About the American Culture Institute

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American Culture Institute

The mission of the American Culture Institute (ACI) is to inform, educate and persuade people of the value of a culture of liberty and personal responsibility, while simultaneously working to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative leaders in The Cultural Influence Professions (CIPs). ACI accomplishes this through:

• Fostering a culture that promotes personal responsibility, economic liberty and prosperity
• Critiquing the contemporary culture
• Bringing attention  to valuable cultural products of the past
• Explaining the principles of conservatism and classical liberalism
• Working to increase the number of conservatives and classical liberals in the Cultural Influence Professions.

A Cultural Think Tank

ACI fills an important and unmet need in contemporary America: a think tank dedicated to restoring and reinvigorating the cultural foundations of a free and orderly society.  Because it is focused on culture, ACI targets its work towards Hollywood, New York, and other cultural centers rather than Washington, D.C., and state political capitals. This does not mean that ACI ignores politics and public policy. Instead we highlight the tremendous, even foundational, role that culture plays in influencing the direction of a nation, including its political choices.

Most current think tanks aim to educate legislators, government executives, and other politically influential parties about public policy issues, with the hope of affecting legislation. ACI complements these efforts by educating policymakers and the public at large about the values that underpin a free, orderly, and prosperous society.  In doing so we influence the messages communicated by what could be termed  the reality-defining institutions. These largely encompass the work of three broad Cultural Influence Professions (CIPs):

• education and academia,
• journalism and media, and
• arts and entertainment.

These professions and the institutions that  shape them have a powerful influence on how average Americans understand and interpret the world they live in.  CIPs help create the “plausibility structures”  that determine what assumptions and beliefs are see as plausible by individuals in a given society and which are not.

These can be ideas about the proper role of government, history, truth, values, religious faith, and anything else that motivates behavior and drives the direction of a culture.

Changing the Debate

ACI is working to change the terms of public debates by educating the public about the importance of a “culture of liberty,” and by outlining the social, behavioral, and institutional changes needed to foster and support such a culture. We also work to increase the presence in the cultural influence professions of people devoted to the nation’s founding and enduring values, to impact the work they produce.  In due course, these cultural changes will influence America’s political and economic direction.

To accomplish this, it is important for any changes in public beliefs to take root in cultural institutions. The ideas and worldviews that move a people are important, but they are not enough to determine the direction of a society. In To Change the World, James Davison Hunter correctly argues that the importance of institutions is in driving cultural change from the top down:

Ideas do have consequences in history, yet not because those ideas are inherently truthful or obviously correct but rather because of the way they are embedded in very powerful institutions, networks, interests, and symbols. These factors—overlapping networks of leaders and overlapping resources, all operating near or in the center of institutions and in common purpose—are some of the practical dynamics within which world-changing occurs. These are the conditions under which ideas finally have consequences.

In a nonpartisan way, ACI is working to educate the CIPs, and those in them, about the value of a culture of liberty and personal responsibility. Our work will grow to encompass books, position papers, op-eds, analyses, conferences, seminars, and the like—all the tools think tanks use to educate policymakers, ACI will use all possible means to educate the culture industries about the value of liberty and personal responsibility.

Instead of writing for legislators and their staffs and people at other think tanks, ACI targets public school administrators, Hollywood agents, producers, and scriptwriters; law school faculty members; newspaper editors; publishers; museum managers; academics, and other important people in the culture.

ACI is in the process of building a network of individuals working within these professions who believe in the greatness of America’s Founding values. We are encouraging young people who embrace these values to enter the cultural professions and are working to connect them with like-minded professionals already laboring within them to counter the current, illiberal hegemony that dominates the cultural industries.