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Culture wars are easy to dismiss when your side is winning one.

The phrase suggests an artificial conflict manufactured by activists who cannot leave ordinary life alone. Yet every society teaches its members what is admirable, shameful, natural and just. The dispute begins when we ask who is doing the teaching—and what vision of society their institutions are working to produce.

Ideas hostile to the classical liberal principles upon which Western societies were founded have gained commanding influence across many of the institutions that produce and transmit culture. Schools, universities, publishers, arts organizations, media outlets and professional associations increasingly interpret society through categories of power, identity, oppression and liberation, while individual responsibility, equality before the law and freedom of conscience are treated with suspicion.

This did not happen because a secret committee issued instructions from a hidden room. Cultural change rarely works that neatly. People enter institutions carrying particular assumptions, hire and promote others who share them, reward work that conforms to the emerging consensus and gradually redefine what respectable people are permitted to believe. The framework also offers something many post-religious institutions lack: moral purpose, a vocabulary of sin and redemption, and a hierarchy of virtue in which conformity can be experienced as courage.

Over time, ideology becomes professional common sense.

To understand how this occurred, we need to return to a problem that confronted Marxists in the early twentieth century. Classical Marxism predicted that the working class in advanced capitalist societies would eventually rise against the bourgeois order. That revolution did not materialize in the industrial democracies of the West, where workers frequently remained attached to their countries, churches, families and inherited ways of life.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist writing from a Fascist prison, attempted to explain why.

Gramsci argued that Western societies were not maintained by economic coercion or state violence alone. Their stability also depended upon what he called cultural hegemony: the network of institutions, customs and moral assumptions through which people came to regard the existing order as legitimate. Government possessed force, but civil society produced consent.

Churches, schools, universities, newspapers, unions, voluntary associations and intellectual institutions all helped form the common sense of the population. Together they created a protective structure around the political order, making a direct revolutionary assault far more difficult than Marxist theory had anticipated.

Gramsci did not leave behind a five-point infiltration manual. What he provided was more important: an explanation of why political revolution in the West required a prior struggle over culture. Before a movement could capture the state, it would have to establish intellectual and moral authority within civil society by cultivating its own educators, organizers, artists and “organic intellectuals.”

Gramsci called this prolonged cultural contest a “war of position.” Decades later, Rudi Dutschke gave a related strategy its memorable name: the “long march through the institutions.” The phrase was Dutschke’s, and direct intellectual transmission from Gramsci is disputed, but both recognized the same strategic reality: durable political transformation required sustained work within the institutions that formed public consciousness.

That contest has travelled a considerable distance. The economic categories of classical Marxism did not disappear, but they were joined by cultural categories drawn from race, sex, sexuality and identity. Society was increasingly interpreted as a struggle between oppressors and oppressed, while inherited norms and institutions were treated as mechanisms through which dominant groups preserved their power.

This is what I mean by cultural Marxism. Critics object that this is not orthodox Marxism, and they are correct in the narrow sense. It is Marxism adapted to a cultural register, retaining the moral architecture of oppressor and oppressed while changing the principal categories through which that conflict is understood.

This does not require an omnipotent conspiracy in which every progressive activist takes orders from a central authority. It describes the migration of Marxist habits of thought into the wider culture: the elevation of group identity over individual responsibility, the reduction of social relationships to power, the assumption that unequal outcomes demonstrate oppression and the belief that liberation requires the transformation of inherited institutions.

The institutional consequences are no longer theoretical. The Canada Council for the Arts explicitly applies equity principles across its funding programs and provides targeted support to designated priority groups. Its stated purpose is to correct persistent barriers, not to advance Marxism, but the policy illustrates how cultural resources are increasingly allocated through group-based concepts of equity rather than formally equal treatment. The Council describes that policy in its own terms.

Universities provide another measure of the emerging consensus. In a 2024 survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, more than half of conservative faculty respondents reported at least occasionally concealing their political beliefs from colleagues to protect their careers. That does not prove that every campus has become ideologically uniform, but it does show that institutional culture can impose professional costs without requiring formal censorship. FIRE’s faculty report documents the wider pattern.

Politics lies downstream of this cultural formation. People arrive at elections with moral intuitions already shaped by the stories they have encountered, the history they have been taught and the institutions they have learned to trust. If children encounter Western civilization primarily through slavery, colonialism, racism and exclusion, they should not surprise us by concluding that their inheritance is uniquely shameful.

Those failures belong in the historical record and must not be concealed. Progressives can reasonably argue that many institutional changes corrected genuine exclusions, and they are right. Western societies did not always honour their own principles, while appeals to tradition sometimes protected injustice.

The dividing line is not whether institutions may change. It is whether reform extends liberal principles to people previously denied them or replaces those principles with group entitlement, inherited guilt and political tests. A civilization taught only through its crimes does not produce citizens equipped to improve it; it produces citizens emotionally prepared to repudiate it.

Classical liberals and conservatives have too often responded downstream. They pour money into elections, policy organizations, advertising and social media campaigns while giving comparatively little attention to the institutions that form political instincts before a campaign begins. They criticize ideological films without supporting better filmmakers, mock politicized novels without helping dissenting writers reach readers and complain about educational capture without cultivating teachers capable of presenting a richer account of Western history.

They are searching beneath the political streetlamp because that is where the light is better, even though the cultural keys were lost somewhere else.

Winning a culture war therefore requires more than defeating a candidate or exposing the latest ideological absurdity. Writers, filmmakers, musicians, teachers, publishers and artists who value freedom need patrons, professional networks, durable institutions and routes to an audience. Expecting every dissenting creator to finance, market and distribute his own work while established institutions subsidize the prevailing orthodoxy is not a serious cultural strategy.

This does not mean manufacturing classical liberal propaganda. Ideological art remains ideological art regardless of which side produces it, while characters who exist only to recite correct opinions are no more compelling when those opinions happen to be ours. The alternative culture must succeed as culture: truthful about human nature, alive to tragedy, unafraid of beauty and capable of showing why freedom is both valuable and demanding.

It must also teach Western history honestly enough to acknowledge cruelty and failure while explaining the development of individual rights, constitutional government, scientific inquiry, religious toleration and equality before the law. Positive cultural confidence does not require collective innocence, because a mature society can admit what its ancestors got wrong without pretending they built nothing worth inheriting.

Nor does national pride require hostility toward other peoples. It means recognizing that a country and civilization can possess a distinctive inheritance worthy of gratitude, stewardship and improvement. We can criticize our institutions while remaining committed to them, correct injustice without abandoning individual responsibility and reform society without teaching people to hate it.

The alternative offered by revolutionary politics is not merely reform at a faster pace. A movement that treats individual rights, procedural neutrality and freedom of conscience as instruments of oppression cannot be trusted to preserve those protections after acquiring power. Activists who regard institutions principally as weapons against their enemies may discover that revolutionary institutions have little tolerance for activists once the revolution is complete.

The proper response is not to imitate that illiberalism from the Right, but to contest the culture while remaining faithful to the classical liberal order we are trying to defend. That requires recovering the confidence to say that Western civilization, although imperfect, has produced achievements worth preserving; that freedom is more than camouflage for power; and that individuals cannot be reduced to racial, sexual or economic categories.

Politics still matters, but it cannot permanently defend principles that the culture has taught people to despise. If we want different political outcomes, we must begin further upstream, in the institutions and stories that teach each generation what is true, what is admirable and what kind of society deserves to survive.