Books By Pundits Don't Change The World

Once again, my poor brain found itself subjected to talk radio last weekend. I’ll spare you the debunking. I will instead focus on an issue that arose which has long troubled me: conservatives don’t understand what interests the public. This is vital to our turnaround.

I first noticed this issue in the 1990s. When Bill Clinton went on the Tonight Show, it was a brilliant move. It allowed him to connect with a part of the public that wasn’t particularly tuned in to politics but did still vote. It also let him craft an image that appealed to the public. In fact, it played into one of the most-loved of American caricatures: the loveable rogue.

Conservatives responded in unison by condemning this for lowering the office of the presidency, and they scoffed at Clinton: “Who could possibly want to see their president on a comedy show talking about his underwear? Harrumph!” Then they were upset the public “didn't get it”: “Why isn’t the public outraged? Hasn’t the public read Bill Bennett’s book on moral decay? What about Cal Thomas’s laments about the culture in which he spells God as G-d? What is wrong with people!” Then someone in the Clinton camp said that everything is political and conservatives laughed themselves silly: “Nonsense!!” I still remember Rush mocking this point for days.

See, it turns out that in conservative minds, politics lives in a box. Politics is speeches given by politicians. Politics is books written by pundits and treatises prepared by think tanks. Politics is what you get on talk radio and political talk shows. Nothing beyond that is real politics. Moreover, conservatives seem to believe that politics defines culture. Thus, Bill Clinton wasn’t reflecting the culture, he was warping it, and if only we could get rid of Bill and get people to read Bill Bennett’s book, then the culture would snap right back to Leave It To Beaver times.

That is fundamentally wrong on all points.

Books like those by Hayek or Milton Friedman are great foundations for our ideology. Reagan’s speeches are inspiring and insightful as well. But political books and speeches don’t penetrate the culture and they certainly don’t move the needle on culture. You could pass out every book written by Thomas Sowell or Bill Bennett or Glenn Beck’s monkey to every American, and not a thing would change... the public doesn’t work that way.

Culture is as the public defines it. They define it through their opinions about a vast array of topics. And their opinions drift according to any number of events. Movies make something seem more or less scary. An event occurs that shocks people. Wall Street inspired people to become stockbrokers and to get rich; Oliver Stone laments this. Close Encounters made belief in aliens acceptable to the mainstream. Walt Disney redefined American history through his television shows. Dirty Harry gave voice to the public’s desire to undo the liberalism put into the criminal justice system... no political book or speech did that, a movie did. All those monogamous, happy gay characters on television made people comfortable with gays. Rosa Parks exposed the perversion of Southern racism. The person in Tiananmen Square showed that dictatorships are helpless against a good cause. Rick Santelli’s rant about a second Tea Party was just a commentary on a financial show. A crying Indian taught us not to litter. Smokey and the Bandit taught us to embrace the New South, and country music did the rest. This is what really changes culture. Culture is changed by these lightening-in-a-bottle moments where someone does something that gives the public a chance to say they changed their minds. And here’s the key point: it’s almost never politics that causes those lightening-in-a-bottle moments!

This is something conservatives need to learn. Too many conservatives blind themselves to the culture because they wrongly think culture is a byproduct of politics. It’s not. The reverse is true: culture drives politics. And the only way to change culture is to engage it on its own terms... to start offering our own works for people to latch onto and be inspired by.

This was the point to my Fifty Shades article awhile back. Conservatives want to dismiss that book and the buzz around it as “just perverted porn.” But in so doing, they completely miss what is really going on. That book has been the catalyst which has let women everywhere declare that they are done with the peer pressure feminists have imposed that required them to compete with men. Conservatives missed this because they don’t grasp that people change the culture outside the political process. And since this book wasn’t written with a political purpose, they don’t grasp that it can lead to a political change. But it can. I guarantee you that Fifty Shades has broken feminism in ways that a million books by Bill Bennett or Christina Hoff Sommers never could have. Likewise, Kim Kardashian can sway more voters than all the talk radio hosts combined. One powerful movie about leftist hypocrisy would do more to break the left’s claim of moral superiority than every treatise or book written by every pundit, think tank or historian. Lament it all you want, that doesn’t change the fact that this is how it happens.

And there’s more. There are opportunities that conservatives completely miss because they have intentionally blinded themselves on this issue. Take the issue of rap music. Say “rap music” to a conservative and the results get pretty ugly and insulting. More to the point though, none of them will grasp that rap music represents an opening for conservatives: “What? How could it? It’s just rude black people being anti-cop!” No, it’s not.

Rap music should be siren song to conservatives. Not only does it tell us that young black males can be reached, but it tells us how to reach them. Rap is about independence. It’s about reclaiming manhood that has been stripped away by social workers and fathers who vanished into jails or welfare. It glorifies wealth and success. These are all things conservatives claim to support, and here are blacks listening to music that treats these things as the very thing they want. You couldn’t have a better roadmap for how to reach blacks. But conservatives can’t see this because they can’t get over the fact they don’t like it themselves and because they can’t understand what rap music has to do with politics.... it doesn’t fit in the box... “We need to get them to read Bill Bennett’s book about the effect of single-parenthood!” Yeah, right.

Not only do we, as conservatives, need to start embracing the culture on its own terms by writing songs and films and books that push our values without being political, but we need to learn to recognize trends and opportunities when they appear. More people pay attention to the issues surrounding black quarterbacks than the Voting Rights Act. The left uses black quarterbacks to talk about discrimination. How about using it to talk about the end of discrimination and that this was achieved through individual skill rather than affirmative action?

Rather than condemning the buzz around Fifty Shades as “perverted women reading porn,” how about pointing out the feminist war on women and demanding that women be given a real choice, including the choice not to compete with men? Harry Potter was written by a leftist, but why not embrace the books as highlighting the dangers of large, strong, invasive government? Why not tell blacks that we hear what they are saying in rap and that if they want independence... if they want success... if they want the good life... if they want to claim their manhood, then we’re the only ones offering that with our message of economic and personal freedom. You’re never gonna be a man with Uncle Sam wiping your ass.

This is how we win back the public: we grasp what they are thinking about and we talk to them on their terms. Forget hoping that another book by another talk radio host will finally save conservatism.