Republicans will not win until they recognize that 2020 is not a political fight, but a battle over America’s culture and the future of the country, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro told “Life, Liberty & Levin” in an interview that aired Sunday.
“I think that the great flaw of the political right is that we ceded the culture and we focused in on politics. The right is actually very good at winning elections. We’ve had several Republican presidents in my lifetime. We’ve dominated Congress from 1994 to 2006 and then again from 2010 to 2018, and it didn’t matter. I mean, the left continued to shift to the very nature of the deck. It’s not about winning elections. It’s about winning the culture,” said Shapiro, the editor emeritus of The Daily Wire and author of the forthcoming book, “How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.”
The outspoken conservative said his party too often looked the other way on key issues, leaving a vacancy for the left to fill with little pushback from across the aisle.
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“The right did not engage in the education system. They sort of let it go,” he explained. “We didn’t engage in culture-making in Hollywood. We just kind of let it go. We set up alternative media structures outside the mainstream media, and that’s been the most successful part of what the right has done. But, now that the left is trying in vengeful fashion to shut down all possibility of social media, even distributing those messages, So the right has to understand that this is indeed more a culture war than it is even a political war.”
The solution, Shapiro said, boiled down to a focus on “re-instilling a sense that we share a culture.”
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“I don’t mean like we watch the same football games or we patronize the same stores,” he explained.
“What I really mean is that we have to be having the same moral conversation about rights and that’s where I think that Americans can still be heard. I think that even the movements from the left that have been most wildly successful have been couched many times dishonestly in terms of rights. But, I think that the political right in this country does have a near-monopoly on the traditional vision of what rights constitute,” he concluded, adding, “I think that’s still a great vision and still an appealing one.”
