A controversial man who will say provocative things can attract attention and even win praise from like-minded listeners. Nevertheless, except in extreme situations, voters will draw back from electing him to public office. The body politic has developed a healthy immunity to rogues and demagogues.

That has not always been the case. Last century, Louisiana seems to have perfected the art of electing rascals. And often there will be a minority movement using a rabble-rouser of a candidate in order to issue a protest vote – a George Wallace, for example, or a Jesse Jackson, a Pat Buchanan or a Ralph Nader.

Earlier this year, two of my intellectual heroes died. Both of them were willing to write things that stirred up comment and invited backlash. They influenced the age, despite never having been elected to anything. One of them was William F. Buckley, Jr. The other was Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Their words had more of an impact than any political campaign they might have led. Both men were unelectable, precisely because they wrote things that careful politicians do not say.

I am not arguing that candidates must never take controversial positions. Neither am I saying that a literate politician can never win office. After all, Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize for Literature! Nevertheless, the more a writer engages in the ancient art of polemics, the less likely he or she will gain sufficient favor with the electorate. It seems that most voters are looking for a safer or tamer leader.

Think for a moment about the legacy of Jerry Falwell, a clergyman who energized a large sector of the population to get involved in electoral politics. With allies in the evangelical movement, he altered the landscape, precipitating a transition in the Republican Party toward the so-called Moral Majority and influencing the debate even today, as Democrats try to sound appealing to evangelicals.

The Reverend Falwell – as well as such divines as Pat Robertson and James Dobson – infused national issues with religious fervor and shrewd media tactics. Opponents might use their names to strike fear into their followers, saying not to let them impose their values on America, but that was okay with the evangelicals. They wore such alarums like a badge of honor.

What the evangelicals recognized is something an Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci had already recognized long before. The political battles in a democracy – at least in the West – would be fought first in the institutions of culture: in the media, in the schools, in the arts. Only after making progress changing the hearts and minds of the youth would victories at the ballot box come.

Radicals who agreed with Gramsci had been at work in the United States for decades when the evangelicals woke up, looked around, and decided to take back the culture. Thus began the so-called culture wars. And where the evangelicals could not win, they created their own parallel culture: their own films, their own cable stations, their own magazines, their own colleges.

What the evangelicals overlooked, in my opinion, was that they had adopted a mirror image of their foe. They decided to fight fire with fire. Politics seemed to reward cuteness, rage, hysteria, and apocalyptic pronouncements. Where in all this were the sober guardians of these institutions? Who was trying to preserve the culture without ripping it apart for partisan gain?

It is a very old question. How does one defend the truth? Men have resorted to bullets, prisons, satire, apartheid, terror, rhetoric, impoverishment, and the sanction of a holy deity. I say to those of you aspiring to run for public office: enter such controversies at your peril. There is a romance to politics that can stain the mind.