In what is surely a disturbing trend for the health of the American republic, the establishment media has lost much of its ability to ask tough, fair, reasonable questions aimed at eliciting useful, previously unknown information. Part of the problem is ideological leftism, and part of it is laziness, and part of it is a diminution of professional standards and of standards of consistency and logic. What is undeniable is that the art of informative interviews is seldom in display - and that many observers from across the political spectrum thought Sunday's 60 Minutes interview of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was so overly fawning as to be Exhibit A of the rapid descent of establishment-media standards.

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  If, as I have suggested, American culture isn't yet lost, then where are the avenues for traditionalists - for advocates of decency - to start winning some victories that turn society decisively in the right direction?

    Sometimes the adversary is weakest exactly where he appears most firmly in control. Caesar was killed not by foreign defeat but in the very heart of Rome. The Soviet empire was never directly fired upon, but it collapsed when its subject peoples in Poland, Romania, East Germany, and finally Russia itself rose up in peaceful protest. And in American pop culture, where liberal Hollywood still reigns supreme, some encouraging signs are emerging even from the movie industry's citadel.

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    So I asked my wife what she would write about if she were to comment on today’s culture. Asking her was, if I do say so, a brilliant idea. She had far more insightful things to say than I usually do.

    She began by lamenting how modern technology has led to the decline of manners not just in social relations, but particularly in business interactions. People don’t actually talk to each other anymore, she said, and they don’t observe what should be the most common of courtesies: addressing each other by name, directing requests or thoughts clearly and directly to a particular person, or a myriad of other small, once-ordinary actions that aren’t mere niceties (although there’s nothing wrong with “mere niceties”) but also important for the practicalities of organizational efficiency and clear lines of authority.

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   Does America need renewed public battles about morality? Or, instead, have traditionalists already lost the "culture wars"?

    The combined answer to those two questions may determine the fate of the republic.

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