| Moved to Opinion because Richard Fernandez is a columnist. |
[PJMedia] David Gerlenter writing in the Wall Street Journal says something self-evidently true. The Left seems to have won every single culture battle fought.
Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.
The late Andrew Breitbart noticed the same thing.  Observing that "politics is downstream from culture" he argued the Left has made us the villains of our own stories.
Our lives -- indeed, our very species -- has storytelling wound into our DNA. ... Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. ...
Thus we come to politics ... the vast majority of those with the power of content creation are Liberals. ... Liberals control story. Â ...What is some of that messaging? Think about movies and TV. Corporations are evil -- using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). American soldiers are bloodthirsty lawbreaking maniacs (Any military film). The CIA conducts illegal, secret operations that have nothing to do with protecting America. Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders. David Letterman and Saturday Night Live ridicule the Right 95% of the time. Jon Stewart pretends to be centrist, but in fact jumps all over the Right far more often than the Left.
Liberal political candidates are the embodiments of those Liberal tenets. The goal is to associate them in voter minds via the vehicle of popular culture.
Even before Breitbart's warning there was Orwell who understood that the Left's ultimate ability was to uproot the past and plant their chosen seed for the future. Â His famous dictum "he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past" is an unsurpassed indictment of groupthink totalitarianism. Â There seemed no doubt they would succeed. Â Within its bubble the Left's control of culture is so absolute they can watch 1984 without realizing it's about them....more