The Limits Of Politics

For your daily pop culture diatribe, I cannot recommend this post by Matt Yglesias highly enough.

Any worldview that can’t stand up in the midst of a vibrant cultural ocean needs to rethink itself more than it needs to try and dragoon political forces into supporting it. I often feel that America’s religious traditionalists ought to engage in more self-congratulation. Despite — or, I would argue, because of — its inability to entrench itself as a European-style official religion, certain strains of American Protestantism have established themselves as far and away the most robust and viable religious force in the developed world. Traditionalists are perfectly capable of doing as I suggest — fighting the fight in the background society, contesting secular culture in the cultural domain. There’s all this stuff out there. Let it fight, let’s argue, write, sing, film, etc. But preserving that sort of vibrancy — the integrity, one might say, of America’s various communities — requires us not to subordinate the value of everything to the values of politics, and not to try and turn everything into the subject of collective political decision-making.

That’s it exactly. Politics can’t do everything. And everything isn’t politics. Democrats can offer real solutions to real people’s problems, but not all of them. We can help mitigate the risk of the free market and provide some protection from the more predatory aspects of capitalism. We can guarantee that every person be treated equally under the law and we can ensure our civil liberties. But politics cannot dictate culture and everytime it tries it creates far more problems than it solves. In fact, the liberal should be in favor of an unfettered market in one thing — ideas. It is only through that, that we can guarantee our freedom. Our Bill of Rights, properly protected, will do that. But, we have to protect it.

Bravo to Matt for finding the nub of this argument. Culture is a different sphere than politics and one that is just as essential, in its own right, to a free society as democracy is or freedom to practice religion. Politics is a very crude instrument to arbitrate something as delicate and ephemeral as ideas, art, love, personal meaning — the whole sphere of life that culture encompasses.

And yet there is a political danger lurking of which we should be aware. One of my many brilliant commenters in that fine thread below points this out:

Today in the US, all the bases are belonging to the radical right, except a few.

They’ve got the think-tanks, but they haven’t got academia.

They’ve got the executive and the legislative branches, but they haven’t got the judiciary.

They’ve got the MSM stitched up along with the commentariat. They haven’t got the entertainment industry quite where they’d like, though. Documentaries, in particular, can be a source of information and criticism that can cause a Rove or a Luntz to break a sweat.

Now look at all the “cultural” kerfuffles they’ve kicked up since the beginning of this year. American education is supposedly threatened by leftist professors, and conservatives are denied their rightful place on campus. New rules are needed to protect poor Young Republican students from their liberal professors, it seems. The Schiavo case shows that the judiciary needs kicking into shape (DeLay just said it again). The entertainment industry is putting out the Wrong Stuff, and what’s needed is censorship. (Hey, blogs too.)

So let’s go and pitch into the great “debate” about these subjects, and let’s not see that, in each case, the radical right is proposing to legislate and even strangle essential constitutional precepts like freedom of speech and the separation of powers. Let’s not notice that what they are trying to do is browbeat and bend to their will the last zones of influence in American life that are capable of being an obstacle in their path, and let’s forget that their path is toward a new form of totalitarianism harnessing religion as the Nazis harnessed nationalism.

We are definitely seeing a frontal assault on the remaining spheres of social influence that are not organized around or willingly complicit with the Republican agenda. This is not an accident. They, of course, see all obstacles as “liberal” which in the classical sense, I suppose they are. But these social influences of the judiciary, academia and popular culture are not explicitly partisan. In fact, they are largely independent spheres that resist co-option by partisan politics.

So, it’s not that liberals want to protect smut and Ward Churchill because we enjoy it or agree with it. And it’s not solely because we don’t trust that anybody could make decisions about such things that we could live with. It’s because we are trying to preserve a society in which culture and intellectual freedom can even continue to exist.

The assaults on culture, academia and the judiciary are not criticisms or even strident disagreements with their products or outcomes. These assaults are legal, legislative and regulatory attempts to pull these independent spheres under governmental authority.

It’s not our political agenda we’re protecting. Not should we allow ourselves to be conned into thinking that we are helping the working mom so it is a good thing anyway. The stakes are much higher than that even if people don’t choose to see it. We must ensure that our entire society, political, cultural and intellectual, isn’t subsumed by the Republican agenda. There’s a distinction there and a very important one. Without a vibrant culture, an independent judiciary and a free intellectial sphere that operates outside the political decision making process, we become, by default, totalitarian.

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