Winning Election 2060

Culture is the tail that wags the political dog. Because the dog is more obvious on cable TV and everywhere else, we think the dog is the final determining factor. It isn’t.

Dec 13, 2024

Dear friends and supporters:

Behind the recent election and virtually every other election in a constitutional republic lay cultural factors. Because cultural factors are often more difficult to pinpoint than political factors, and specifically election results, the relationship between the two sets of factors is not always apparent. I’ll try to make that relationship more apparent.

Lagging and Leading Cultural Indicators

First, politics is a lagging cultural indicator, and culture is a leading political indicator. Those terms, “lagging indicator” and “leading indicator,” are economic terms. A lagging indicator is any event or phenomenon that provides evidence of something that happened earlier, though we might not have been noticing it. A good example is unemployment figures. Unemployment happens because other negative economic events have already occurred, like a reduction of consumer confidence or spending. If consumers don’t spend money, there’s less of a demand for jobs that produce the stuff that people spend money on.

Then there are leading economic indicators. The prime one is the stock market. If the stock market consistently goes up, that’s good news for the economy, because it means consumers are confident about investing. This is why, even when the economy itself seems to be lagging, if the stock market starts increasing, better days are likely ahead.

But I’d like to suggest there are cultural indicators, and not just economic indicators, and that, in fact, the cultural indicators are even more significant.

Let’s take as an example the 2015 Obergefell decision that legalized same-sex “marriage” nationally. Obviously, this is a significant decision, but it wasn’t the turning point in the battle over gay “marriage.” That turning point occurred very slowly over the previous three decades or so. Homosexuality was normalized on TV sitcoms and in movies and magazines and in popular culture. The obligatory “gay” character was smart, witty, and attractive. The anti-gay character, often a Roman Catholic priest, was venal, weird, and combative. Over time, these sorts of stereotypes burn themselves into the consciousness of a culture. They made Obergefell not only possible, but almost inevitable. Obergefell was simply the legal (political) confirmation of an already well-established cultural victory.

Then let’s take the Trump phenomenon. I use that word phenomenon because it implies something much bigger than the bigger-than-life man himself. His 2015 campaign actually started channeling cultural and not only political developments. Rightly or wrongly (wrongly, in my view), many middle-class workers in the West had turned their backs on free enterprise. There was a strong backlash against seemingly unfettered immigration. There was a perception that the elite had gotten increasing control to harm the lives of ordinary, middle-class citizens. Historically, these have all been populist characteristics, and Trump’s 2016 election certainly didn’t launch them. His election was a lagging indicator of a previous cultural development.

We can take it as a rule that, with rare exceptions, what happens in elections, and particularly large national elections, is a lagging cultural indicator. This is often hard to predict by political experts, because they’re often focused solely on political factors; usually they don’t incorporate cultural developments into political calculations. In my view, they should.

Red and Blue Cultures

This also suggests the reason we have red and blue states is because we have red and blue cultures. I’m not suggesting culture is the only factor in politics. That would be far too simplistic. But if you live here in California as I do, and you spend time traveling in Louisiana or Mississippi or Alabama, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

I’ll never forget traveling around the U.S. in 2015 and 2016. In states like California and Washington and New Mexico, I heard a number of people say things like, “Trump is going to get trounced. I’ve never seen a Trump yard sign anywhere. Nobody I know, or nobody they know, would even consider voting for Trump.”

In Oklahoma and Kansas and Kentucky it went something like this: “Trump is going to rout Hillary. I don’t see a Hillary sign anywhere. Just a small number of elites will vote for Hillary.” Both of these viewpoints were wrong, obviously.

These weren’t mainly political statements. They were mainly cultural statements. Of course, there are plenty of big blue pockets in red states (almost always in cities) and big red pockets in blue states (almost always outside cities). But the point remains: culture is the tail that wags the political dog. Because the dog is more obvious on cable TV and everywhere else, we think the dog is the final determining factor. It isn’t. Politics is a lagging cultural indicator, and culture is a leading political indicator.

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Political Victories Are Not Cultural Victories

Second, because Christians have been preoccupied with politics and not culture, they’ve wrongly interpreted political victories as cultural victories. A little historical background is necessary.

For a century in the West the church purchased heavy stock in political pietism: that the Christian obligation to God is limited to private piety and personal evangelism and world missions and church-building and, at most, Christian schools. Applying the Faith in politics (and other areas of culture like science and media and technology and architecture and entertainment) is a distraction from our exclusive calling of personal and churchly piety. Cultural piety is a rabbit trail that pulls us from white-hot devotion to Jesus Christ. That’s a summary of pietism.

This pietism created a social vacuum filled by cultural apostasy, including a political apostasy marked by a secular politics: legalized abortion-on-demand, the expulsion of prayer from public schools, the pervasiveness of porn, leveling of taxes to engineer a Leftist social vision, and so on. In the 70’s a reaction set in, led by groups like Moral Majority and Christian Voice. Many Christians awakened from their pietistic slumbers and aggressively applied God’s word to pressing political issues. This reversal led to political victories, and even contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

By 2016, the scene had changed yet again. The earlier Christian political engagement hadn’t significantly tempered the cultural apostasy. The Obergefell decision legalized same-sex “marriage”; cultural Marxism marginalized manliness and lionized feminism; and porn was ubiquitous due to the digital revolution. In desperation, many Christians sidestepped the priority of cultural redemption and fixated on raw politics. You can install a politician or enact a political policy in a single election, but changing culture takes time. Time isn’t what these Christians wanted. They kicked culture out the back door and moved power politics into the mansion.

This recent power politics has largely been driven by the millennials and Gen Z. But if you’re in mid-40s or older, you’ve lived long enough to know that as conservative political victories have mounted, so have conservative cultural losses.

Conservative political victories did nothing whatsoever to stem the tide of the Sexual Revolution. It bulldozed Christianity and traditional standards all over the United States and everywhere else in the West. With smart phones, pornography has become ubiquitous. Conservative victories at the ballot box did not deescalate radical feminism. And don’t get me started on the transgender revolution. Whichever party held the White House, whichever party had control of Congress, whichever party dominated state houses, the cultural rot grew worse and worse.

There’s one seeming, striking, exception, and that is the overturning of Roe v. Wade, a staggering and spectacular victory which was not initiated by political victories, but by the long-game cultural strategy of the Federalist Society and the Alliance Defending Freedom and other groups and individuals working behind the scenes for many years to influence legal philosophy.

It should not escape our notice, however, that almost every place abortion has finally been put on the ballot, our side has lost, with Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota as gratifying exceptions. Please note that these are not first political losses but rather reflections of cultural losses. Most of the country, and this includes red states, are simply not where we’re at on the pro-life issue — including Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota. This is the obvious reason Donald Trump was willing to strip pro-life language out of the party platform and boldly declare that “reproductive freedom” would be defended in his administration. This was not a principled decision one way or the other. It was fully pragmatic. This also means that if abortion is to be correctly recriminalized around the country, it’ll be necessary to change the culture, not simply get people elected or even pass propositions. Abortion was a criminal act in most of U. S. history simply because it was unthinkable that it would not be. Criminalization was simply the legal expression of the conviction that abortion is the taking of another human life; that was not a debate. Throughout the mid 20^th century, the culture changed, and therefore in 1973 the law changed. Political change is usually subsequent to, and a consequence of, cultural change.

Culture Now, Politics Follows

And that leads to the third and final point: if we want to win election 2060, we need to start winning the culture now. The seeds of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 political victory were sown first culturally in a large minority groundswell against surging communism abroad and economic interventionism at home. The 60s and 70s were by all accounts decades of cultural excess – not so much political excess, mind you, for recall that Richard Nixon and even Lyndon Johnson we’re not by any means devoted political progressives. It was the culture that was progressive: free love (which turned out to be very costly indeed); exploding drug use and its increasing respectability; the questioning of almost all traditional beliefs and institutions; and other cultural factors. Reagan was the political beneficiary of a large resistance to these and other cultural developments

And then think about the political victory of Donald Trump, propelled by an entirely different set of cultural developments: the loss of manufacturing jobs; an excessively tolerant immigration policy; the rapid development of global free markets; and so on. Whatever we might think of these developments (and in my view, they’re much more checkered than the ones that drove Reagan to victory), they did create a cultural backlash environment for which Trump was the political beneficiary.

Culture War Proxies

One political fact has become strikingly evident: over the last quarter century, political battles have been proxies for the culture war. For most of American history, this simply wasn’t true, because there was no culture war — at least not with today’s extent and intensity. Democratic presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy were not the vanguard of cultural progressivism. They wouldn’t have dreamed of supporting legalized homosexuality or abortion or the genital mutilation of children by the transgender revolution — a practice they would’ve considered abominable. No, they mostly disagreed with their Republican counterparts on the size of the federal government and how communism should be contained. They didn’t fight a culture war but, at most, an economic war.

In the 70s all this began to change. The Democratic Party gradually became the party of the Sexual Revolution, and the Republican party became the party of traditional, which is to say, largely Christian, values. Today, in voting for a president, you’re voting for a particular cultural vision. This is just as true of Donald Trump as it was of Ronald Reagan, though the content of that vision between the two men is strikingly different.

Therefore, if Christians want a president and congressmen and governors and occupants of other political offices that really share their Christian worldview and will apply it in their politics, they need to work now to create a culture hospitable to that worldview. Remember that in Western constitutional democracies, people get approximately the politicians they deserve. In supporting the political arrangement we have, that’s what we all signed up for. So if we like neither of the presidential choices in the recent election, then we need to create a consensus, or at least a minority large enough to elect a different slate of candidates.

Family

What does that look like more specifically? It means, first, building strong families. The family is and always will be the backbone of a society. The family has been under withering attack everywhere in Western culture over the last three decades. Do you want to know how to replace the current anti-family culture with a pro-family culture? Get married, start a family, stay married, avoid the divorce courts, rear your children in the Faith and in the church and with a Christian education.

But this isn’t enough. This next point is vital. Strong families are not a private matter. Families are a public matter. This means you need to stand for these families in your areas of influence. A strong family is not just good for you and your family. It’s good for everybody. And if it’s good for everybody, we need to trumpet that truth.

Encourage your children to grow up and get married and have children of their own. Encourage your younger single friends to prepare for marriage (in the Faith, of course). Except in the most extreme cases, influence people to avoid divorce. Divorce has been one of the great cultural blights of the last half century. Citizens who have a high view of the family tend to vote differently than citizens who have a low view of the family, or almost no view of the family. The latter will tend to support highly individualized, antinomian, autonomy-protecting candidates. Dramatically restoring respect for the family will be eventually to dramatically change politics.

Responsibility

The same is true of personal responsibility. One reason God blessed the United States for so long is that it was founded by men who believed in personal responsibility. They didn’t valorize victimhood. They knew that, under God, we are the shapers of our own destiny. Casting a look around for a scapegoat for one’s failures – whether vocational or economic or family or spiritual failures — is a recipe for persevering failure.

Most expressions of economic interventionism over the last half century have been suckled on personal irresponsibility. This wasn’t true of the economic interventionism of Franklin Roosevelt. His view was still wrong. He wanted to tax wealth to help out “the little guy.” A bad economic idea, but one can sympathize with the motive.

But for most of the last 50 years, economic interventionism has been designed to subsidize irresponsibility: single child-rearing as a result of no-fault divorce, refusal to get and hold an honest job, failure to invest one’s own resources wisely but expect somebody else’s money to bail out one’s irresponsibility. Economic interventionism was simply a response to these cultural evils. In simple terms, in societies of cultural irresponsibility, the citizens will vote for politicians and policies that subsidize their irresponsibility. But recovering and promoting personal responsibility everywhere will lead to the election of personal responsibility candidates and the adoption of personal responsibility proposals.

Gospel

There’s so much more I could mention, but in the interest of space, I’ll close with the most important cultural development: and that is the success of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’re hearing less and less these days from Christians about national revival and repentance to prepare the way for a renewed Christian — that is to say, small-government — politics, and more and more about capturing the state without any reference to the gospel, in order to impose a top-down conservative political order. Politics has become secularized within Christianity. We now have a Leftist secularized politics and a Christian secularized politics.

Dropping the gospel from political concerns is no less reductionist than avoiding politics in favor of a narrow gospel preaching. When the church, by contrast, preaches the gospel in its fulness, baptizing new disciples and teaching them to observe biblical truth (Mt. 28:18–20), she lays the groundwork for a legitimate politics, because at the root of biblical truth is the claim of the risen King in all areas of life and thought, including politics. In Western democracies, Christians must support policies in line with biblical law and elect candidates that will enforce it. Over time this plan will gradually purge society of much of its depravity. When the church fails, it will get on its knees and repent and return to gospel truth. In other words, the gospel is the inexhaustible reservoir of legitimate politics. When we shut ourselves off from the gospel, or gradually let it slip away, we are guaranteeing a perverse politics. We reverse secularized politics by replacing it with the full-orbed gospel.

The gospel first changes culture by changing hearts. Changed hearts are certainly not the end, but they most emphatically are the beginning. There were never be a Christian culture without Christianity, and there will never be Christianity without changed hearts. This is why the unapologetic preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ is the first step in the right kind of political victories.

The Kind of World-Changers We Need

In conclusion, we need world-changers, but world-changers quite different from what many people today seem to understand.

I was struck by this FB post by Larson Hicks:

People who think that spending all their time on social media getting “red pilled” is somehow productive engagement in culture are delusional.
If you are interested in joining those of us who are actually on the front lines, we could use the reinforcements.
Here’s how you can help: Get married, raise a family, serve faithfully at your local church, and become really good at your job.
We’ll change the world together.

Amen, brother. Amen.

Personal

The CCL symposium, by God’s kindness, was our best and best attended in 24 years. Because this is a symposium and not a conference, we always cap the attendance, but we are now packed to capacity. We’re planning a larger Silver Anniversary conference for next December. Stay tuned. Here are some photos from CCL 2024: