Politics and America’s Cultural Output
The following is an overview of Law & Liberty's February forum on the tenor of American cultural output and its relationship with our politics.
At a time when most politicians are actors, and the outside steps of the Capitol or the courthouse often seem more important than what goes on inside those buildings, it’s not hard to see that our politics is not so different from our screens. Film director Adam Simon led Law & Liberty’s February forum on the tenor of American cultural output and its relationship with our politics.
Simon opened the forum by arguing that culture is neither upstream nor downstream from politics—culture “is the stream. And everyone is soaking it in.” Drawing on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, he makes the case that our civil life is “in a way founded on the same rhetorical structure and devices as the drama—especially in that most rhetoric-dependent of regimes, a democracy, where all rests on some form of popular agreement.” And our democratic rhetoric is all too easily identified with melodrama, which tends toward Manichean distinctions between good and evil, and all-or-nothing conflict with neither nuance nor compromise.
Accordingly, we have lost sight of a more tragic understanding of life together, in which goods are often in competition with one another, and one evil must sometimes be chosen over another. A tragic view of politics is one that recognizes the constant need for tradeoffs, compromises, and therefore conversation. But Simon is optimistic that there is a growing fatigue with our melodramatic politics, and believes that many of the narratives being produced for films and television may just help us recapture a sense of the tragic in public life.
Adding to Simon’s diagnosis, novelist Kat Rosenfield stressed that the melodrama of our public stories—fictional and political—turns “every human interaction into a microcosmic battle between good and evil.” This has produced a narrative of victimhood that creates an endless stream of villains, and encourages everyone to see himself as a victim, but rarely offers us heroes who courageously confront their obstacles. Whether novelists, filmmakers, and others involved in contributing to the culture can affect much change, however, Rosenfield is unsure.
Novelist and literary scholar Lee Oser also agrees with Simon’s pluralist impulse, and on the oversimplified nature of American stories and politics. But circumspection is in order when thinking about American stories of good and evil: “We cannot put our knowledge of good and evil back on the branch where we found it. Our historical panoramas are inevitably populated by angels and demons and by martyrs and madmen.” Can the artist ignore altogether the apocalyptic vision? It may be, Oser concludes, that what we need most in an age of cocksure Manicheanism is comedy—and particularly satire.
More critically, poet and humanities professor James Matthew Wilson warns that Simon’s insistence on pluralism and the abandonment of the rhetoric of good and evil may also entail a cutting off of politics and political language from truth and the need to live rightly together. Pluralism, argues Wilson, is not the aim of politics but the very tragic reality that politics must overcome. Drawing on Simon’s discussion of Frank Capra, Wilson conludes that America is at its best when it gets past melodrama and Simon’s tragic outlook, and finds “a genuine community united in its love of the highest good held in common.”
Ultimately, Simon argues in the concluding essay, we must be able to discern true evil from the kind manufactured by our political melodrama. But we cannot let the existence of good and evil serve as a justification for a politics of “natural orders” or one that uses state power “to coerce people into unity.” Politics ought to bridge our differences, but in a limited way that avoids nostalgic yearning for the unity of a “golden past,” or utopian dreams of a perfect tomorrow. “Instead, let’s practice the unsettling joy of an endless conversation among us as equals in the here and now.”
