Andrew Breitbart claimed “politics is downstream from culture.” The proposition is simple: in order to change government policy we must change the culture. This is related to the political lefts “wars of position", in which the aggressors defeat their adversaries by gaining positions of power within the established institutions. By controlling established institutions, such as the mainstream media, Hollywood and Big Tech, the left has been able to propagate their political narrative almost without opposition. The widespread propaganda of these institutions has influenced the way Americans and the Western world view religion, ethics, science and metaphysics. In turn, this influences whom the American people vote into office and the resulting government policies.
The “small government” establishment conservative was both unable and unwilling to prevent the liberal takeover of the institutions because the establishment largely accepted liberal premises. It was argued that government was to remain neutral in all matters relating to non-government institutions, the same institutions the left spent decades infiltrating. At the same time the left was infiltrating the institutions, they were simultaneously using political power to change the culture. Three relatively recent Supreme Court decisions would radically change American culture.
The first court decision was Engel v. Vitale, which ruled that the long standing American tradition of public prayer was unconstitutional in government run schools. In a single decision, state and local governments were now unable to counter an already increasingly secular public opinion. After generations of students taught little of the Biblical principles shared by most Americans since the first colony in 1607, it is now culturally accepted that the United States was founded as a secular liberal democracy.
In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that a woman's liberty included the right to purposely end her babies life. This court decision would further radically change the country's understanding of morality and personhood and officially establish liberalism as the state quasireligion.
The third court ruling was Obergefell v. Hodges, which changed the cultures understanding of marriage as the sacramental union between one man and one woman to a government contract between any two persons with no defined purpose. The court neither discussed the merits of the argument for marriage or provided an alternative definition, but rather ruled that the traditional understanding of marriage was incompatible with the established state quasireligion. Again, in one court decision the use of political power had changed public opinion and thus the culture.
Those are three prime examples of how culture is downstream from politics . This isn't to say that politics is not downstream from culture, but only that it isn't the entire story. As Saint Thomas Aquinas taught us,
virtue implies a perfection of power: wherefore the virtue of a thing is fixed by the limit of its power (De Coelo i). Now the limit of any power must needs be good: for all evil implies defect; wherefore Dionysius says (Div. Hom. ii) that every evil is a weakness. And for this reason the virtue of a thing must be regarded in reference to good. Therefore human virtue which is an operative habit, is a good habit, productive of good works.
Conservatives should fight the “wars of position”, but conservatives should also use the power of government to help citizens develop virtuous habits. Some examples are prohibiting perverted “Pride parades”, removing LGTBQIA+ ideology from public schools and making access to pornography more difficult. These are simply a few examples of how government power can be used to influence culture. Rather than politics being downstream from culture or culture being downstream from politics, culture and politics act in a reinforcing feedback loop.