In an inspired monologue last Thursday, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh put the progressive assault on traditional American customs and culture in precisely the proper perspective. “I don’t think the culture war has been about right versus wrong for a long time. And people haven’t figured that out,” Limbaugh said. “They continue to fight it on a moral or a morality battlefield, but that’s not it at all. In fact, obliterating morality has been what the culture war is all about, not asserting it and not having it triumph.”

Obliterating morality has been the American Left’s objective for quite some time. Beginning with the national temper tantrum dutifully mischaracterized by the mainstream media as the “cultural revolution of the 60s,” the Left began asserting a series of bromides aimed at completely upending societal norms. Phrases such as “God is dead,” “if it feels good do it,” “there is no black and white, only shades of gray,” “tune in, turn on, and drop out” and “do your own thing” (absent the critical addendum of taking responsibility for it) heralded the beginning of an age when the traditional and religion-based arbiters of morality, with whom people identified for most of the nation’s history, were swept aside.

Who replaced them? Legions of lawyers and therapists, as millions of Americans, egged on by the nation’s first overprotected generation of spoiled children known as the Baby Boomers, began insisting that right and wrong could be easily replaced with legal and illegal, or well and unwell. The headlong rush toward moral mayhem was aided and abetted by the destruction of the nuclear family, courtesy of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” agenda. Prior to its enactment, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program had been reserved for widows, as a means of funding once-married women who had lost the primary male supporter of the family.

Johnson and a Democrat-controlled Congress changed the qualifications and made any household where there was no male family head present become eligible for taxpayer subsidies. In 1966, Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted exactly what would happen, noting “a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families … asks for and gets chaos.”

Moynihan also coined the term “defining deviancy down,” aptly describing the successive and increasingly self-entitled generations of Americans who have not only abandoned traditional morality, but logic and reason as well. Logic has been dismissed as “a patriarchal contraption of oppression” by feminists, and reason as a “white male Euro-Christian construction” by a leftist university professor. Ironically, there is logic and reason for doing so: Their dismissal precludes any basis — other than pure emotion — by which the American Left’s assumption that they own the franchise on enlightened thinking can be challenged.

The results have been disastrous. America is now a nation where millions of weak, but arrogantly self-assured thinkers truly believe all dissent should be shouted down or censored, and those who disagree with leftist dogma can be dismissed with an assortment of derogatory epithets designed to shut down every debate before it starts. And in a recent development that smacks of outright fascism, leftist corporate entities have joined with government to “punish” those that refuse to kowtow to a leftist agenda so disconnected from reality, biology itself must be relegated to the ash heap of history, replaced by the utterly bankrupt notion that self-identification is all that matters.

Columnist Mona Charon asks the right questions in response to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ ludicrous ruling that a high school student in rural Virginia has the right to use a restroom based on her self-determined “gender identity,” rather than her actual sex. “What if the young person considered herself African-American, like Rachel Dolezal?” Charon asks. “Should she get preferences in college admission? Or what about Danny Almonte, who was 14 when he starred in the 2001 Little League tournament? If he felt 12, does that make it ok?”

When morality is obliterated, everything is ok. Or more accurately, everything that accrues to the progressive agenda is ok. Limbaugh describes what millions of Americans are feeling as a result: “We are stunned. How many of you … are literally shocked and stunned that logical arguments do not persuade people anymore?”

One suspects shocked and stunned is less accurate than frustrated and angry. And perhaps even more troubling, many Americans seem resigned to an inevitable trajectory of continuing social decline. A decline due in large part to an impotent Republican Party afraid of incurring leftist wrath, as well as the built-in disadvantage accruing to a conservative philosophy that embraces individualism, attempting to stand against a collectivist Left willing to win by any means necessary. Add to the mix a Left-biased mainstream media, and a leftist-dominated entertainment industry that routinely mocks traditional values in general, and Christians in particular, and the odds of restoring decency and common sense to the republic are intimidatingly high.

Nonetheless, surrender is not an option. Rock-ribbed conservatism might not enjoy majority status anymore, but progressive ideology never has. For example, while popular culture makes it seem like the nation is awash in LGBT Americans, the fact remains that only 3.8% actually identify as such, and transgenders separately comprise a minuscule 0.3% of the population, or 700,000 adults. As for the nation’s current ideological breakdown, a 2015 poll reveals that 38% of respondents identify as moderates, 33% as conservative, and 26% as liberal.

Based on this reality, live and let live should be the order of the day. But the Left has no interest in compromise. As Limbaugh points out, “The culture warriors believe that there is universal right and wrong only because the majorities have had the tyrannical power to use right and wrong as ways to oppress people.”

This is utter nonsense, and it’s time conservatives stood up and defended themselves. Imagine at least 33% of the nation engaging in economic boycotts, refusing to support leftist colleges, challenging public school curricula, and eschewing entertainment at odds with their values. Cynics might say such efforts are futile, but the University of Missouri is discovering their countenance of progressive race-baiting has precipitated an enrollment decline of 1,500 students and a projected $32 million shortfall for the coming fiscal year. Such efforts can be replicated in a number of other arenas.

And such efforts are vitally necessary because the battle against progressivism’s “anything goes” mindset will not be won all at once. Millions of mindful conservatives willing to take small stands on a day-to-day basis can have an enormous impact.

The Left can only obliterate morality if decent Americans allow it to happen. Don’t allow it to happen.