Daniel Crandall continues his important discussion about the primacy of culture in the direction of American society.
I argued previously that limited government would not come about through political activism alone. Political activism is necessity to defend liberty but it is not sufficient.
I shudder to think of the bureaucratic burden we would be living under today if activists, pundits and think tanks were not making conservative and libertarian arguments in the Public Square. The Right, however, shows a tremendous blind spot when it makes political activism its sole method toward building a culture of liberty and personal responsibility.
Politics follows culture. The culture does not follow politics. The Left realized this years ago when it effectively took over New York and Hollywood. Before the Left made a full frontal political assault on America’s founding ideas it ate away at those ideas through its cultural institutions.
In Red Star over Hollywood, Ronald and Allis Radosh explore the Left’s relationship with the film industry’s cultural influence professions beginning with Willi Münzenberg in the 30s to Sean Penn today. Lloyd Billingsley explored the Left’s impact on unions in Hollywood, which inspired Ronald Reagan’s lifelong fight against Communism, in Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.
As Director of Campus Programs for The Culture Alliance, I have had plenty of conversations with individuals about how a man with ties to radical leftists and who could be described as a radical leftist was elected to the White House. President Obama did not arrive on the political scene ex nihilo.
Leftists working for decades in the arts, entertainment, education and journalism made possible the President’s rapid rise from Illinois State Senate to the U.S. Senate to the White House. The Cultural Influence Professions not only cleared a path for him in the public’s mind, according to one member of the journalist class, it is now their job to make sure the most Left-wing President in America’s history succeeds.
Mark Steyn, a man as comfortable on Broadway as he is at the Heritage Foundation, noted after the 2008 elections:
Unlike those excitable countries where the peasants overrun the presidential palace, settled democratic societies rarely vote to "go left." Yet oddly enough that’s where they’ve all gone. In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.
As long as the Right focuses all its energy on politics and either ignores the Cultural Influence Professions or simply throws stones at them, America will continue “getting lefter.”
Until relatively recently the Left was considered counterculture. Now the Left is the culture and the Right is counterculture. To be truly countercultural, however, one might actually consider working in the cultural institutions.
In a private conversation recently, a woman was bemoaning higher education’s current condition. She went on and on about how her mother went to college in the 50s, got a good education at a reasonable cost. Today the cost of secondary education far outpaces the rate of inflation and one is more likely to find Left-wing indoctrination rather than education in the classroom.
The woman’s reaction against today’s education system was like most people on the Right. Rather than explore how to get more individuals imbued with classical liberal ideas into academic institutions, she would rather berate the universities and withdraw from public education.
The Left, however, looked at schools, like the one this woman’s mother attended, and saw a mission field not something from which they should withdraw. The more radical among the Left, as they are wont to do, held sit-ins and loud protests, while others took the Associate Professor job or the low-level administrator position. Then they got their friends jobs and so on and so on, until that professor promoting “oppressive Western Civilization” and “dead, white European males” found himself a minority among his academic peers.
That same general storyline played out in journalism, in publishing, in theater, in film and television. The Left didn’t throw up their hands when they saw America-loving immigrants running film studios during Hollywood’s Golden Age. They hunkered down, learned the craft and eventually took the studios away from those “Right-wing extremists.”
Fostering liberty and personal responsibility in the Cultural Influence Professions is work that requires long-term thinking and vision. It is generational work. It also requires a very thick skin because Leftists, entrenched in these institutions, will throw obstacles up every step along the way.
The Right must take on this task or, as I noted in previously they will continue to fight rear guard actions in politics.
Tea Party protestors and health care town hall-ers are deluding themselves if they think that electing a Republican Congress in 2010 and a Republican President in 2012 will affect, in any way, what is taught, how news is reported, or what New York and Hollywood put on film or television. As long as those professions remain dominated by the Left liberty, personal responsibility and other classical virtues will continue sliding into historical obscurity.
If the Right ignores the fact that they are the counterculture, if they continue with the same political fights, then they should not be surprised when the nation they love goes the way of Europe.
Irish orator John Philpot Curran said, in 1790, “It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” The Right cannot expect liberty and personal responsibility to thrive, let alone survive, in America when the vigilance they exercise in political matters wanes when engaging the Cultural Influence Professions.
Political activism has its place, but perhaps, after decades of fighting rear guard action after rear guard action, it might be time to try something different. Support organizations, like The Culture Alliance, that support young people inspired by classical liberal ideas to write the stories, produce the films, develop television, create the theater, and become the next generation of teachers and journalists.
Promoting a culture of liberty does come about through a “culture war.” A culture of liberty is created and fostered by practicing eternal vigilance and supporting those called to careers in the arts, entertainment, education and journalism. Only then can we ensure that our progeny will enjoy the blessings embodied in the greatest nation on God’s green earth.
—Daniel Crandall