Digby: The Limits Of Politics

Good post on the culture wars...--Dictynna

For your daily pop culture diatribe, I cannot recommend this post by Matt Yglesias highly enough.

Any worldview that can't stand up in the midst of a vibrant cultural ocean needs to rethink itself more than it needs to try and dragoon political forces into supporting it. I often feel that America's religious traditionalists ought to engage in more self-congratulation. Despite -- or, I would argue, because of -- its inability to entrench itself as a European-style official religion, certain strains of American Protestantism have established themselves as far and away the most robust and viable religious force in the developed world. Traditionalists are perfectly capable of doing as I suggest -- fighting the fight in the background society, contesting secular culture in the cultural domain. There's all this stuff out there. Let it fight, let's argue, write, sing, film, etc. But preserving that sort of vibrancy -- the integrity, one might say, of America's various communities -- requires us not to subordinate the value of everything to the values of politics, and not to try and turn everything into the subject of collective political decision-making.

That's it exactly. Politics can't do everything. And everything isn't politics. Democrats can offer real solutions to real people's problems, but not all of them. We can help mitigate the risk of the free market and provide some protection from the more predatory aspects of capitalism. We can guarantee that every person be treated equally under the law and we can ensure our civil liberties. But politics cannot dictate culture and everytime it tries it creates far more problems than it solves.