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The stories that matter about money and politics in the race for the White House
A Donald Trump admirer will vote for him in November, no matter what anyone says. A sworn skeptic knows what to do, too. This column is interested in a certain kind of undecided: the one who thinks Trump is dangerous but hates anything “conscious.” I know several. The writer Andrew Sullivan is the most fluent communicator of his views. However much one may mock his hesitations about drawing spurious equivalences between great and small evils, the election will be decided by people who look more like them than the determined. They have a right to hear a worthwhile argument.
Which is it? It’s not that Kamala Harris is a cultural moderate (I can’t say), but that doesn’t matter. If the past few decades have shown anything, it’s that governments don’t create culture or have much influence on it.
Republicans have provided four of the last seven presidents. They have held the House of Representatives for most of the time since 1994. Republican-nominated judges have constituted a majority on the Supreme Court since 1970. This is as close as politics can come to being hegemonic in a divided nation. And the cultural result has been — what? According to the right itself, progressive principles have spread, including an emphasis on racial and other group identities, an overly blameworthy depiction of the Western past, and a selective approach to free speech.
Political strength, cultural regression: if this is the fate of American conservatives, consider Britain. The 14-year Conservative government that fell this summer was not even the longest-lasting in my lifetime. Yet their complaint is one of a general progressive drift.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? If culture is important to you, who runs the central state is of secondary importance. What counts are the university faculties, the publishing houses, the film studios, the meetings of museum trustees, the advertising agencies and other creators of the normative atmosphere.
And realistically, the left will always have an advantage in those areas. Part of this is self-selection. People with conservative or classical liberal views may be drawn to business rather than the institutions of the Marxist “superstructure.” Or perhaps the left, being collectivist in outlook, is a better organizer. Oscar Wilde’s complaint about socialism (“it takes up too many evenings”) was not entirely facetious. Every now and then, I get an email from an internal group that I think is too preachy and politicized for a work environment. But what am I going to do? Join a committee? Attend a meeting? Ensure a quorum? State my case? Cast a vote? Distribute minutes? Follow up? “Have coffee”? Yes, no.
The Woke movement didn’t arise because of politics, it didn’t reach its peak in recent years because of politics, and it won’t rise again because of politics. I can understand him voting against Harris on taxes, antitrust, and maybe immigration. But doing so out of widespread cultural desperation? Whatever is wrong with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, he at least understands the importance of winning “out there,” in civil society.
Conservatives will object that if they did not have so much official political power, the cultural trend would be worse. Perhaps. The State can make definitive interventions: against this curriculum, against that medical treatment. But I wonder if the political empire itself engenders the problem.
In 1987, Allan Bloom wrote about the postmodern degradation of the humanities in The Closing of the American MindThat was seven years into the Reagan era. Two of the three previous presidents had been Republicans, and the other was a Southern Baptist. The summer of 2020, when protests passed my kitchen window on Florida Avenue in Washington, was Trump’s fourth year. Most of the subsequent backlash, like the one against ESG, occurred during the Biden administration.
Look at these dates. Either politics is irrelevant to culture, or culture is evolving. against the powers of the moment. That is to say, an idea has more chances of spreading if it has the prestige of subversion and dissent.
There has been much talk in recent weeks of the Oasis era, from 1994 to 1997. As a child of that era, I am glad that it is now being recognised as a moment in Britain’s cultural evolution, when a newly irreverent and carefree people strutted into the millennium. It occurred between the 15th and 18th years of a Conservative government.
janan.ganesh@ft.com