Conservatives should fight the culture war—but on a battlefield we can win

They accuse classical liberals of desertion in the culture wars, but this strikes me as a desertion of conservative ideas. They’re abandoning the insights from Hayek and others about emergent order and the limits of statism in favour of a centrally planned culture from Ottawa. Just because one accepts that the state interacts with culture doesn’t mean we should wield state power indiscriminately. In a diverse and pluralistic society in which fundamental questions about the good life and human flourishing are themselves contested, it means the opposite. We should be cautious about concentrating cultural authority in the hands of federal bureaucrats and politicians. That’s why devolving these questions downward—to provinces, markets, and civil society—as much as possible is, in my view, essential. I see subsidiarity as a key element of prudential conservative statecraft. Yes, of course, conservative governments should reverse progressive excesses within public institutions. And, yes, they should also extend conservative norms where appropriate, including, as mentioned, supporting families in the tax code. But it also means recognizing where the state is the wrong instrument altogether.  For example, we don’t have to imagine what a conservative National Film Board or a conservative arts bureaucracy might look like. We should just get rid of them altogether. The same goes for the CBC, private news media subsidies, and the panoply of federal grant programs that fund civic and political advocacy. Nationalizing these decisions effectively turns the federal government into an arbiter of cultural meaning and forces taxpayers to support causes and groups with whom they fundamentally disagree. There’s no opt-out option. The result is to unduly raise the political stakes and enable unrepresentative groups to circumvent the marketplace of ideas by gaming the political system. Government retrenchment would push these decisions down to individual Canadians and thus subject advocacy groups to a greater degree of market forces. If they couldn’t persuade their fellow citizens that their work is worth supporting, they’d have to change or close. That would represent a meaningful victory in the culture war. The same logic applies to higher education. If universities have become ideological monocultures, the answer isn’t for conservative politicians to micromanage their curriculum or faculty hiring. It’s to eliminate public transfers, raise tuition, and expose them fully to market pressures. Those institutions and programs that serve students will adapt. Those that rely on subsidy to sustain ideological projects will be forced to change or close. None of this denies that the state has real responsibilities. Conservatives should govern confidently on the issues that Anglin highlights in this essay. But governing confidently isn’t, as others have claimed, the same thing as imagining the state as the primary architect of cultural life or overcoming progressive institutional capture by trying to orchestrate a conservative one. Anglin is right that there are no pacifists in the culture war. But the greatest mistake conservatives can make is to fight it on the terrain the Left prefers: centralized politics, nationalized culture, a sprawling bureaucracy that adjudicates meaning. A culture war fought inside the state is a culture war that the state will eventually win. And that means politics becomes total, elections turn existential, and pluralism is weakened, which self-evidently would be bad for conservatives. But there is more than one way to fight. Conservatives’ best strategy is to make culture too decentralized, too plural, and too free for any government to control.