Winning the Culture War: Why the Left Moves to Hollywood and Conservatives Move To DC

Winning the culture war is crucial to winning the political war of ideas. Mark Tapson offers some thoughts on winning the culture back.

Mark Tapson – As my friend the late, great Andrew Breitbart was fond of pointing out, politics flows downstream from culture, and the results of the last election confirm that. Conservatives lost last November in the political arena because for decades the radical left laid the groundwork for it in the cultural arena. Politics is obviously a critical battleground, but unless and until we start thinking in terms of waging a vigorous cultural campaign, we will never win another presidential election. Following is a rough beginning of some thoughts toward that end.

There is no way the radical and insubstantial Barack Obama would ever have been taken seriously as a presidential candidate, much less be elected to two terms in the White House, if the left had not successfully infiltrated the key cultural realms – education, news media, and entertainment – and spent decades indoctrinating generations to reject traditional American values, feel shame rather than pride in our country’s history, and embrace their own enslavement to a big government, post-American, cancerous ideology rebranded as progressivism. That indoctrination runs so deep in too many American hearts and minds that not even the reality of four disastrous years under Obama was enough to shock them out of their irrational addiction to his hope-and-change snake oil. Deprogramming that indoctrination and seducing subsequent generations to a renewed vision of American exceptionalism means retaking the culture or creating a parallel one.

In the wake of the presidential election loss, conservatives have agonized endlessly about our “message.” We need to get our message across better, we say; we need to change our message, we need a more effective, compelling messenger. Well, the best way to get our message across now is through stories rather than political lectures, through values rather than political talking points. Nobody likes to be preached to, not even the left, which is why leftist message flicks like Matt Damon’s “Bush lied” anti-war movie The Green Zone and anti-capitalism Brad Pitt flick Killing Them Softly bombed in theaters. But people are seduced and changed by great stories, whether the teller is a screenwriter or a politician.

I can’t say I totally agree with this article. Wallowing with pigs just makes you a pig. But he does raise some good points.

Read more here.


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