KNOWLES: Culture Can Be Downstream Of Politics

Last week, Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson refused to sign into law a bill that would protect children from the predations of perverts who want to pump them full of cross-sex hormones. Governor Hutchinson’s “conservatism” demands that we defend child castration as preferable to any “big government” regulation that might outlaw it. “I go back to William Buckley, I go back to Ronald Reagan, to principles of our party,” Hutchinson explained, “which believes in a limited role of government.” One can almost hear WFB and the Gipper turning in their graves. If preventing the mutilation of minors does not fall within the limits of legitimate government, what does?

Hutchinson dismissed the bill as “a product of the cultural war in America” — a war that he seems to wish we would all just surrender. The governor has acknowledged “the fear…that we’re losing our culture.” But, he insisted during an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, “You don’t need to use the instrument of the law, you don’t need to use the state to accomplish that purpose in every instance. There is the Church. There is society. There is your community. And that’s where the culture is impacted or reflected in the future.” In other words, “politics is downstream of culture.”

Andrew Breitbart’s famous maxim conveys an important truth: cultural institutions shape our politics from outside the halls of government. But “politics” influences “culture” too. Indeed, one cannot neatly distinguish between the two concepts because both describe much the same thing: how we all get along together. Is our reality TV star former president a “cultural” or “political” figure? When the Big Tech billionaires who control the flow of information around our public square censor that same duly elected president, do they exercise “cultural” or “political” power?

According to a 2012 survey, the majority of East Germans are atheists. That percentage falls to 10.3% among their godlier countrymen in West Germany. Politics, not culture, explains the disparity. From 1945 until 1990, an officially atheistic, communist government dominated East Germany. The previously Christian culture of that region did not flow downstream to convert the Soviet puppets who ruled. On the contrary, even after the communists’ political regime collapsed, its culture of atheism remained.

Ask a conservative how Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs affected the black family in the 1960s and ‘70s, and even the most ardent disciple of the Breitbart Doctrine will acknowledge the power of politics to shape culture. For too long, craven politicians have exploited Breitbart’s clarion call for conservatives to wield influence in the entertainment industry as an excuse for not doing their own jobs in the political sphere.

Asa Hutchinson seems to think the people elected him to do nothing. He believes “the party is about…pushing freedom and choice in the free market.” But gelding children does not expand freedom. The governor mistakes licentiousness for liberty, a distinction crucial to the thinking of our Founding Fathers and wise statesmen throughout history. Worse still, he mistakes impotent sloganeering for political leadership.

In practice, Hutchinson’s castrated “conservatism” advances the agenda of the radical Left more effectively even than the leftists do themselves — an irony I detail in my upcoming book Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds. Governor Hutchinson fails to understand that freedom has a purpose. It is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, as our Founders and Framers well understood when they set about to “secure the blessings of liberty.” The benighted governor prattles on about freedom, but he doesn’t grasp its essential feature: liberty has value only to those who know how to use it.

The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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