Andrew Breitbart famously asserted that politics is downstream from culture, implying that cultural values and norms prefigure and shape political outcomes. The conventional interpretation seems true on its face, that by the time a political issue comes to the fore, it has already been shaped and conditioned by the cultural milieu.

This perspective resonates widely, particularly among conservatives, framing politics as a passive arena, shaped by the stronger currents of cultural change. However, this viewpoint, while compelling, merits a closer examination to explore the possibility that the relationship between politics and culture may be more reciprocal than it appears.

This conventional framing of Breitbart's claim implies a sequence where cultural values and norms evolve independently of political influence, subsequently molding political outcomes. //

As political mastery involves both the subtle nuances of personal skill and the broader application of power within institutions, it becomes a critical component in the bidirectional influence between politics and culture. This understanding reveals that mastery of political processes is essential for maintaining and expanding influence within any arena, political or otherwise. //

Whether dealing with ideological shifts, mundane administrative adjustments, or crafting overarching policies, the fundamental processes are consistent. This universality underscores that the strategies used to sway opinion, garner support, or suppress dissent in politics are akin to those used across all those where process itself applies.

Moreover, understanding "Culture" as a type of influence rather than a static set of values or norms reveals its dynamic nature. Culture is not just a backdrop against which politics happens; it is a malleable field that can be shaped and reshaped through deliberate actions. Recognizing culture as a learnable, manipulable, and masterable process allows for a more proactive approach to cultural engagement and political success, challenging the traditional perception of culture as merely a byproduct of societal evolution.

The notion that everything from casting a ballot to crafting a policy involves manipulable processes highlights the need for a deep understanding of these mechanisms. //

Andrew Breitbart famously posited that politics is downstream from culture, suggesting that cultural forces shape the political landscape. However, the evidence we've examined presents a compelling case for a more nuanced relationship, where political processes actively sculpt and redefine cultural realms. This dynamic interplay reveals that political actors, through deliberate strategies and mastery of processes, have not only influenced but reshaped cultural institutions to align with specific ideological goals.

The 'Long March Through the Institutions' and tactics like those outlined in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals exemplify how deeply political mechanics can penetrate into areas once deemed apolitical, such as education, media, and even personal social networks. These strategic infiltrations demonstrate the capacity of political forces to engineer cultural environments that perpetuate their ideologies, challenging the notion that culture merely influences politics and underscoring that politics can, indeed, flow upstream.

This realization invites readers to reconsider the traditional views of cultural influence and encourages a deeper exploration into how political processes are intricately woven into the fabric of societal norms and values. The implications of this analysis are vast, suggesting that understanding and mastering these political processes is not merely an academic exercise but a necessary endeavor for anyone looking to build victory.

Sinistra Delenda Est! //

emptypockets
8 hours ago
"Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society."
-- Antonio Gramsci
(1891-1937) Italian Marxist theoretician and politician, “class warrior”
Source: 1915 //

Cafeblue32
18 hours ago edited
No, Breitbart was not wrong. The proof is in the people we elect from the culture. It's why everything Trump did was undone overnight once he left- you can change the leaders 50 times, but unless you change the culture that produces them and votes for them, nothing changes for long. Politics doesn't create culture, it capitalizes on it. Politics didn't create the divisions we have. It merely exploited them and grew them as a means to political power. The academics and elites who benefit from a divided culture are the ones who drive the culture, not politics that arise from it. Cultural problems are always made and fixed from the bottom up, never the top down. The government we get is a symptom of it.

American politics did not create the war in Ukraine nor the Gaza conflict. Both predate America by many centuries. But it does feed it and capitalize from it. When there is power and money to be found in division and conflict, there is every incentive to make sure it continues. //

emptypockets
19 hours ago edited
As one Leftist pundit phrased it, the Left, the "Democrats have mastered Process"...which is where you ended up. I hadn't looked at it that way till she said it but she...and you are right. They are collectivists, doing everything in groups attracted by "activists"/"community organizers"....or in plainspeak, rabble rousers. They pontificate how if you are with them in lockstep you, too are "on the right side of history". Those not there will find increasing discomfort at their hands...even unto lengthy prison sentences. Or worse. The history they believe they're directing tells us they always go too far. If we don't stop ours now, we'll be worse than Venezuela before another 4 years have passed.

The "cure" for the politicization of all that was never supposed to BE political but has been captured by the Left's processes is to shrink gov't, pull it out of areas completely. But that would gore herds of oxen, each with several elected and appointed "defenders". It will have to get worse yet before we can effect changes to make it better. //

Indylawyer
19 hours ago
I agree it works both ways. However, as conservatives we need to recognize that government provides a very clumsy tool for any building project. We are not going to be able to use government to rebuild a free society, but we do need to start attacking the government projects that are actively undermining the free society we inherited from our ancestors. Some of the most poisonous government projects at work are (1) "anti-discrimination" laws - these effectively force every institution to over-consider race in order to avoid being accused of "discrimination" or "bigotry". (2) Government schools - regardless of the curriculum, the existence of this institution establishes the principle that government is a provider of important services. It also does a lousy job of educating, and necessarily establishes some sort of religious views. (3) our byzantine system of welfare programs and tax credits which reward bad choices in the name of determining "need." Biggest impact of this is to discourage marriage, but it also punishes work and savings.

Swift is pop’s sullen Peter Pan, forever refusing to grow up. Regrettably, she is bringing a massive audience along for the ride. Artistically, “The Tortured Poets Department” is not bereft of value. Its fatal flaw is in offering no hope for the brokenhearted. And there is, indeed, hope. //

Real GOP 690
44 minutes ago
Self pity. Life's singularly most destructive emotion. And the belief that everything is always someone else's fault. Sadly, these are the predominant emotions of our current American culture, and they are not limited to the arena of teenage girls, or even Democrats.

“We just had a midair,” the pilot of the Hawker is heard saying in an audio recording posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air traffic control radio transmissions.

Someone in the control tower responds by saying, “Say what?”

“You guys cleared somebody to take off or land, and we hit them on a departure,” the Hawker pilot says.

The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.” According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a “result of human error.” The Times report further revealed that “runway incursions” of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies. //

While the disturbing decline in aviation safety is complex and multifaceted, we identified two major contributing factors that have received scant media attention. The first such factor is the likely contribution of disastrous COVID-era policies to the staffing shortage of many air traffic control rooms. The second factor is that aggressive affirmative action policies implemented during the Obama administration have resulted in a catastrophic collapse in the quality of controllers. In short, COVID policies have gutted the quantity of air traffic controllers, and diversity policies have gutted the quality of air traffic controllers, creating unprecedented danger for the aviation industry. //

The implications of these findings reach far beyond the scope of aviation, as important as this industry is. Rather, the collapse of the aviation industry must be understood in the context of a broader collapse in our ability to maintain the infrastructure of a First World society. This is a major and significant trend that we highlighted years ago in our coverage of the repeated failures of Texas’ electric power grid.

J.K. Rowling is arguably the most successful author in the history of publishing, with the possible exception of God. And Harry Potter was a kind of bible for my generation. Since its publication beginning in the late ’90s, the series has taught tens of millions of children about virtues like loyalty, courage, and love—about the inclusion of outsiders and the celebration of difference. The books illustrated the idea of moral complexity, how a person who may at first appear sinister can turn out to be a hero after all. //

When she gave the Harvard commencement address in 2008, she was introduced as a social, moral, and political inspiration. Her speech that day was partly about imagination: “the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.”

“We do not need magic to transform our world,” Rowling told the rapt audience. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”

The uproarious applause that greeted her in 2008 is hard to imagine today. It’s hard to imagine Harvard—let alone any prestigious American university—welcoming Rowling. Indeed, I’m not sure she’d be allowed to give a reading at many local libraries. //

It all blew up in the summer of 2020.

“‘People who menstruate,’” Rowling wrote on Twitter, quoting a headline. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

She continued: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

It’s hard to capture the breadth of the firestorm that followed. //

I was born into the Westboro Baptist Church, a tiny congregation founded by my grandfather that was a world unto itself. From the age of five, I protested with my parents, siblings, and extended family on sidewalks across America—including outside the funerals of AIDS victims and American soldiers. //

But when I took the church’s message to Twitter in my mid-twenties, I encountered strangers who—through kindness, friendly mockery, and civil conversation—helped me see that it was me who needed to change.

Ten years ago, at age 26, I left the church and lost all of my family who stayed behind. Those strangers from Twitter became some of my dearest friends—among them, the man I would eventually marry, the father of my two children.

Like Rowling, I knew what it was like to be an object of intense hatred. But I also knew the value of good-faith conversation, and the role it can play in bridging even the deepest divides. //

But the story of J.K. Rowling is not just the story of one author, or one woman, or one issue. It is a microcosm of our time. It’s about the polarization of public opinion and the fracturing of public conversation. It’s about the chasm between what people say they believe and how they’re understood by others. It’s about what it means to be human—to be a social animal who feels compelled to be part of a tribe. And it’s about the struggle to discern what is right when our individual view of the world is necessarily limited and imperfect.

Libertarians aren't anarchists, we're minarchists. It's the general libertarian belief that there should be hard and fast rules for society, but not a lot of them. The vast majority of the rules that are created should be applied to the government which can easily spiral out of control the more room it's given. The government is like a child, and it has to be watched, monitored, and given strict boundaries, or else it will [wreak] destruction upon you, your home, and itself. //

I'm a big fan of basic rules. God gave us 10 that are conducive to a happy, healthy life and our American system is broadly based on these rules. A few more could be added here and there, but if I'm being honest, at the end of the day it's not the laws that matter.

It's the people's willingness to follow them.

In order for society to function we have to agree to have a functioning society. This means following, not just the laws, but the unwritten rules that usually come with tradition and societal expectations. If even a fraction of the population suddenly disagrees with these rules, society starts to collapse. //

America — and the Western world in general — seems to have gotten to a point where it's perfectly fine with shrugging off propriety and common decency. It puts endless laws on the books, empowers its own government, and is even now willing to ban entire platforms off the internet, but it has very little concern about enforcing many of the basic rules already on the books, especially if the person not following them is of a certain identity.

People in America aren't following basic rules anymore because they aren't being enforced. Even when someone defends people against someone willing to violate these rules, the defender gets in trouble. //

We're encouraged to be passive while aggressors roam around us.

Then we wonder why everything is so trashy and our society is degrading.

We've shrugged off the rules in order to avoid being labeled as one thing or another, but as we pat ourselves on the back for being "tolerant" and "inclusive," we crumble.

what the former high school grappler said in interviews afterward was equally impressive.

"I haven't really been turning down interviews because I do want to get this out there for the young men. There's a lot of talk nowadays of toxic masculinity, and I'm really trying to, you know, push this narrative that you should stand up for the people, innocent people, people in your local neighborhood. And, you know, that's kind of what I take from it," he said. //

anon-76r6
2 hours ago
"All glory to God". Awesome

I am in New York again, and I am sending you this postcard from a city I love and have loved; from a broken city. Broken; yet struggling to reimagine itself, as it has so many times before.

Are we better? Are we lost? Are we changed, changed utterly? //

We are post-Tower of Babel now.

The culture of New York is now completely fragmented, and this happened through language.

It used to be that while there were a million different languages and accents here, everyone was trying to communicate as best he or she could — all the time. New Yorkers were famous for this! Any given day was thrilling, because random strangers, from whatever part of the world, would say something silly or funny or wise to you in passing, and everyone would manage to get the gist of each other, whatever anyone’s level of English. We were all present in the joy of being Americans — New Yorkers!— together.

That commonality is simply gone. Culturally, this city could now be anywhere in the world — any globalist, polyglot city. The culture that was New York has been smashed right through. //

The fact that somehow, all at once, English has collapsed as even the remotest goal of New York City common speech, and that speaking English seems not to be important at all to many of the newest immigrants, means that there is a loneliness and sadness and boredom and homesickness, involved with getting around New York City and its boroughs — journeys that used to be thrilling because you met people from everywhere, through their English.

Somehow it has suddenly become acceptable completely to ignore people in ordinary human interactions, and not even to try to communicate with them in even very basic English. //

Even recent immigrants with very little English in New York used gladly to say “Good morning!” or “Have a nice day!” — whatever chit-chat their language levels allowed — as recently as just a few months ago. We were all participating in a common linguistic community, at whatever level anyone happened to be.

Now that effort of participation seems to have simply been dropped in many quarters. I don’t know how or why cultures suddenly shift in these ways or why the prestige of English suddenly collapsed; but the fact that many people in the City now have given up trying to communicate in English, and tend to ignore those who do not speak their languages, creates an anomie, a fractured civitas; atomization. And it weakens us as a city. We cannot speak to one another in a crisis, let alone create culture, dance, or music together, or even spark romance or build families together; we can no longer have those moments of humor or goofiness or the deep many-cultured into one-cultured exchanges, that I miss so much.

Christians are often labeled "intolerant" for their refusal to embrace destructive behaviors. I would argue that America could use more Christian intolerance and a lot less Western "acceptance." The reason we should is pretty easy to see at this point. //

It's time to start normalizing intolerance. Obviously with nuance and discernment, but intolerance should make a comeback nonetheless. //

frylock234 RSVP
16 hours ago
I've always said that tolerance is that I have to let you go your own way, even if I don't approve of it, but nowhere does tolerance mean that I have to support you in your ways or embrace them if I disagree. I only have to accept you have the right to go your own way, and you have to reciprocate or else there is no tolerance. //

My pastor during my growing up years once stated it this way:
"We dare not condone that which God seeks to redeem. It confuses the sinner." //

anon-608f
16 hours ago
Hear hear! Tolerance, discrimination, prejudice, these are words which have been weaponized.

The story of the Comanches and the Red River War, whose 150th anniversary we mark this year, shows the absurdity of the ‘noble savage’ narrative. //

The Comanche were just as much imperialists as the Europeans ever were. Though Europeans could certainly be violently cruel, their culture at least censured violence against civilians — indeed, when stories of federal troops massacring defenseless Indians traveled east, the American people were horrified. The same cannot be said of the Comanche, whose brutality was an indelible component of their cultural identity.

It’s true as much today as it was 150 years ago that the West can learn from indigenous peoples such as the Comanche, who were not only tremendous horsemen and students of the natural world, but incredibly resourceful in finding a use for practically every part of the buffalo, which, with the horse, served as the cornerstone of their society. But that doesn’t mean we should embrace a simplistic, starry-eyed conception of native peoples, or a benighted, self-hating understanding of our own civilization.

Disney has abandoned heroism. In fact, instead of just ignoring heroes, Disney has taken the extra step of eviscerating established ones. Since 1981, Indiana Jones, like Superman and John Wayne, has been a symbol of America and the American man. He is smart, tough, and a fighter who does the right thing. Disney’s “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” turned him into an old, feeble man who cowers in the corner while his goddaughter saves the day. Not even “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” did that.

Luke Skywalker was the most optimistic character in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, a warrior who defeated the emperor, saved the galaxy, and rescued his father’s soul from the Dark Side. Disney Luke is a paranoid, cynical, broken old man who has to be coaxed back into the good fight by a Mary Sue and then dies, not in a blaze of glory but by concentrating too hard. There are other examples: fat Thor, an emasculated Nick Fury, and the growing host of “diverse women of color” who have taken the place of the traditional hero and, more often than not, have to fight — surprise, surprise — a straight, white man. If you are an example of the SWM, Disney wants you to know that you are either a villain or a comically castrated clown.

Part of the reason for this new campaign against heroes is that Disney is now thoroughly behind what YouTube’s Critical Drinker has simply dubbed “The Message,” the current web of racialism, rainbow mafia, DEI, and general hatred of Western civilization. //

It may come as a shock to Disney executives that people resent it when they are blamed for not seeing a movie that doesn’t deserve to be seen. This then creates a doomsday loop: The more failures Disney has, the more it will blame what’s left of its audience, whittling down that audience even more.

Disney is not just chopping away its audience but also its brand. And that is the foundational issue in all of this. Since 1937, Disney has been a name not just loved but trusted. //

But now, the sleeping giant of the American public is awake, and it knows those days are gone. And once that trust is gone, it may prove impossible to win back. That should be the nightmare keeping Disney’s leadership up at night.

No film from Angel Studios makes it to the big screen without the approval of the Angel Guild.

Over 21 films a week are submitted to the Angel Guild, “and then the guild goes through those and they’re picking their favorites and they’re greenlighting them and then Angel Studios can only pick from the list that they greenlight,” explains Jeff Harmon, chief content officer for Angel Studios. //

Neal Harmon: Once we started thinking about the media and storytelling, from perspective of our own children, we said, “We’re not happy with where the world’s headed and how are we going to solve this problem or has someone solved this problem?” When we realized no one had and that there were other parents that were interested in solving this problem, we decided to do something about it. //

Neal Harmon: The core premise of Hollywood is two things, from our perspective.

One is that if you collect a group of people and have them work together in storytelling, that you’ll create a vibrant community that can tell stories better than anyone else in the world. We think that Hollywood actually is performing well on that premise, like that they tell a story better than anyone else in the world.

The second thing is that Hollywood has consolidated the decisions of what stories to tell into very few hands.

Jeff Harmon: Gatekeeper model.

Neal Harmon: Gatekeeper model, yeah. And that’s what’s different, is Angel’s fine with the craft of Hollywood and the capability, but then the gatekeeper and the decision-making we feel like has lost its way, it’s trapped in a bubble. And we’ve flipped the power structure so that the Angel community, the Angel Guild makes the decisions, rather than a few elite decision-makers.

Jeff Harmon: We don’t make the decisions. We can’t pick a film unless it goes through the Angel Guild first and the Angel Guild is over 100,000 people—

Neal Harmon: And growing. //

You can join it by investing or you can join it by subscribing, so anybody who goes to angel.com/guild can join the guild.

They get a vote on the content that goes to theaters. They get two free movie tickets to every single movie that comes out. //

Neal Harmon: And why are we doing it this way instead of the way Netflix does it? We have learned that the community aspect of watching films creates an experience that shapes culture. It becomes part of the culture.

There’s lots of things that have come to Netflix that nobody hears about. They hear about it if they’re on Netflix, but they don’t become part of the cultural conversation the way that “Sound of Freedom” did. “Sound of Freedom” is arguably the most talked about story in this decade. And that’s what the Angel Guild wants. That’s what we all want, is we want to shape cultures.

Ali has come to the realization there can be no liberalism apart from the Christian faith from which it emerged. She’s right. //

Over the weekend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali revealed in an essay at Unherd that she has become a Christian. For Christians, this is welcome and joyous news. But it’s also instructive. A former Muslim who very publicly rejected Islam and became an avowed atheist in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Ali has been speaking and writing in defense of Western civilization and liberal values for decades.

Now she has come to the conclusion that there is no way to maintain Western civilization and no way to preserve its liberal values apart from Christianity. Just as she came to discover the fundamentalist Islam of her youth was a dead end, she has also discovered the atheism she adopted in response to it is also a dead end. //

She’s also right about that but wrong to think Christianity is primarily about countering those forces or preserving a particular civilizational or political project. As great as Western civilization is, it arose as a byproduct of the Christian faith, the sole object of which is communion with Almighty God by means of salvation through Jesus Christ. Things like freedom of speech, rule of law, and human rights are fruits of the Christian faith, but they are not what Christianity is about. '//

There was a lot of discussion after 9/11 about how Islam needed its own Reformation to tame and secularize it, as Christianity had supposedly been tamed and pacified by the Protestant Reformation (never mind the century of continental war that it triggered). What the atheists promised Ali and other disillusioned Muslims was rationalism, freedom of inquiry and expression, and scientific objectivity — all of which would flourish in Muslim societies just as it had in the West, if only Muslims would set aside their backward religion and embrace the secular humanism of Western elites.

According to this theory, Christianity itself had served its purpose in the West, bestowed all its gifts, and could safely be discarded. We could live forever, drawing on its capital, which we assumed would never run out. The Islamic world needed to do likewise, and all would be well.

But something very different happened instead. It turns out, the capital was gradually spent and never replenished. Liberalism always depended for its vitality on something it cannot itself supply: the Christian faith, active and alive among the people. As the French philosopher Rémi Brague wrote back in the 1990s, “Faith produces its effects only so long as it remains faith and not calculation. We owe European civilization to people who believed in Christ, not to people who believed in Christianity.”

Ali’s conversion, which is laudable on its own (even if she doesn’t quite yet grasp the true object of her new faith), is a stark reminder that the liberal, secular West cannot survive without the Christian faith from which it emerged. Indeed, the secular elites who once promised apostate Muslims like Ali that they could have all the benefits of Christianity without Christianity itself are now abandoning the principles they once espoused.

In recent weeks, we have seen this abandonment most potently in the Red-Green alliance between the global left and the pro-Hamas crowd, who have been marching through the streets of Western cities in a show of force reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. The naked antisemitism of the Hamas people, together with the deafening silence of the elites of the global left, tells you everything you need to know about the durability of secular humanism.

There is no room anymore for freedom of speech, open inquiry, or rational debate among the people and institutions that once espoused these ideals. There is only the brute force of the mob. It’s easy to see this at work throughout Western society, not just on the Israel-Hamas issue.

The emerging Red-Green alliance is poised to plunge the country into a spat of civic violence comparable to the summer of 2020, or worse.

How can coddled, “sensitive” minds so callously defend unthinkable cruelty and torture? How does a generation supposedly committed to tolerance and racial equality support mass genocide?

The answer is actually simple. While Gen Z-ers may have been coddled, they have also been trained to believe that the end justifies the means. This is the consequentialist approach to social action famously proclaimed by Malcolm X in 1965: “We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary” //

“By any means necessary” thinking is blind to justice. It’s all about the end game — achieving the final goal, whatever it takes, no matter how much pain and misery is required.

And this, let us take note, is essentially the rationale for terrorism. //

If significant numbers of students at major U.S. colleges and universities are part of this movement, we have reason to fear for our future. And if, as Lincoln would say, we are not somehow touched by the better angels of our nature, this is not going to end well.

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