Democracy is a sham. It doesn't matter who gets elected, the bureaucrats remain the same, the teachers remain the same, the university professors accrediting the teachers remain the same, and the people making movies remain the same. So, of course, nothing changes; it's the same government!
This seems like you redefining influential members of the culture as the real government in order to argue that the government controls the culture. Of course you aren't going to think the government is weak if you redefine anyone with power as part of the unofficial government. But someone who agrees with you but is using normal definitions is going to say that the the control of the U.S. government over culture is weak, and when they coincide it's generally because an influential cultural faction controls the government rather than the other way around.
Definition issues aside, I think you're also very mistaken about it being top-down. I saw the rise of SJW ideology, and it didn't originate from film-makers or bureaucrats or teachers. It was developed, refined, and spread by posters on websites like Tumblr and Something Awful. The influence over institutions like media outlets came later. Some of the words and ideas originated from academia decades earlier, but plenty was altered or brand new. "Demisexual" originated from a young teen girl on a play-by-post roleplaying forum (used to explain why her slutty RPG character had sex with some characters but not others) and spread when another poster from the same forum made a Tumblr post about it as a joke. Now plenty of big official institutions and university professors and so on take it seriously. (The original girl now identifies as demisexual herself, having "discovered" that she was projecting it onto her character, while the Tumblr poster regrets having accidentally unleashed it on the world.)
The rapid rise of SJW ideology had less to do with the power of the people creating or spreading it and more to do with a sort of selective memetic immunodeficiency among institutions and much of the public, with the internet serving as a breeding ground for ideas that maximally exploited those openings. To the extent that specific people were influential at all it was by being the sorts of weirdos who posted on the internet a lot and/or became skilled at internet posting. Not every change in culture is going to follow that pattern, but in the internet era I think such changes tend to be grassroots.
Look at any communist revolution
The government can influence culture a lot more if it's killing anyone who publicly disagrees and engaging in very extensive and relatively successful censorship. That doesn't mean every country (or the world as a whole) works the same way, or that establishing a totalitarian government is easier than influencing culture in other ways. There are multiple communist groups in the west who think engaging in normal politics is a waste of time because communism can only be achieved through violent revolution. Needless to say they're a lot less influential than the Something Awful posters who spent a decade refining their shitposting skills to amuse a few hundred other forum posters, then discovered those skills were transferable to influencing millions of people on social media. Which isn't to say that direct mass-appeal on social media is the only way, Scott Alexander demonstrates another approach.
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This seems like you redefining influential members of the culture as the real government in order to argue that the government controls the culture. Of course you aren't going to think the government is weak if you redefine anyone with power as part of the unofficial government. But someone who agrees with you but is using normal definitions is going to say that the the control of the U.S. government over culture is weak, and when they coincide it's generally because an influential cultural faction controls the government rather than the other way around.
Definition issues aside, I think you're also very mistaken about it being top-down. I saw the rise of SJW ideology, and it didn't originate from film-makers or bureaucrats or teachers. It was developed, refined, and spread by posters on websites like Tumblr and Something Awful. The influence over institutions like media outlets came later. Some of the words and ideas originated from academia decades earlier, but plenty was altered or brand new. "Demisexual" originated from a young teen girl on a play-by-post roleplaying forum (used to explain why her slutty RPG character had sex with some characters but not others) and spread when another poster from the same forum made a Tumblr post about it as a joke. Now plenty of big official institutions and university professors and so on take it seriously. (The original girl now identifies as demisexual herself, having "discovered" that she was projecting it onto her character, while the Tumblr poster regrets having accidentally unleashed it on the world.)
The rapid rise of SJW ideology had less to do with the power of the people creating or spreading it and more to do with a sort of selective memetic immunodeficiency among institutions and much of the public, with the internet serving as a breeding ground for ideas that maximally exploited those openings. To the extent that specific people were influential at all it was by being the sorts of weirdos who posted on the internet a lot and/or became skilled at internet posting. Not every change in culture is going to follow that pattern, but in the internet era I think such changes tend to be grassroots.
The government can influence culture a lot more if it's killing anyone who publicly disagrees and engaging in very extensive and relatively successful censorship. That doesn't mean every country (or the world as a whole) works the same way, or that establishing a totalitarian government is easier than influencing culture in other ways. There are multiple communist groups in the west who think engaging in normal politics is a waste of time because communism can only be achieved through violent revolution. Needless to say they're a lot less influential than the Something Awful posters who spent a decade refining their shitposting skills to amuse a few hundred other forum posters, then discovered those skills were transferable to influencing millions of people on social media. Which isn't to say that direct mass-appeal on social media is the only way, Scott Alexander demonstrates another approach.
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