Weird locution

Reader comment on: Cultural and Prepolitical

Submitted by John Gillis (United States), Feb 6, 2018 20:11

Brooks: The crucial battleground is cultural and prepolitical.
This is an extremely vague and awkward way of saying that what precedes politics is philosophy (not religion as other correspondents claim). "prepolitical" is fairly contentless as is "cultural", but to say that one's politics is dependent on deeper ideas about human nature and the nature of the world, one is talking philosophy, which would have made Brooks' point coherent.
So the editor is correct that this sort of talk is "onto something important" -- it's just that ideas do matter, and the wider and more abstract they are, the more they matter.

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