Learning from the Cultural Conservatives, Part II: Talking Up The Worldview

By Sara Robinson

March 5th, 2008 - 4:00pm ET

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This is Part II of a series on the strategies used by the conservatives to promote their worldview, and the lessons progressives can learn from them to promote our own. Part I is here.

As we saw in the previous post, the entire conservative movement was organized around the single goal of changing the country's dominant worldview, weaning it away from liberal assumptions about how the world works, and teaching Americans to assign meaning to the world using conservative values instead. They firmly (and rightly) believed that that once the rest of the country evaluated and prioritized reality the same way they did, the rest of the conservative political, economic, and social agenda could be implemented with strong popular support, and no meaningful resistance.