Rare News Desk
American culture is changing because of the content on these omnipresent screens. Much proverbial ink has been spilled over the Right “losing the culture war” and since November of last year we have been scrambling to figure out what that means.
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GOP presidential candidate and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum thinks he’s figured it out and is taking steps to change things.
At CPAC St. Louis on Saturday, Santorum spoke to the audience about the importance of culture and how to actually affect change in our country. “If liberal Hollywood actors and producers can get involved in politics then conservative politicians can get involved in Hollywood,” he said. “By and large it’s folks who don’t share our values, and they’re having a huge impact on this country.”
This seems like a fairly obvious statement, but the truth is that conservatives — particularly social conservatives like Santorum — have been on the defense regarding culture. The reaction to the Left’s hold on Hollywood has been to retreat and shelter ourselves and our children from offensive content, which has lead to an even wider gap between conservative values and the movies and music that surround us.
The U.S. today is a culture that runs almost entirely on feelings. We respond to stories. We respond to emotion. Storytellers change hearts and minds in a way that all of the research in the world never will. The Left can boil their position down to a snarky Facebook meme that get shared 17 frillion times, and Republicans respond with a 56-page white paper on why they’re wrong. It doesn’t work, and it is the reason we continue to lose.
Santorum used a similar illustration, challenging people to cover up the bottom of their screen while watching C-SPAN. How do you tell the difference between a Republican and a Democrat? “The Republicans will get up there with a chart that has a pie chart, a line graph, and numbers. The Democrat will put a chart up with pictures.”
Those pictures put a face on the issue. Those stories make all of the pie charts and line graphs in the world irrelevant, because the charts do not elicit an emotional response from the viewer. They don’t incite the passion that people need to walk away and take action. Instead, they arm people that already agree with them to go talk to each other about how right they are, and we end up continuing to preach to the choir.
No one wins an election with graphs and charts. Santorum drove home the importance of stories when he asked the CPAC audience, “How many speeches do you remember, and how many movies do you remember? How many talking points from Heritage do you remember, and how many song lyrics do you know?”
We have to be better. We have to “engage the soul of our country,” as Santorum put it, and we have to do more than talk about how we should be relevant. It was refreshing to hear a GOP politician take very real steps to win back the culture. Let’s hope this is just the beginning.
