This essay takes its empirical starting point in the cultural and library policy debate that took place right before the governmental election in Sweden, September 2006. The concern of the essay is two-folded. At first, we want to show how the appropriation of certain ideological and political concepts, in times of election, tends to organize the multiplicity of rationalities and subjects into binary relations. Such binary relation is often in Swedish cultural political climate defined as social-conservative versus neoliberal or conservative. As for the social-conservative formation, we connect the uses of concepts to an immanent idea of a national subject and historical coherence; whereas for the political right we connect the use of concepts to a wider neo-liberal turn in the Swedish political language. Secondly, in a political-philosophical reflection, we will argue that the contemporary decline of cultural policy discourse on the level of governmentality is not at all adequate. Rather, we observe tendencies that points to a more complex, web like, cultural policy that have taken it’s turn into other institutional positions, from where it can continue following a somewhat social-conservative agenda. However, we are convinced that the cultural policy debate, if it wants to remain vital, needs to discuss it’s meta-political, conceptual and form related issues, rather than keep dwelling on factual matters.