Culture or society?

James Poulos, at the Confabulum, argues that it is better to be a cultural conservative than a social conservative, and makes a neat point about social justice in the process. I have a feeling I'll be quoting these lines to my friends:

“I am still bewildered by those who insist on social justice — for those times, I suppose, when simple justice is somehow inadequate. Social justice seeks to conform politics and culture to one another by inventing a sphere that encompasses them both — ’society’ — and then promoting politics out of its subsidiary position into a freshly-empowered supervisory position, one from which society itself (which has just already been redefined as its relationship to politics has been changed), may be observed, controlled, disciplined, and instrumentalized.

“. . . Conservative political philosophers need to make a persuasive case to social conservatives that they ought to turn mostly back into cultural conservatives. Cultural conservatives turned into social conservatives when the militant, politicizing left convinced them that the only way they could maintain their local ways of life — their own community justice — was by nationalizing and politicizing themselves. This effort was an understandable past error; it now appears as a present failure. To an important extent, cultural conservatives must have the courage to be good and let the chips fall where they may. In several fashions, this looks and smells a lot like a retreat from politics. But a culturally conservative political philosopher might assert that the politics to be abandoned is one which never should have been taken up in the first place. Perhaps, at the time, it seemed or even was necessary; now it is necessary to reverse that. It has been tried, under conditions of commanding power, and it has failed. Spectacularly. At incredible cost.”

Poulos has been slowly rolling out what may be turn out to be the blogosphere's best argument for both American federalism and the principle of subsidiarity in politics more generally. He often climbs to higher parts of Theory Mountain than I can reach, but he returns with treasures.