By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs, formerly of willowashmaple.xyz)
Nov. 9, 2024
This week's fallout from the 2024 U.S. presidential election proved the assumptions of many Democrats wrong: the so-called "culture war" was not a distraction to keep the electorate from focusing on issues like income inequality and corruption; as it turned out, the culture war propelled DJT to his victory. As LGBTQ Nation reports in "How anti-trans attack ads helped Trump reach male voters & beat Kamala Harris" (Nov. 8, 2024),
The Human Rights Campaign has repeatedly said that such ads are a waste of money that don't connect with voters, citing that only 4% of voters listed trans issues among their primary concerns. But after the ads aired, the race shifted 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor, according to an analysis by Harris’s leading super PAC Future Forward.
2.7 percent was not insignificant in an extremely tight race in which the Harris-Walz campaign was prepared for a 2-percent margin of effort when the actual margin was over 4 percent.
In The Atlantic (Nov. 7, 2024, online), Spencer Kohnhaber writes a critique of how the Democrats failed to adapt to the new media landscape in which right-wing influencers aggressively magnify the culture war through podcasts, social media, and alternative online platforms, recruiting lots of younger people into their camp.
The so-called Breitbart Doctrine stated that “politics is downstream from culture”—that is, the ideas conveyed by popular entertainment shape consumers’ worldviews.
This tied right into the "Seven Mountain Mandate" of the New Apostolic Reformation movement.
In short, culture shapes society and politics. It cannot be divorced from them.
Culture grows organically. It is not something that can be imposed top-down from any government (as much as it may try) and in this era of instant peer-to-peer mass communications, not even by the cultural elite class.
This is something the far-right has become extremely adept at in recent years. From PragerU to Libs of TikTok to One America News Network, they have a full ecosystem of new media platforms, joined by Elon Musk's X, Andrew Torba's Gab Social, and DJT's Truth Social.
Culture matters, and if we were to fight back against the specter of so-called national conservatism and Christian nationalism, it is critical to build a counter-"Seven Mountain Mandate." Activism only goes so far. As much as it is important to focus on the next election cycle, only a transformation of culture leads to a lasting impact.
Simultaneously, we also need to take a look back and see where the left erred in its past attempts at culture change. Any successful cultural transformation must maintain continuity to the past traditions, even as it corrects its past errors and looks forward to the future. Failure to do this is not a cultural transformation but it is a cultural revolution, and most people will reject it. Contemporary examples include the performative "woke" (also known as SJW and "cancel culture") that makes complicated and nuanced questions into oversimplified, sound-bite issues that are weaponized as political litmus tests.
We must become culture makers. Artists, writers, filmmakers, influencers, poets, and other creators play very important roles in this. And that is why repressive regimes try to suppress, censor, and regulate cultural activities. Culture changes people and our communities one person at a time, and creates an environment in which transformations and justice can happen. This is a long-term, generational work that is not constrained by election cycles or for that matter by national, linguistic, and ethnic boundaries.
So let's be creative and start creating.
How anti-trans attack ads helped Trump reach male voters beat Kamala Harris (LGBTQ Nation)
Why Democrats are losing the culture war (The Atlantic)
Culture making means tiny acts of doing it differently (Kelly Diels)
A critique of the Seven Mountain Mandate (The Gospel Coalition)
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