I liked the Katha Pollitt column, but it was reminding me of something and I finally realized what it was...
http://www.lcrga.com/archive/99021701.shtml
Weyrich Says Clinton Trial Makes Him Consider Urging Conservatives to 'Drop Out'
By RON FOURNIER The Associated Press
February 17, 1999 WASHINGTON - One of the political right's intellectual firebrands is questioning whether conservatives should "drop out" of American culture and essentially declare decades of moral struggle unwinnable.
"I no longer believe that there is a moral majority," Paul Weyrich wrote in a letter to several hundred fellow conservative leaders. "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually share our values."
Weyrich, head of the Free Congress Foundation in Washington, says President Clinton's acquittal in the impeachment trial has brought him to the point of wondering whether conservatives should continue trying to influence politics.
"We need some sort of quarantine," he wrote in the letter obtained by The Associated Press.
[...]
Weyrich, while a leading conservative intellectual, does not command a large grassroots organization or necessarily speak for large numbers. He led a campaign to rally social conservatives behind a Republican presidential candidate in 2000, but the effort failed after the prospect he favored, Sen. John Ashcroft of Missouri, decided not to run for president.
He's is plowing relatively new ground by suggesting that the conservative movement cannot succeed in today's culture.
"The culture we are living in becomes an ever-wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics," he said.
Arguing that it may be time for "separation" from society, Weyrich points to conservatives who teach their children at home, form private courts or get rid of their televisions. "I think that we have to look at a whole series of possibilities for bypassing the institutions that are controlled by the enemy," he wrote.
He suggested a conservative roundtable to discuss the movement's next step. "I don't have all the answers or even all the questions. But I know that what we have been doing for 30 years hasn't worked, that while we have been fighting and winning in politics, our culture has decayed into something approaching barbarism."
In an interview, Weyrich said he was not suggesting that conservatives stop fighting. "I'm just suggesting that the chance of victory that we thought was excellent is now not in the cards. We have to take the appropriate action," he said.