The Current Events Room
This week, celebrities emerged from their Hollywood cocoon to sound off on abortion law ... in Georgia. If this sounds bizarre, that's because it is: The people of Georgia don't spend an awful lot of time trying to control the policies of New York or California. Yet the greatest and most moral among us -- people who read lines for a living and look attractive for magazine covers -- now lecture people thousands of miles away on the necessity of late-term abortion.
This sort of disdain of our culture's supposed elite for those who disagree politically is helping drive another wedge into our national divide. It's actually promoting a spiral of division that has severe consequences for our national polis.
Here's how it works.
Culture is supposed to be the binding glue for any nation. The United States is ethnically, politically and religiously diverse. Only a few key threads still bind citizens from New York with citizens from Georgia: symbols like the American flag, institutions like the American military and, yes, water cooler conversations over sports, movies, music and television.
The American left has politicized each of these threads, in effect fraying them. The American flag itself has become a symbol of division, as our cultural betters -- and the gimlet-eyed marketing firms that power corporations like Nike -- decide to glorify protests against the flag. The American military has been politicized, too, with Hollywood portraying soldiers as either victims or villains (aside from a few rarities like "American Sniper" -- which, not coincidentally, did enormous in the box office). Our movies and television and music have become politicized, too, with artists deemed "unwoke" if they refuse to speak up on the issues of the day.
Our cultural arbiters, in turn, have reacted to the political victory of their opposition with renewed attempts to merge culture and politics -- they've gotten more extreme, louder, more pronounced in their determination to shift the culture to their point of view. Which will, of course, drive more political divisions.
A pluralistic democracy requires three factors to function: a shared cultural space; a shared belief in key ideas, largely embedded in the Constitution; and a shared willingness to leave one another alone. As each component erodes, so, too, does the possibility of a united country.....snip~
https://townhall.com/columnists/bens...tters-n2547427
Notice how when threads are posted up about celebs in politics. What the usual response is about who cares. They don't matter. Well now you know why they matter and what celebrity politics does and how it affects the country. Shapiro nails it. Thoughts?
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Originally Posted by Peter1469
