The Left is waging a particularly nasty culture war this year, which means all conservatives and moderates of good will must rally to defeat it at the ballot box two weeks hence.

The Left’s dishonest, vicious treatment of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh wasn’t a unique response to unique circumstances, but rather a mere sample of what is now its standard operating procedure. That standard set of savage strategies threatens every one who doesn’t fall in line – especially (but not only) people who have committed the egregious sin of being born white – or, worse yet, white, male, and heterosexual.

Poor Kavanaugh, as the ultimate example of “white privilege and patriarchy,” was assumed from the moment he was nominated to be guilty of something. For Senate Democrats, his guilt was not in question; the only hard part was determining how that guilt was manifest. First, he must have been a perjurer – until Washington Post fact-checkers repeatedly exploded those claims. Senate Democrats tried claiming he is going to criminalize birth control – but that, too, was a bald-faced lie. They also wrongly accused him of complicity with the Bush administration’s very rare use of somewhat torturous interrogation procedures.

So when Christine Blasey Ford publicly lobbed her bombshell accusation Kavanaugh’s way, the Left just substituted it for all their other claims of his guilt.

For their purposes, any guilt would do.

Please understand, we live in an era in which the New York Times, not as satire but intending to be serious, actually publishes tommyrot like this:

“Your race granted you privileges that were and are denied to people who are not white. This is true for all white people in America, no matter how racially diverse their childhood neighborhoods were or were not, no matter how much money their families had or didn’t have, no matter how difficult or easy their lives have been. Every white person should be ashamed of that injustice.”

The way to fight such privilege, apparently, is to “to dismantle a toxic system that has perpetuated white supremacy for centuries.”

And if you are a woman who, using your own critical faculties, decided the allegations against Kavanaugh just weren’t credible, you are a “gender traitor” who has “made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job.”

Again, though, this effort to “dismantle a toxic system” is not just about Kavanaugh, not just about judges, and not just about white patriarchy. The Left sees these as fronts in a wider, civilizational struggle. The struggle is against the Constitution. It’s also against what once were accepted as “middle American” values – the assumptions that child-rearing is best done within marriages; that norms of public behavior should be observed; that people are not entitled to things they haven’t earned through hard and patient work; that individual liberty and responsibility go hand in hand; that competition and the free market lead to prosperity; and that cultural norms and common sense, not bureaucracies and courts, should be the primary enforcers of civic (and civil) cohesion.

The Left’s struggle also, quite virulently, is against churches and other “intermediary” cultural institutions that dare do charitable work – “disruptive philanthropy,” they ludicrously call it – that interferes with the supposedly supra-wise altruism of the government. (Hence, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or the Boy Scouts, are to be undermined rather than celebrated.)

In all, the Left aims to create its own, regimented, centrally controlled utopia, in which dissent from leftist orthodoxy is either illegal or shouted down; in which human nature, especially its spiritual and sexual aspects, is remade; and in which all material inequities are leveled no matter what the cost to individual liberty.

The entire Democratic leadership of both House and Senate is in thrall to this leftist enterprise, and every Democrat in Congress, by the very act of caucusing with those leaders, enables those ill-motivated leaders.

Now it’s true that Trumpist, rage-infused responses to the Left’s agenda are counterproductive. In any race to the cultural bottom, the Left ultimately will win, because its whole goal is to undermine “bourgeois” norms. But this election is not about Trump, who is one of a kind. It’s an election about saving the cultural norms the Left tried to shred in its persecution of Brett Kavanaugh and in its relentless pursuit of the agenda described above.

The way to defeat the Left is not Trump-like, by adopting its means, but by using the good old ballot box. Defending American culture isn’t an expression of patriarchy, but of patriotism, rightly pursued.

Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of “The Accidental Prophet” trilogy of recently published satirical, literary novels.