Political Heritage and Culture in Reforms

There is a strange kind of blindness that overtakes many who wish to change the world. It is the blindness of the impatient reformer, the revolutionary technocrat, the ideological purist. With the right theory, they say, the people will follow. With the right design, society will bend into shape. The past is dead, they believe, and only the future matters.

But political life does not begin with a manifesto or a constitution. It begins in the home, in the stories whispered by elders, in the rhythms of language and ritual, in grief passed down across generations. It begins not in policy but in political heritage—the deep memory of how a people has lived, suffered, governed, and survived. This heritage is not always written down. Often, it is felt before it is understood.

Culture, in this view, is not a soft ornament to politics. It is its foundation. It shapes what people feel is just, what they tolerate, what they resist, and what they dream of. No law, however elegant, can outpace what people feel in their bones. And so, to ignore culture—to treat it as irrelevant, backward, or inconvenient—is not only arrogant but politically reckless. Culture has ascendency, not because it is pure or superior, but because it is psychologically real. It is the fabric through which people recognize themselves in the world.

As a constructivist realist, I do not treat culture or heritage as sacred truths. They are not eternal, nor are they above critique. But they are real in the sense that they shape identities, boundaries, expectations, and solidarities. They can be manipulated, reinvented, and mobilized. And they can also be wounded. In every society, culture is a living battlefield—contested, evolving, used by some to include, by others to exclude. It is never neutral. But it is always there.

This is why political actors—especially those who seek transformation—must approach culture and heritage with caution and respect. Not because these are inherently good, but because they are necessary conditions of political imagination. A politician who ridicules a people’s traditions, or an activist who demands overnight erasure of inherited ways of life, will not be heard as liberators. They will be heard as invaders. Even just demands will sound like threats if spoken in a cultural accent the people do not recognize.

Hierarchy, for instance, is often viewed—rightly—as a source of domination and injustice. But for many communities, some form of hierarchy is not merely imposed; it is emotionally familiar. It mimics family structures, it reflects historical survival, it provides a sense of order in chaos. One does not have to endorse hierarchy to understand its hold. Dismissing it entirely, without offering culturally resonant alternatives, often leads to backlash or alienation.

The mistake is not in questioning authority, but in failing to understand its cultural meaning. The goal should not be to impose abstract ideals over the ruins of people’s stories, but to translate those ideals into the language of their heritage—to find the justice already implicit in their own narratives.

This does not mean submission to cultural relativism or romantic nationalism. Heritage can be violent, exclusionary, or regressive. There is no virtue in preserving every tradition. But there is also no justice in uprooting people from their histories. Transformation is possible, even necessary—but it must be inhabited, not merely declared. It must feel like ours, not theirs.

Many movements fail because they ignore this simple fact: people do not live by theory alone. They live by memory. They live by the things their grandmothers believed and the songs sung at funerals. They live by symbols, by smells, by silences. And so, any political movement that hopes to endure must do more than diagnose suffering. It must speak to the moral imagination already latent in the people. It must call forth the dignity that has been waiting, not dictate a new one from above.

Culture ascends not by decree, but because it is the slow sediment of lived experience. And political heritage is the record of those experiences—layered, contradictory, fragile. To govern, to resist, to reform—these are all acts of translation between ideals and heritage. No revolution succeeds without learning to speak the language of the soul.

So let us be careful with the past—not because it is always right, but because it is always present. Let us be skeptical of hierarchies, but not blind to their psychological weight. Let us critique our cultures, but not discard them wholesale. And above all, let us remember: politics is not simply about changing laws. It is about guiding people through the emotional terrain of their shared inheritance.

Ignore that, and no movement lasts. Honor it, and even the most radical hope can grow deep roots.