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In the United States, many aspects of the culture are more advanced than the people who experience it. Here, we have three groups. Social Conservatives want to destroy modern culture and all the progress that comes with it and replace it with a--for them utopian--culture based on their »family values,« a term that itself evokes discrimination against homosexuals and high prudery.
The second group live in the culture, but don't generally see a problem with it. They may see it as a bit too staid in some ways, or think that it goes too far in others, but they generally don't seem driven to destroy it. They're more inclined to favor incremental changes in whichever direction they feel is appropriate for any given issue.
The last group is the avant garde. They are the ones in whom we can see what the culture can truly be and where it might be heading. Both the first and last groups act as antitheses to the middle group's experience of culture. The first group acts on the middle group to move it backward. The last group acts on it to move it ahead. Then you get a synthesis, an alteration to some degree of how the middle group experiences reality. This new synthesis is now thesis and we'll just see where it goes from here.
Curt Cobain and Nirvana and how they radically altered culture with their release of Nevermind in 1990 ('91?) are a good example of how the avant garde acts upon our culture.
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