Thinking Upstream of Politics

A family enjoys the Union River waterfront in Ellsworth, Maine, on June 6, 2026. Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times

Commentary

“Politics is downstream of culture” runs the famous maxim. This is a truth we need to constantly remind ourselves, particularly in our mass media, where social media sites, TV, and radio bombard us with political developments as a form of both entertainment and rage-baiting, all of which can make politics omnipresent in our minds.

Of course, politics can influence culture, too, such as when the federal government works to eliminate neo-Marxist DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs, thus reshaping the educational formation of future citizens, which will itself reshape culture.

But at best, politics can dam up the river or divert it a bit here or there; still, culture remains upstream of all that. It is the source, the lifeblood of society, and the battles that play out in the political sphere are generally just a later manifestation of a battle that has already played out culturally. The legalization of abortion or gay marriage, for example, would have been unthinkable had the battle not already been lost culturally, had culture not already been radically transformed by the sexual revolution and other forces. This is what we mean when we say culture is upstream of politics.

As conservative author and publisher Scott P. Richert wrote, “politics is [not] unimportant—far from it—but ... we need to return politics to its proper sphere, to recognize that culture is prior to politics, both in the sense of existing before politics and in the sense of being more important than politics.”

Why? Because culture is about the most elemental of things—family, religion, art, music, beauty, virtues, principles. Culture both forms and gives expression to those values that define a people. Politics is ultimately just an offshoot of this.

This is one reason why we have to be careful not to reverse the relationship, to see everything as a segment under the ever-widening umbrella of “politics.” When we wrongly assign cultural problems to the political sphere—looking for quick legislative or executive fixes to deep-seated cultural illness and malaise—we play a dangerous game. True, we might, sometimes, see the hoped-for cultural shift as a direct result of political action. But too often, we don’t. And, even when we do, the tradeoff is an increasingly behemothic state, a state that approaches more and more the figure of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Such an all-encompassing state is inherently antithetical to healthy, localized culture.

As Pope Pius XI warned in Quadragesimo Anno, “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” That’s the disorder we fall into when we look to national politics as the be-all, end-all. Cultural restoration belongs not to Washington, but to the institutions of culture: family, community, church, school, fraternity, etc.

The more cultural ground is ceded to national political authority—the more we look to centralized government to “fix” culture—the more we empower the state to perform jobs it was never designed to do—largely because we, ourselves, have forfeited the difficult work of cultural restoration. It is difficult and it is apolitical because culture is a living, organic thing that grows, develops, and flowers (or withers) with the coming and going of generations, with memory and place, with ways of life, with skills preserved or lost, with community, with a million unnoticed actions, choices, and decisions that begin at the level of the individual family. Real culture resists the systemization that politics seeks to impose.

“Conservatives have been warning about ‘Cultural Marxism’ for years while fundamentally misunderstanding the underlying strategy of the [Marxist] long march through the institutions,” Mr. Richert argues. What we have misunderstood, arguably, is that at the heart of the ongoing revolution is not merely the promotion of bad ideas within the political realm, but, rather more fundamentally, the subordination of everything to political conflict. One aspect of the revolution—which has been ongoing in various forms since the Enlightenment—is that it cuts off human social life from the transcendent values contained in culture and religion and relegates human social life to a rationalistic, materialistic struggle for power. (This is what DEI has tried to do to all the cultural disciplines.)

Modern conservatism has often failed to recognize the real terms of the engagement, the full radicalism of the shift that has occurred, thus playing into the enemy’s hand. Mr. Richert observes,

“Rather than resisting any attempt to politicize the institutions of culture—the family, the Church, the schools, arts and literature—we have responded to the revolutionary subversion of these institutions by politicizing them in a different way. But the end result is the same: Those institutions have become thoroughly politicized; truth has been replaced by ideology; the revolution has advanced. So we fight for ‘family values’ as if this abstract phrase is more important than the family itself; we march under the banners of ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech’ when what we should be promoting are truth and beauty and goodness.”

A body is not healed by a sudden dictate from the head. It is healed by countless cells each performing their proper tasks throughout the whole living organism. So it is with culture. The task before us is much broader than merely winning political battles (though that’s important too). It involves reconnecting things that have been severed, resewing fields that have been uprooted, rebuilding structures that have been torn down, beginning in each of our local environments.

Let’s be clear about one thing: culture cannot be fixed by Washington, even if Washington can be, at times, an ally of cultural improvement (and at times an enemy). Culture can only be fixed by you and me.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.