Not too long after conservatives picked up their swords and shields to honorably defend the proper gender classification of Mr. Potato Head on Twitter, something extraordinary happened. A new foe approached: “Satan Shoes.” “Old Town Road” rapper Lil Nas X just released satanic shoes with “Luke 10:18” (I saw Satan fall like lightning from Heaven) embroidered on the side, a bronze pentagram dangling above the laces, and actual human blood placed inside the shoe’s sole. A move that justifiably sent right-wing Twitter ablaze. “What’s next?” You might ask. “Giving Satan a lap dance in a gaudy music video?” Well, yeah, that too.
All kidding aside, I bet you’re wondering: “how did we get here?”
Over the past century, as civil society began its slow and pernicious decline in America, we sought purpose and belonging outside of our local communities. Naturally, the government responded to the will of the American people by expanding in size and scope to reach into the life of every atomized individual to give each person the purpose and belonging that they were all starving for. The result? Well, it didn’t work.
It introduced a new problem: hyper-partisanship. Because the government became so involved and intertwined in every aspect of our lives, a change in policy could easily change our lives. Unsurprisingly, politics became hyper-partisan. We became so invested in politics that the two parties essentially bifurcated into two tribes, with each tribe promising the communal purpose and belonging that we were still lacking — a poor and crippled substitute for the civil society that we left behind. And we, upon seeing the substitute, mangled our limbs and performed a self-lobotomy. Now, we are just monkeys screaming and throwing feces at each other. Kevin D. Williamson, for instance, experienced this first hand after Twitter’s left-wing feces-flinging monkeys, as referenced in his book, cost him his job at The Atlantic once they finally found out that he was, wait for it, a conservative two weeks into the job. For those who think the monkey comparison is a little too ridiculous, please explain this to me. Anyway, absolutely no one is winning the culture war on social media, which provided the battlefield for the fetid mess. It doesn’t matter how many likes or retweets we get after dunking on a pink-haired furry Bernie Bro because the stench repulses all outside observers anyway–no one new is being brought into our coalition. These social media sites metastasize partisanship and tribalism by designing algorithms to cater to your political views so that you only see like-minded people and content that you already agree with, effectively creating a partisan bubble. This radicalizes people into thinking that the other side is crazy, evil, or stupid without ever listening to them.
We need to take a break from social media. We’re wasting our time. Since almost half of all Republicans and half of all Democrats have a “very unfavorable” view of the opposing party, will firing off that snarky tweet in a five-second fit of fury actually convince the other tribe that your tribe is right? As much as I relish memes and clever insults, we have to recognize the unwinnable reality.
How can we win a culture war in an era of tribal politics that we’ve never seen before in recent history? We can’t take back left-leaning institutions when there will always be pressure and bullying from the left-wing social media mob to force institutions into complying with their radical ideas, especially by firing anyone accused of being to the right of Karl Marx. The right just doesn’t have the same dominance over the national culture that the left does, so the political makeup of our national institutions will remain static. Our dominant institutions will continue to enforce strict ideological conformity, and it will continue to drive conservatives crazy. Don’t listen to anyone telling you that the culture war can be won. It’s not even within our reach.
So, what is within our reach? Well, Republicans do win elections, even though, as Andrew Breitbart once said, “[p]olitics is downstream from culture.” This quote, as an aside, is a simulacrum of Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony: the ruling bourgeoisie class maintains political power by controlling the cultural institutions and using them to impose ideological conformity on the proletariat class. Clearly, progressives have been imposing their ideology on Americans ever since they captured Hollywood, the universities, the mainstream news outlets, and corporations. But, this is not news to conservatives. We’ve known this for decades. The problem is that we have been turning to politics to solve all our cultural problems.
By the way, turning to politics to fix our culture is an alternative that I completely sympathize with, especially when it seems like we are losing everywhere we look. But have our political wins given us any cultural wins? A question many conservatives were pondering during the rise of Donald Trump, a culture warrior at heart. A man who campaigned on bringing back “Merry Christmas,” on getting rid of political correctness, on the Ghostbusters movie cast being all women, and such. Emotional issues like these were easily more appealing and entertaining than Cruz or Rubio droning on about marginal tax rates and deficits. Now, it is moot whether Trump’s focus on cultural issues was a primary reason why Republicans won the presidency and maintained control over the house and senate in 2016, but did these promising political victories, which occurred over four years ago, change the national culture at all? If you think “yes,” then I got two words for you: Satan… Shoes.
Accordingly, the left’s stranglehold over our national institutions and conservatives failing to win cultural fights at the political level leaves conservatives with no other recourse than to go back to what we left behind: civil society. The family, church, schools, neighborhoods, local associations, leagues, charities, and more are the mediating institutions between the individual and the state responsible for our moral formation. As Yuval Levin points out in A Time to Build, mediating institutions are supposed to mold us and “shape and structure our desires rather than serve them. Form our habits rather than reflect them. Direct our longings rather than satisfy them.” They don’t just form us; mediating institutions are what properly satiate our desires for communal purpose and belonging. Communal purpose and belonging are not found with Republican or Democrat Facebook friends who live thousands of miles away, not in Reddit blogs, nor in the comment section of your favorite talk show videos, but in that which is closest to you and that which you care about the most.
I sincerely believe that mediating institutions are a litmus test for the health and strength of a society and country because, as Alexis de Tocqueville argued, they are prophylactic to soft tyranny in a democracy. In our democracy, real and lasting change does not happen suddenly through national elections but gradually through people’s commitment to the most immediate and concrete levels of society that affect them the most. To take a few examples, a decades-long groundswell of desire for equality among women in the suffrage movement and African Americans in the civil rights movement led to the passage of their right to vote, which would not have been possible without their active participation in mediating institutions.
Yet, it’s hard to deny that our national institutions sometimes make us conservatives despair and long for a time when we lived in a more conservative country. But, there is hope. Each of us is responsible for the communities we live in and the mediating institutions we belong to within our country. If we truly want to make America a more conservative country, then we need to become more active in our communities and clean up our institutions. Instead of fighting a culture war on Twitter over execrable shoes, we should concentrate on creating little citadels of conservatism to stave off the worst of leftist fusillades. In a time of “war,” one would think that it would be best to avoid or attack the enemy, but the problem is inherent in the assumption. We are not at war! Even if you think we are, lay down your weapons. We should be reaching out. Ideas are best spread through persuasion, not through insults or coercion. The other side is not crazy, evil, or stupid; they are our fellow Americans. Every American wants to make America a better place; we just disagree on how to get there. Talk to one person you disagree with, and we’ll get one step closer.
