Politicisation

Politicisation describes the tendency of the Left (and the Right) to over-emphasise political solutions to diverse challenges.

The left’s misplaced faith in politics

There is a well-documented tendency of Liberal Democrat MPs, the BBC and Church of England clergy to see bigger government as the solution (of first resort) to nearly every social challenge. The Radio 4 Today studio is invariably full of voices calling for higher taxes for this and more regulation of that. Even when the left-liberal establishment turns its mind to decentralisation it doesn’t think of sharing power with local schools and hospitals – or better still families and churches – but to new (albeit less centralised) tiers of politicians and bureaucrats.

Conservatives are rightly concerned at this tendency to politicise national life. Conservatives understand that many of the nation’s challenges are most likely to be solved by the 3D institutions of society, rather than the feed-and-forget bureaucracies of the state. For conservatives there is much more transformational power in culture and religion, than in politics.

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, got it exactly right when he wrote:

"Politics Moves The Pieces On The Chessboard. Religion Changes Lives. Peace Can Be Agreed Around The Conference Table; But Unless It Grows In Ordinary Hearts And Minds, It Does Not Last."

The politicisation of conservatives

Although conservatives understand the limited nature of politics and the greater power of culture, they have displayed much more interest in fighting elections (and then over-reading their results) than influencing culture’s commanding heights.

Jonah Goldberg has argued that conservatives have over-interpreted the implications of George W Bush’s 2004 victory. Rather than an illustration of conservatism’s strength, his 51%-48% re-election may actually be a sign of conservatism’s cultural weakness. In this extended extract from an article for The National Review, Mr Goldberg makes a powerful case for his theory:

"Imagine you're an umbrella salesman during the early rainfall that led to Noah's flood. You might think these are the best of times because business is so good. Or imagine you're the pastor of the last church in town because the rest have been bulldozed to make way for strip malls and strip clubs. You might think the standing-room-only crowd was a sign of moral health. Imagine you're the leader of the last polka band in America…oh you get the point: Success and progress can be deceptive.

One more example: Imagine you're the grand strategist of the Republican party during an age of unremitting social change. Homosexuality has been mainstreamed. The New York Times announces gay "weddings" alongside "traditional" ones and the social momentum is toward full legal recognition of gay marriages sometime in the near future. The popular culture being pumped into American homes is often coarse, smutty, and alien to traditional values. Narcissism has filled the vacuum of nihilism — designer drugs, designer bodies, designer children with nary a drop of shame for any of it. Technology itself is reducing the once-sacred boundaries of self and soul to a vast gray area where people are a collection of software and interchangeable parts. Meanwhile, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are cutting off heads, blowing up Americans, and threatening to use nuclear or biological weapons on American soil. Even many of our European "allies" have decided that hating America is simply easier and more satisfying than hating America's enemies…

I think the folks who celebrate the Republican triumph as a conservative triumph may be getting ahead of themselves."

It’s the culture, stupid

The flipside to the over-politicisation of conservative activism has been conservatism’s neglect of culture. This problem was analysed by Ross Douthat in another National Review article. Douthat noted:

”Over the last 40 years, the [American] Right has labored in the wilderness, building a counter-establishment of magazines, colleges, think tanks, and news networks, with an array of foundations — Olin and Bradley, Scaife and Koch — to finance them. And in this wilderness campaign, conservatives have been wildly successful, training a generation that can craft election strategies, run for Congress, plot entitlement reform, and even make a bid to transform the Middle East... The Family Research Center may be a great tool for taking over Congress, but a thousand think tanks can't match the transformative power of Friends and Will & Grace, Madonna and Sex and the City.”

Any signs of hope?

The success of the National Gallery’s Seeing Salvation exhibition and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ – plus the commercial failure of many ‘red corner movies’ and continued public cynicism towards much modern art - suggests that we might be witnessing a nascent conservative arts industry.

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