To Change the World!

Alexis De Tocqueville said:

Americans have used their liberty to combat the individuality born of equality, and they have won.

This is old-fashioned populism. The problem with this, according to James Davison Hunter in To Change the World (click on the title), is that populism tends to ignore high culture and leave it untransformed. High cultural forms like academia, media, and government build the plausibility structures that makes the gospel seem implausible to moderns.

Hunter says that we will not change the world until we assume a "faithful presence" in the centers of high culture.