Don't Forget the Culture War

There is great anticipation in the land, that the incoming Trump administration will set aright the capsizing ship of state. I examined this topic in my post of 12/9/24; now I would like to expand the discussion beyond the boundaries of the merely governmental.

There is a tendency among the forces of the Right to be fixated on the political realm, particularly the Executive branch of the Federal government, as the source of salvation. I have no doubt that this domain is quite important, but it does not have primacy. The Left understands this full well. They know that fundamental change, including in the political sphere, is the end result of cultural shifts. Remember the “long march through the institutions”? That was the Left’s gradual, patient, decades-long subversion of the culture. And it worked.

Let us recall the domains in which the Left overthrew the existing structures, and ousted the last vestiges of sanity: criminal justice; primary/secondary education; art; movies; academia; medical; economy/finance; race relations; to name just a few.

The Obama/Biden regime is the logical outcome of this process. It could hardly be otherwise. Can it now be overturned and expunged by a change of president and other high-level government personnel? I submit that it cannot. To be sure, many emergency fixes can be made. I do not wish to downplay their importance. I will be the first to applaud if, for example, all illegal aliens are deported from the country. This is essential to national survival.

It is unrealistic, however, to expect that Trump and his associates are the people who can accomplish the required deep cleaning. They are liberals (in the classic sense) who have been “mugged by reality”; who are horrified at the excesses of the Left. They can apply the emergency fixes, but they are not equipped philosophically to lead us into the promised land. That work will remain to be accomplished by others.

As a case study, consider Elon Musk. His support for Donald Trump, and his purchase and decensoring of Twitter, were laudable actions. But if he were a true cultural leader and visionary, he would go much further. He would confess that Tesla is a monstrous grift based on one of the biggest lies in the Left’s pantheon of big lies: the Global Warming/Green Energy myth. Musk would then convert the Tesla operation to the production of simple, $10K internal-combustion cars, sell the company, and use the funds to set up a movie studio that is bigger than all of Hollywood combined. The first film to be produced would be a Jason Bourne sequel, this time with the CIA plotting a coup d’état against a conservative U.S. president.

Next step for Musk: Become the leading benefactor at the top five art museums in the country. Use that position of power to clean out the “contemporary” filth, replace curators and executives as necessary, and restore American art to its former elevated status. MAGA: Make Art Great Again.

Now back to reality: Let us not live under the illusion that this monumental task can be delegated to one individual, namely Mr. Trump, and that’s that. The responsibility for cleaning out the rot has devolved upon each of us, every man in his respective domain. We must overcome, however, the propensity of our side to non-involvement in such affairs. Folks on the Right tend to be engaged in productive economic pursuits, as well as family, religion, and other “normal” activities. They are not, by nature, political animals. The Left has a huge advantage in this area, having armies of people whose religion is Wokeism, and who are willing to devote their lives to the cause.

The Right builds, the Left tears down. An ancient template. When institutions are conquered by the Left, they become platforms to pillage and ruin what came before. Educational institutions become a tool to destroy education. Artistic institutions destroy art. And so on.

Now it is time for us to do some destruction of our own—creative destruction, to return those institutions to their true roles. We need smart and preferably young people to attain key positions in education, the arts, and other areas in which opinions are formed and culture is determined. Ideally, the big guns like Musk could jump-start this process. When this is in place, we can speak truth to power, and solve the dilemmas plaguing our society.