule here.  (The use of a non-gender specific possessive is deliberate.)  There is an active Human Rights Council, a panoply of ethnic "affinity groups," an active young-professionals organization with ample overlap in membership with the the above, a gay-straight alliance, and Interfaith Forum that holds peace-pipe ceremonies and the like, and a Healthy Communities Initiative that, as documented in a piece I wrote for The American Thinker in 2010, has taken federal stimulus money to put eat-your-broccoli posters in area daycare centers.  The up-and-coming "community leaders" are a sharp lot.  Out city has the highest per-capita concentration of mechanical engineers in the country, but these go-getters want bike trails, arts activity and good restaurants.

They are, like Barro, "utilitarians" who, by golly, just want things to "work for everybody."  They are considered by mainly themselves to be the hope of the city's, and country's, future.

Cancel my order for the kind of world that their vision culminates in.  On the surface, it looks like a place of great contentment and robust community interaction, where vitality-filled engineers, doctors, art-gallery owners, teachers and government officials regularly convene to assess what is needed to make everybody feel good in every way it's possible to feel good.  It's also a world in which any art produced is sterile and pointless because it came about as part of a grand plan rather than springing up organically.  It's a world where there's a Six Sigma project for every aspect of human existence.  It's a world in which the very deeply embedded, difficult and intricate questions about the nature of God and humans' relationships with Him get glossed over because churches no longer have time for such uncomfortable conversations, busy as they are with all manner of "outreach."  It's a world in which the family structure that has informed all viable societies throughout human history becomes just one more "lifestyle option" among an infinite array.  It's one of endless coalitions and partnerships leave no aspect of human experienced unaddressed.

These people are the nicest folks you'd ever want to meet - being "inclusive" and "welcoming" being foremost among their values, after all - unless you want to talk about basic concepts like immutable maleness and femaleness, or the primacy of private property, or the constant presence of evil in human history.  Then you're not quite as welcome to their party.  You're either shunned or ridiculed.

We are in the midst of a reinvention of what it means to be human. Of course, that's folly, but the really frightening part is that you can no longer say so without getting into trouble with the overlords.