Have you ever scratched your head in total bewilderment over the state of American society today?  Have you ever wondered what the hell happened out there in the good ole USA while you were busy making those mortgage payments and raising those kids?   Well, look no further than the blog post over at Human Events to get an answer to your plaintive query.

John Hayward of Human Events (Powerful Conservative Voices), in a post he entitled Buying Into the Culture War, has dramatically, if unwittingly, given us the core reason for all the daunting dilemmas that our country is facing today.  As you will see from his blog post, Mr. Hayward shows us that when it comes to understanding the conundrum of culture, Conservatives are Complete Idiots.

Glenn Reynolds makes an interesting suggestion to Republican donors in the New York Post today: instead of pouring cash into ineffective old-school political advertising during campaign season, they should use their millions to “buy some women’s magazines… or at least some women’s Web sites.”

This is one of numerous suggestions made in the wake of the 2012 election, sharing the common theme of encouraging Republicans to make long-term investments in cultural capital, rather than frantic last-minute margin calls on political capital.  Others have encouraged the financing of more conservative publishing, Internet, television, and cinematic ventures.  It won’t be easy to recapture this cultural territory from the Left – it took them decades to establish their near-monopoly on cultural media space – but if the efforts are launched immediately, they could bear some fruit by 2016.

It’s very difficult to re-define the terms of such an engagement in just a few short months, especially since so much of the “news” media is energetically working for the other side.  Politicizing culture sometimes seems repulsive or unfair to conservatives. We need to get over that, because the other side does it every day, in countless ways.

Politicizing culture seems repulsive or unfair to conservatives….well, there you have it in a nutshell, folks—Conservative Stupidity on full display.

It’s really embarrassing to read such pathetically naive gibberish.  It’s like listening to a grown man telling us that babies should really come from the stork, but now that those evil liberals have sullied the birth experience by indulging in sexual intercourse, we better get in the game pronto before we’re totally extinct.

Apparently, Mr Hayward believes that culture is some sort of pure and sacred entity totally divorced from the direct intervention of human experience.  It would seem that those powerful conservative voices over at Human Events have never stuck their noses in a history book.  One wonders where Hayward and his cohorts have gotten their education, and where, pray tell, they have been sticking their silly heads these past few decades.

Well, for the culturally challenged (which seems to be the depth and breadth of our conservative leadership), here is a mini remedial tutorial on the ins and outs of that mysterious human cult called culture.

Definition: Culture is the learned patterns of behavior and thought that help a group adapt to its surroundings.  Culture consists of values, beliefs, mores, underlying assumptions, attitudes, and behaviors all shared by a group of people.

Gee, shared beliefs, values, and attitudes—like the ones that decide whether the electorate feels there should be abortion on demand, whether the government should pay for birth control, and whether the definition of traditional marriage should be revamped.  In other words, the dominating beliefs, values, and attitudes of our society, OUR CULTURE, drive people’s political orientations.  I think even Gomer Pyle and Barney Fife would be able to grasp the connection here.

Some of the Major Drivers of Culture Include:

• Media—News and Journalistic editing, TV programming, films, publishing, etc.

• Educational Institutions—Primary, secondary, university philosophical underpinnings through expressed through curriculum and teachers.

• Government/Politics—Laws, administrative policies, constitutional interpretations through the judiciary, taxation policy, use of police and military, number and size of government agencies and their power and employment.

• Corporations—business products and policies, marketing tactics, grants and donations to political parties and non-profits, etc.

• Science and Technology—think birth control pill, computers, Internet, smart phones, medical breakthroughs that extend lifespans, and the use of ‘scientific’ research to prop up political agendas.

• Demographics—Population stats and age ranges, immigration/relocation (from outside US and within US), birth rates, economic stratification,

• Economic Opportunities—the matching of skills to jobs, entrepreneurial expansion, the level of affluence, inflation/deflation, etc.

The Republican party and the conservative movement have played predominately in one, and only one, cultural sandbox, leaving many of the other cultural drivers to the not-so-fickle fates and their Left-wing puppet masters.

But challenging the dominant liberal culture can only be launched upon the strong back of a thriving and well-organized conservative sub-culture.  Our alternative political news media and blogs on the Internet, and the occasional conservative essay-type Bestseller that hits the market, are a good start, but only a start.  We need to dominate the world of fiction, in publishing, in TV comedies and dramas, and in the Hollywood film industry.  In other words, we need to shape and direct the social narrative within the entertainment field.

Example: Note the not so subtle portrayal of conservative values from the hit TV series of the 1980s, Family Ties.  The character of Alex Keaton, played by Michael J. Fox, turned the Reagan years into one long-running spoof of traditional American values.  The genuine values as presented in this sitcom that all good-minded Americans are expected to espouse are those of Alex’s parents, the liberal duo who represent the cool married couple working for public television and doing a little feminist freelance architecture.  Well, we might have won the White House for three terms running back in those days, but as this clip shows, we sure as hell didn’t win the future.

And Education is another driver that is so so ripe for winning right now.  Take the time to read Nathan Harden’s article at American Interest entitled The End of the University as We Know It to get a clear idea of what’s coming down the pike for the university of tomorrow.  Will conservatives be positioned to take advantage of these changes or will we continue to be sitting in the bleachers bellyaching about the progressive propaganda game?

As the Soviet tanks of socialism have been rolling across America for years on end, conservatives have been busy living out their separate lives all within the imaginary bubble of Mayberry where we just whistle our happy snappy reassuring tune and the big bad liberal world magically melts away.  Yes, it seems some citizens of Mayberry may be awakening from their self-induced delusions, but just in case there are a few Gomers and Barneys out there who didn’t get the gist of my message, I’ll put it all into just three simple words:

Culture is Political