FrontPage Magazine has a great interview with screenwriter Mark Tapson on the importance of culture and how a lot of conservatives don’t understand how much control it has over politics. I found myself shouting “Yes!” when I watched it:

The political arena is obviously a very important battleground and it’s good that we have people fighting in that arena. But until conservatives get their heads around the fact that the culture is everything … then we’re not going to win another presidential election. It’s all about the culture now.

And conservatives are typically very uncomfortable with the culture, it’s an arena that we ceded to the left long ago, largely unwittingly. So it’s at the point now that conservatives are so repulsed by what the culture has become that their instinct is to reject it. “I’m not going to give those people in Hollywood a dime of my money. I cancelled my cable tv, I’m not watching that filth. I don’t buy music CDs.”

The problem with that attitude is that disengagement is not how you win a culture war. When you take yourself out of the culture stream and end up sitting on the banks while the rest of the country flows by you, you become as marginalized as the Amish. And then you lose in the political arena as well. So it’s really important for conservatives to understand how important the culture is and to be willing to dive into the fray.