Monday, May 22, 2006

Da Vinci Thoughts   [Stanley Kurtz]

I just saw The Da Vinci Code.  Point one: Michael Novak’s review is dead on.
Point two: This movie is a salutary kick in the teeth for conservatives.  There’s no gainsaying the fact that the Narnia movie was a big deal.  Having conceded that, the fact remains that when it comes to exercising influence on the fundamental levers of American culture, conservatives remain in a pathetically weakened position.

I may not be a professor of “symbology,” but I have taught at Harvard and studied religious symbolism.  So I feel in a particularly strong position to reveal the entirely unsecret conspiracy against patriotism, tradition, and religion hiding in plain sight on our movie and television screens, in our universities, and on the pages of the mainstream press.  Conservatives have forgotten just how precarious our position is.  One cable news channel, talk radio, and the blogosphere do not an invincible army make.  It only seems that way because we also have nominal control of the reigns of power.  But lose our foothold in government, and conservatives are up a creek.  The other side controls the levers of cultural power in this country, and we are the enemy in their eyes (and on their screens).

Conservatives need to face the fact that our position in this culture is genuinely precarious.  If we lose our hold on power, we’ll scream bloody murder on our outlets at everything the other side does.  Yet those screams may only confirm our helplessness.  The deep cultural dimension of our political battles makes an ordinary transfer of political power far more consequential than it was in the days when America had a bipartisan foreign policy and a broad cultural consensus.  We can dream about forcing Republicans to the right and then riding back into power two years later, but one big loss could easily turn conservatives back into a marginal cultural force for some time.

Why have Democrats been so angry?  It’s because their taken-for-granted cultural superiority has been called into question by 9/11, the return of patriotism, a tough foreign policy, and the open defense of the sort of traditional values they thought were on the way out.  Republican victories have punctured the cultural left’s sense of the historical inevitability of their triumph, and that is at the root of their rage.  By controlling the political agenda, conservatives control the cultural agenda as well (or at least a large part of it).  But the truth is, other than the government, the left is still in control of our critical cultural institutions.  Should the left recapture the government as well, it may well succeed in pushing traditionalists aside in the culture at large.

The battle is radicalizing.  Big Love and The Da Vinci Code are far more direct and brazen attacks on tradition than we might have anticipated just a few years ago.  Conservatives are the targets, and Hollywood is aiming and shooting repeatedly.  Give credit to Tom Hanks, by the way.  As producer of Big Love and star of The Da Vinci Code, he is clearly one of the captains of the not-so-secret conspiracy.

05/22 10:58 AMShare