The late, great Andrew Breitbart famously observed, “Politics is downstream from culture,” and as was so often the case, he was right. Now the very same conservative activist who was the architect of President Trump’s placement of three conservative justices on the Supreme Court is channeling his inner Andrew Breitbart to “crush liberal dominance” in our culture, including corporate boardrooms as well as in media and entertainment.
In a rare interview, Leonard Leo, the architect of the rightward shift on the Supreme Court under Donald Trump, said his non-profit advocacy group, the Marble Freedom Trust, was ready to confront the private sector in addition to the government.
“We need to crush liberal dominance where it’s most insidious, so we’ll direct resources to build talent and capital formation pipelines in the areas of news and entertainment, where leftwing extremism is most evident,” Leo told the Financial Times.
“Expect us to increase support for organisations that call out companies and financial institutions that bend to the woke mind virus spread by regulators and NGOs, so that they have to pay a price for putting extreme leftwing ideology ahead of consumers,” he said.
This is a Herculean task; the long march through the institutions that made things the way they are now began as long ago as the last years of the 19th century. No one man, no one organization can completely carry out this task. But great rivers begin with small streams. This effort is worth making, although one must admit that even determining the scope of the problem may be the work of a lifetime. How many institutions have leftist groupthink infiltrated? Business, yes, news and entertainment, most assuredly. But how about schools? The bureaucracies of the several layers of government from county to the federal Colossus?
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That’s not to say that conservatives and libertarians shouldn’t undertake this effort, but we should be well aware of the task ahead of us.
Here’s the thing; while efforts like this one are important, and while helping to fund lawsuits and other actions against companies that go all-in on things like DEI hiring practices is worth doing, it’s important to note that the institutions named are just part of the problem. People tend to support their economic interests; politics may be downstream from culture, but culture is downstream from economics. Every decision we make in our daily lives has an economic element to it, and while a politician might ask what you want, an economist will ask what you want more. Any effort to reshape our culture into a more liberty-minded one has to first demonstrate the economic benefits of liberty.
Economics issues are, of course, of great concern in this election cycle. Both major-party candidates have been hitting economic themes, although one of them is pushing the same predictable leftist claptrap.
Leo’s group is not, however, supporting candidates directly.
“The political environment is more topsy-turvy and more uncertain than it’s ever been in my lifetime,” said Leo. “Political investing is not as good a bet as it used to be.”
If that’s not the understatement of the century, it will do until a better one comes along.
