As I wrote at Modern Conservative, folks “need to bear down and get back to work on the Culture. Write stories. Create Art. Report the news. Make movies. Teach the young. Perform plays. Criticize intelligently. As we conservatives do that work, many leaders will emerge, and America will be put back on the Right track.” I need to stop throwing stones at what I don’t like (Christians have been doing that for years, concerning Hollywood, and see where that’s got them). I need to work on creating what I want to see.

Howard R. (#24), You and Andrew would agree on much. The “New American Culture” as he calls it. This is clear when Andrew describes it as “… a culture [that] would reflect and uplift the values and perspectives that made the west and America the greatest and freest places on the globe; it would put forward an image of man as our founders knew him to be, flawed and sinful yet capable of striving toward dignity and salvation through self-reliance and sacrifice.”

Clearly, Andrew is not asking for “an entirely new set of cultural values be built from whole cloth.”

Given how far the Culture has slipped into anti-American, Statist promoting nonsense returning to what made the West and America “the greatest and freest places on the globe” would be “new” to many people.

This is something that I’ve been blogging about at both my blog linked above, and at Modern Conservative here and here.

Not without another, critical element.

A culture forms and flourishes because a communications medium of some sort unites the people who participate in it with their compatible values and norms. The scope of the medium will determine the size of the culture; the bandwidth of the medium will determine how quickly it solidifies and spreads.

The current, statist culture owns the mainstream media, which, as Mr. Klavan has observed, protect the culture and the values and norms it promotes. To form a New American Counterculture will require the exploitation, intellectually and artistically, of a communications medium of equal or greater scope and bandwidth. What would that be?

The key factor no one has adequately addressed is money.

Talk radio, as much good as it’s done, doesn’t have the scope to propel a national culture. It functions well at the local level, but apart from the Rush Limbaugh phenomenon, which others have attempted to match with no success, it offers little prospect.

The Internet has been conservatives’ great hope, but it, too, has limitations. Up to now no artistically applicable model has arisen through which money could be made in decent quantities via the Internet. Again, there have been some stirring success stories — Amazon is the most prominent — but these don’t appear imitable by a cultural entrepreneur.

Revenue to a non-artistic patron is the logistic support the arts have always required. Most artistic and expressive efforts need to be supported by commercial enterprises; they can’t gain enough revenue on their own hook to be self-sustaining. A model for making money through cultural and intellectual dissemination on our chosen medium must emerge before any thrust there, however well meant, can be sustained.

The mainstream media have sustained themselves financially by offering advertisers what they crave: broad scope, high bandwidth, the ability to tailor their advertising to local needs, and large numbers of eyeballs to view it. If we can counterstrike through talk radio and the Internet, it will be because some bright fellow concocts a revenue-generating technique suitable to those media, compatible with the offerings we hope to promote, which will appeal at least as strongly to prospective supporters as what our opponents have to offer.

Is anyone even working on such a thing?

Like Eastwood’s character in “Grand Torino”? Here is the key, let your pocketbook do your protesting. If you find something offensive on TV, don’t watch it. If a books author has distasteful political leaning, don’t buy their books. If a movie has actors with repugnant political philosophies or a theme that is Leftists or anti-freedom, don’t pay your money to see it.

Great post and I caught you on Fox today! You did great (((props)))!

God bless you and thank you for speaking your message loud and clear.