…in a recent column, quotes Pat Moynihan:
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”
I’m a liberal, and I believe the first part of Moynihan’s statement. I believe politics is a subset of culture, not the other way around.
We can’t just elect or defeat a Presidential candidate and really change things.
We can’t just protest, no matter how spectacularly, and really change things.
We can’t just “deconstruct texts” and really change things.
We’ve gotta do the hard, lifelong work of building a national, permanent, progressive-populist movement.
And to do that, we’ve gotta construct a culture. Not just a “counterculture” or a culture of opposition, but a forward-looking, all-embracing, universally-welcoming aesthetic/zeitgeist.
All the aspects of current hipster and historic coopertative cultures can be part of this: Music, books, video/film, food/drink, architecture, small business, non-profits, artists, craftspeople, sidewalk philosophers, preachers, cafes, bars, “third places,” the Net, and so on.
They don’t have to be all coordinated or uniformly “on message”—the point is to free up human ingenuity to solve human problems.
And yes, there will be political rifts and divisions within such a non-top-down culture. There will always be geographic and other interests wanting, say, more funding for their own areas of interest.
And yes, there will be “cuture wars” within such a culture. There will be hammered-dulcimer people who don’t like heavy-metal people, sexually-reserved women who don’t care much for sexually-expressive women, etc. etc.
But all that’s part of the whole point—to liberate the whole mongrel beauty that is the US from the twin dictatorships of Hollywood/Madison Avenue corporate culture and right-wing authoritarian culture. To advocate a third choice, which is really millions of third choices.
It’s a task for the long haul, not for an election cycle. So take your vitamins, get into shape, and live for it.
