Sunday, November 25, 2012
The Long Game
City Journal: Life is short, said Hippocrates, but art is long. There is a practical corollary to that great truth: elections are won and lost in the politics of the moment, but it’s the culture that makes the nation.
In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, conservative political thinkers will have to ask themselves some hard questions. How much of our defeat was due to strategy and how much to structure? How can we reach out to struggling workers without sacrificing our commitment to free enterprise and individual liberty? How can we speak to single women without losing voters committed to family values and the lives of the unborn? How can we welcome the children of illegal immigrants without compromising our belief in the rule of law?
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4 comments:
I think it's a little sad to see politics having such an influence over art. Sadly, they do. Culture is the piece of every group of people that makes them who they are. I almost am tempted to say that politics is a less favorable part of our culture. Even if that's true, our culture is something we need to make last, and if that means that we have to put aside our differences to keep it alive, so be it. The direction we take ourselves in, of course, is a big factor in that, which is what makes politics relevant. Let's hope whoever is leading us and whoever is not happy about that will not permanently stain our culture
I was confused for a minute about why this article was on the blog (not at all because I don't think politics should be on the blog, but just because I wasn't expecting to see something SO political).
Being a staunch liberal, this article angered me for a lot of reasons. First of all, whoa, hello bias. As part of his opening argument, the author claims that the top three political writers in the nation are conservative. That is a claim that at the very least requires some sort of citation to back it up, but to just throw it out there as a statement of fact when it is really a 100% subjective opinion is not good writing.
Second of all, I know that the right is having lots of no conversations about changing the face of the party in the wake of Romney's defeat, so I get why the writer chose to publish this article, but none of his claims about the media and the Democratic party are substantiated by any examples or even anecdotes. This entire article just seems like an example of how not to form a coherent argument. It's just a series of opinion statements, with some INCREDIBLY biased assertions.
I do agree with his sentence about providing more funding for the arts, but I absolutely do not agree with his underlying premise: that more support and funding should be given only to the arts organizations that further the right's ideology. The fact that the arts are being manipulated for political gains is a sad, but true reality of the current culture.
Yikes! I've got the same reaction to this article as Cat does. This is politically supercharged with self-righteous opinions that left me feeling angry and doubting the legitimacy of this author. Although it's good to see arguments from the opposite side of where most of us are generally politically situated, this "argument" is so densely conservative that it is hard to pay attention to the good points he is actually making in between the abrasive comments. He's hardly even lightly veiling his desire to offend the left.
One of the few points of interest that I could extract from this article amidst the thickly woven rudeness was that what we need is a truly unbiased platform for younger minds to debate or speak their positions. Both the liberal and the conservative news outlets are guilty of shading stories to enhance their particular point of view.
Wow, this author is certainly not afraid to voice his opinions. I must admit, though I fear some judgement, that I too have views that lean more to the right. However, I'm not sure that such measures as the author describes need to be taken for the political future of our country. I don't think that what the author is describing should be called an art form, so much as a strategy. Sure, there is some amount of art in the game of politics as far as the creative ways in which candidates find to voice opinions, but overall I think politics are more of a game. I like that he thinks the arts need more funding and wouldn't mind exploring the idea of political messages in art, but I think seeing conservative values in the Dark Knight trilogy is a bit of a stretch.
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