The Economics of the Culture War

A $1.2 trillion industry, and a fight over who gets to shape the public mind.

For a long time, American politics pretended culture was decorative. A nice extra. Something you fund when times are good and cut when times are tight. That lie no longer works. Culture is now a $1.2 trillion sector of the U.S. economy. It accounts for more than four percent of GDP. It employs millions. It shapes global taste. It exports American identity every day in the form of music, film, fashion, design, media, architecture, and digital life.

That is not a hobby. That is a power block. And once something becomes a power block, it becomes a target.

The fight over culture is not about taste. It is not about wokeness or tradition or morality, no matter how often those words get used. It is about control over one of the largest engines of money and meaning in the country. If you influence culture, you influence consumer behavior. You influence political behavior. You influence what people believe is normal, possible, shameful, or aspirational.

That is real leverage.

This is why the same political forces trying to dominate civic institutions are now circling cultural ones. Museums. Universities. Public broadcasters. Nonprofit arts orgs. Streaming platforms. Social media infrastructure. None of this is random. You do not attempt to regulate or “align” things that do not matter. You attempt to shape the sectors that move the public.

Culture moves the public.

The numbers tell the story more honestly than the slogans ever will. The cultural economy is larger than agriculture, larger than mining, larger than utilities. It outpaces traditional manufacturing in growth in many regions. It anchors tourism. It supports entire real estate ecosystems. It fuels advertising, tech, retail, nightlife, hospitality, fashion, and media.

Every billboard, every TikTok sound, every sneaker drop, every piece of film or digital content is a node in a trillion-dollar machine that trains people how to see themselves and each other. That is why political actors no longer treat culture as soft. It is not soft. It is structural.

And authoritarian politics understand this better than anyone.

Authoritarian movements always try to seize culture first. Not because they care about beauty, but because they care about obedience. They want to compress the range of acceptable identity. They want their symbols normalized. Their enemies caricatured. Their mythology institutionalized. When you control culture, you do not need to persuade in the traditional sense. You pre-condition people to accept the story you are about to tell them.

This is why the latest culture fights feel so intense. They are not about individual exhibits, individual books, or individual performers. They are about who gets to program the national imagination in a sector now worth more than a trillion dollars.

When Fall of Freedom erupted this past weekend, it was not an isolated artistic gesture. It was a direct response to that economic reality. Artists understand that culture is not just where they work. It is where power is being consolidated. And they are refusing to surrender that ground quietly.

There is a deep contradiction at the heart of this moment. The political class talks about artists like they are marginal. But the same class depends on cultural output to generate consumer confidence, national branding, tourism revenue, urban redevelopment, and global influence. They cut arts funding while building entire economic development plans on cultural districts. They ridicule the sector while quietly harvesting its profits.

That tension is not sustainable. It produces what we are now seeing: public contempt paired with private dependence. Ideological pressure paired with economic extraction. Cultural workers are told they are unimportant while being expected to drive one of the fastest-growing sectors of the economy.

That is not accidental. It is a form of political gaslighting.

What makes this moment different from past culture wars is the scale. Culture is no longer a fringe economic player. It is a core economic pillar. And as it grows, the fight over who controls it will only intensify. The battle is not over taste. It is over who shapes behavior at scale in a data-driven, digitized society.

This is why artists organizing right now matters so much. They are not just defending expressive freedom. They are defending economic terrain that politicians would rather shape without public resistance. They are asserting that cultural labor is not neutral and culture itself is not up for quiet expropriation.

This is also why institutions keep panicking. Museums, universities, and nonprofits were designed to exist in a political gray zone. That zone is disappearing. Once culture becomes recognized as a trillion-dollar political lever, there is no safe neutrality left. You either acknowledge that power or you pretend you do not see it while someone else configures it around you.

The illusion that culture exists outside of power is over. Culture is now a visible economic force. A psychological force. A political force. And increasingly, a site of open confrontation.

Which is exactly why they want to police it.

And exactly why artists are refusing to let that happen quietly.