Politics Killed the Culture
13th November 2022
“Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together,” Barney Frank once said. The sleazy former congressman was echoing Rousseau’s idea of the General Will.
To leftists, the state was the central unifying principle and the thing that brought us together.
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America didn’t just become a world power by economic and military power, but culture. And when we were done, much of the world wanted to be an American, as it had once wanted to be Greek or English. We conquered the world without intending to or even realizing it.
That culture is mostly dead now except as a bunch of corporate properties being beaten to death. The machinery of mass culture is still there, but it has no soul. The $500 million comic book spectacles and the oversaturated autotuned payola music makes money, but much of it performs better around the world than it does in America. The days when it brought us together are long gone. Mass culture now reminds us of how little we have in common.