The conventional wisdom is that presidential debates don’t really matter, don’t really move the proverbial needle for most voters, and that vice presidential debates matter even less. Moreover, fewer people watched the debate the other night between Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz than watched previous vice presidential debates, which suggests that it should, in theory, matter even less than most.

All of that notwithstanding, last Tuesday’s contest between the vice presidential nominees may have been more consequential than just about any public political discussion in recent memory. It contained one critical moment that indicates that at least one very important public figure understands the limits of politics as it is currently practiced.

Near the end of the first segment of the debate, at about the halfway point, CBS’s moderators asked the candidates about abortion and about the controversial nature of the positions they had previously stated. When it was JD Vance’s turn to answer, he did so with unusual humility, for a politician, at least:

[A]s a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American People’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us….

[W]e’ve got to do a better job at winning back people’s trust. So many young women would love to have families. So many young women also see an unplanned pregnancy as something that’s going to destroy their livelihood, destroy their education, destroy their relationships. And we have got to earn people’s trust back.

Some conservatives were upset by Vance’s answer. They thought it represented a retreat, that it signaled the Trump-Vance ticket’s willingness to compromise on the issue and, thereby, to sell out the Pro-Life movement and unborn babies everywhere. They missed the point entirely.

What JD Vance did in that brief but important answer was signal that he understands that there are limits to politics; he understands that passing laws and issuing proclamations is not enough to “win” certain issues.

Although he couched his answer in terms of persuading “voters” and convincing them to trust the Republican Party, Vance’s answer wasn’t really about politics at all. It was about culture. It was about the need to put in the hard, slow, often frustrating effort to change people’s minds about issues before compelling them, by force of law, to behave in certain ways.

To understand exactly what Vance did and why it is so important, it might be useful to take a look at a couple of relevant precedents.

The first of these is a subject on which I’ve focused for most of the last four or five years, in the specific context of American business and capital markets: the left’s “Long March through the Institutions.”

After World War I, and after the failure of the workers of the world to throw off their chains and unite to defeat the capitalists who “oppressed” them, Europe’s Marxists were forced to rethink everything they believed about the inevitability of the Communist Revolution. When they did so, they concluded that the workers of the world were oppressed not only by their bourgeoisie masters but also by a hegemonic culture that kept them from understanding their true needs and desires. In short, Marxist revisionists like Antonio Gramsci, Gyorgy Lukacs, and the founders of the Frankfurt School determined that their much-anticipated, much-desired revolution would never happen unless and until they changed the culture. They realized what Andrew Breitbart would later summarize as “politics is downstream from culture.” And so they set about their “long march” to take over the institutions of cultural transmission and to change the culture enough to destroy the existing order, thereby enabling the revolution.

Although it is rather dubious that the revolution will ever materialize in the form they imagined, it is absolutely inarguable that these second-generation Marxists were successful in their quest to change the culture. It is also inarguable that they revolutionized Western politics, the lack of explicit, physical revolution notwithstanding.

Fortunately, the second precedent is more hopeful. As I recently noted in much greater detail here, almost 30 years ago, the conservative movement settled on a new strategy by which to fight the battle against abortion. The Project for the Republican Future and the Ethics and Public Policy Center jointly proposed a new political position paper for Pro-Life Republicans suggesting a new tack. They recommended that the GOP continue to publicly declare its opposition to abortion but shift its tactical role away from attempting the overturn of Roe v. Wade and concentrate instead on efforts in the individual state legislatures to “curb the incidence of abortion by seeking maximum feasible legal protection for the unborn.”

By adopting this strategy and by focusing specifically on the heinous practice of “partial-birth abortion” (which is morally indistinguishable from infanticide), Republicans were, in fact, able to make a significant difference. They were able, in short, to change the culture on abortion. They managed, in part, to convince the American people that the “pro-choice” Democrats were the real radicals and that abortion up to the moment of birth is both unnecessary and morally abominable. The Pro-Lifers took their time. They moved slowly. And eventually, they built a consensus and successfully engineered the overthrow of the Roe regime. Like the Marxist revisionists, they understood and harnessed the power of societal culture.

I have always believed and have always told my clients and others that the key to understanding how this country works and how it institutes change is to know that Washington is not where the big decisions are made.  It is merely the place where the score is kept.

This is an argument for respecting the power of culture and its importance in creating the type of society we desire.

The other night, JD Vance signaled that he too understands this, which, frankly, is remarkable for a politician to grasp. One can only hope that he is not alone and that together we can all make the long march back through the institutions.