It’s very common in conservative or libertarian circles to hear the phrase “politics is downstream from culture”. The idea is that culture is what drives major changes to our politics. This implies that if one wishes to change government one must first change the culture.
This view has a lot of appeal to conservatives. It suggests that the ultimate source of government dysfunction is our increasing cultural degeneracy. In my opinion they’ve got it completely backwards. That ultimately it’s politics that drives our culture not the other way around. Let me elaborate.
For thousands of years governments have been waging psychological warfare on their subjects. This is a necessary feature of any government since the class that constitutes the government is always a minority in the population. At any time majority has the numbers to rise up and overthrow the government should they become motivated to do so. Thus the primary job of any government is to psychologically manipulate the public and convince them that, at minimum, the existing government is better than all other conceivable alternatives.
In our present democratic age most people don’t need much convincing since they erroneously believe that the government is just the expression of “we the people”. However, democracy makes it such that in order to obtain power or get laws passed that benefit you, the public still needs to be psychologically manipulated. It doesn’t matter how unscrupulous you are in obtaining that power. You can outright lie, distort the facts, abuse political power, etc. The system rewards you for obtaining power regardless of how you acquired it.
Consider one of the defining aspects of our present culture ― that diversity takes precedence over meritocracy. This isn’t just some random cultural phenomenon that popped up one day out of nowhere. Instead it’s an outgrowth of the half-century long project of the left to lock down the black vote. I don’t think one could have predicted how specifically this would manifest. That there would be thousands of academics competing with each other to make the most outlandish claims of “systemic racism”. Or that museum curators would take down a Rembrandt painting because it only contains white people. But this is all an outgrowth an attempt by the left to capture power regardless of whether people participating in it today realize that or not.
I live in a university town. There’s actually a road in town called Faculty Rd where, you guessed it, the faulty of the university live. When you drive down this road every single house has a pride flag out front. Again, conservatives might think this is just a weird cultural phenomenon that just popped up one day and caught on, but it too is a byproduct of the drive to manipulate the public into thinking that our current system is systematically discriminating against LGBT people so that people will continually be motivated to vote.
If it were not for politics, if there were no power to be had by manipulating people, I suspect neither of these cultural phenomenon would exist.
I think part of the appeal to conservatives of this belief is that it suggests that there’s really nothing wrong with our institutions. That there’s nothing wrong with Federal government, the U.S. Constitution, or even democracy itself. If we could just get our culture right then these institutions would work just fine.
But that’s wrong. As long as there is power to be earned by psychologically manipulating people, which there will always be so long as the Federal government, U.S. Constitution, or democracy exist, the culture will always tend toward degeneracy. You can’t fix the culture without fixing our institutions and removing the incentives manipulate people in pursuit of power.
Power itself is the problem. Our degenerate culture is just the symptom.
Escape Velocity 