Culture Changes Before Policy Does

Most of my closest friends don’t work in policy. They work in design, tech, education, and restaurants. Most have never read a piece of legislation cover to cover. But they notice things. Whose story is being told and whose is not. They text me clips from podcasts. They send me lyrics. They reference a movie scene to make a point I would have spent three paragraphs trying to make into a newsletter or memo.

It’s something I think about quite often, because I spend most of my days inside rooms where the smartest people I know are losing the country in real time — without realizing why. Conversations about 2028 have not been translated into terms that resonate with my friends at home. Conversations about democracy that have not made it past the people already convinced.

If you work in this sector, you already know the contradiction.

We say narrative and representation matter. We say movements need storytellers and creative strategists to do what policy alone cannot. And then, when budgets tighten, the cultural work is the first thing pushed to the next fiscal year.

I get why. Cultural investment is harder to justify in a one-pager than a policy win. The metrics are slower, the attribution messier. So, the work gets quietly downgraded year after year, and we are surprised when our opponents keep setting the terms of fights that matter.

Here is the part I want to be honest about. The Left is not bad at culture. I’d argue that we are extraordinary at it. Bad Bunny puts a same-sex couple on the Super Bowl stage, while Beyoncé reclaims who is allowed to be a cowboy. Ledisi sings “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to a stadium of people who hadn’t known what they’d been missing. Public policy doesn’t only come in the form of legislation. It’s also about what gets sung — and who sings it — at the Super Bowl, and what stories are taken seriously.

We win these moments constantly, but the trouble is that they tend to be moments.

Our cultural power is diffused, multicultural, and built on relationships. Theirs appear to be concentrated, corporate-funded, and sustained across decades. Our wins arrive in flashes, as theirs land on an infrastructure that was built when the rest of us might not have been paying attention. AI labs, social platforms, surveillance firms, oil and gas, private equity, billionaire-funded media. They are not embarrassed about funding the work that decides what feels real and right to ordinary people.

That is cultural power, and right now an enormous amount of it is being built with a level of intention we have not matched. They are pouring money into films, podcasts, and an entire alternative media economy, and they are not embarrassed about it — whoever shapes the story shapes the country.

The 2024 election made this impossible to ignore. A generation of young men formed their politics inside a podcast economy our sector spent a decade calling unserious, and we acted surprised when those politics showed up at the polls. Meanwhile, Ava DuVernay's 13th moved public opinion at scale because someone funded the connective work that turned a documentary into a policy conversation.

Policy changes the rules, litigation enforces them, and organizing builds the pressure that makes both possible. Each does work culture cannot do, and each runs on the terms culture sets long before the lawyers and lobbyists arrive. By the time an issue reaches a hearing room, the country has usually decided how it feels about the people involved, and that decision was made in a podcast on the daily commute or a film a friend couldn’t stop quoting.

Most people reading this are already living inside the funding crisis. Documentaries that should be made are stuck in development. Cultural organizations are being asked to translate their value into dashboard metrics, as if the question is whether they can prove themselves on terms borrowed from somewhere else.

The deeper trouble is the framework. Somewhere along the way, the sector decided culture had to behave like everything else in the portfolio. Applied to cultural work, those instincts make the work brittle. Art turns into content, stories turn into messaging, and we wonder why nothing we fund moves people the way our opponents move people for a fraction of the cost.

Arts and entertainment work needs more than project grants. It needs firms and teams that can hold politics and culture inside the same strategy, not as parallel departments; people who treat the seam between movement work and creative work as a profession, not a favor between friends.

There are plenty of communications shops that can write a press release, plenty of agencies that can produce a campaign. What the field does not have nearly enough of are partners who can hold the strategy across an entire arc, from a script in development to the policy hearing it eventually informs. That is what philanthropic foundations should be building around in 2026 and beyond.

Because culture is upstream of politics far more often than we like to admit. Before a bill is introduced, a story has been told about who deserves help. Before any of us organize, we must first believe something different is possible, and that belief almost always arrives through a song or a film before it arrives through a memo.

Culture binds the work together. Without it, we are disjointed, and we know we are.

Those of us who care about justice, democracy, and pluralism cannot keep treating culture as the thing we get to once the real work is done. It is the work. It’s how my friends find their way into issues nobody handed them a briefing on, and how communities refuse to disappear when an institution would rather they did.

We have the talent and the moments. What we don’t have, yet, is the discipline to treat our cultural wins as part of a long-term strategy rather than a string of beautiful, scattered sparks. Funding culture is not indulgent. It’s one of the few moves left that builds power on terms we can name.

We can no longer afford to keep pretending that investments in arts and culture are optional.