There have been many efforts on the Right, over the last decade, to make good on the popular rallying cry to, “take back the culture.” These endeavors have often been engaged with great enthusiasm (and sometimes buckets of donor cash), but have yielded little success, at best. Despite the creation of content–ranging from some horribly cringe documentaries to well-crafted, stand-alone features–“the culture” remains firmly in the hands of the Left.
I believe the failure of this project was inevitable, as it stems from several common misunderstandings the political Right has about the nature of the arts, as well as the recent collapse of our cultural education in the West. Both need to be addressed–as the creation of a vibrant, truly worthwhile artistic movement on the Right is more than a worthy goal; it is a condition of a civilized, creative and intelligent people.
First, it’s crucial to understand what is meant by “the culture.” While technology and demographic change together wiped away what was once known as the American common culture, there is one that exists simply by the virtue of its reach in the marketplace. The cultural mainstream that’s found in entertainment media is simply a collection of products, content and messages emanating from some of the world’s largest multinational companies. As the creative and artistic content of these messages have cratered in recent decades, the ideological content has increased, saturating everything. It is, like the administrative state inside the Beltway, a mechanism that responds only to the wishes of its creators–and that’s not the Right. No amount of energy expended on institutional capture can ever wrest power away from these protagonists. So, considering the Right never had “the culture” to begin with, taking it back seems like a strange, self-defeating goal.
But that’s not the only “culture.” Thankfully, technology’s atomization of the entertainment market has made it possible to create and sustain a great many cultures and subcultures; new ones emerge organically with great frequency. Thus far, however–even after spending millions of donor dollars–the Right has been unable to create such a thriving cultural movement organically.
In the last several decades, what has been referred to or thought of as Right-wing art was undertaken primarily by those with political rather than aesthetic concerns. The medium was simply a vessel for the message, and there was little love of craft or beauty in evidence. The final product, then, was often very bad art that couldn’t stand on its own without being propped up; it was, at best, graded on a curve. And, like the political ad that is its close cousin, it was forgotten within the election cycle.
If the Right wants to create its own culture–which is to say, works of art rather than mere “products” or “content”—it must begin by focusing on aesthetics rather than political messages. Of course, there is a contradiction: a focus on aesthetic excellence would be difficult both conceptually and programmatically, as the subculture would naturally define itself politically.
Politics can gently guide aesthetics, but it cannot be overbearing. This is outrageous for many of the ‘trad’ disposition who understand life exclusively through a rigid political frame and have very definitive ideas about what they like and what they reject. But I don’t think it’s really possible, from the standpoint of the creator, to erect very hard aesthetic borders around art, especially non-artistic limitations to the imagination imposed by politics or religion (or any other creed). For politicos or philosophers it sounds plausible–the way it sounded to the Soviet commissars of music, for example, who pored over Shostakovich’s scores–but the more granular and specific one gets, the harder these borders are to maintain or rationalize.
Cultural Maturation
The challenges the Right faces in creating its own cultural products and its own aesthetic scenes and universes are formidable; these pale in comparison to the larger, more consequential collapse of the process of cultural maturation in the West and, with it, the expectation of bringing the effort necessary to enjoy and converse with works of art.
There was a longstanding cultural expectation which persisted for several centuries across every cultural, racial and religious divide, to one degree or another: as a person would grow from childhood to adulthood, his tastes would deepen and gain sophistication. Life experience–and the continual process of discovery–would cause his palate and tastes to expand, allowing him to assimilate and enjoy things possessing greater amounts of contradiction and abstraction.
At the same time, that maturation would bring with it experience. In all the things we understand as culturally important and enjoyable works of art–music, the great works of literature, or visual arts or cinema–there was an expectation of intellectual work involved: one has to bring effort, patience–and, often, a familiarity with religion, history, and other works of art. Great art would rarely reveal its secrets and delights on first hearing, reading or seeing; it requires some background and an education. There is–or should be–no end to this process of deepening, as one can come to handle more complexity, more references and more abstraction.
So that is what was expected of an adult. We understood that children, on the other hand, had different levels of experience, intellect, and ability to deal with this type of abstraction. So we taught them the basics. This dynamic is most easily understood with food and drink. Babies and children tend to prefer sweet things, with straightforward taste profiles. As soon as food enters their mouths, their assessment is immediate—and they cling to that first opinion with great obstinacy, often for years. As they grow older and mature (hopefully), they let down their defenses and once again try the things they didn’t like the first time around. They come to delight in the complex and contradictory tastes they couldn’t possibly grasp as children, like the bitter and stinging flavors and aromas of alcohol, tobacco, or the mix of salty and sweet.
When it comes to culture, this maturation and deepening over time has an unintended but natural didactic effect, as well. This is best illustrated with music. Children are taught nursery rhymes and simple songs; these pieces are easy to sing, with small and often repetitive intervallic movement. While it’s rarely the intent, these songs and nursery rhymes teach children about the society’s foundational conception of harmony and melody. Eventually, children master and tire of this repertoire, and gravitate toward music that’s more complicated and aesthetically provocative as young adults.
It’s important to understand that society used to encourage this process. A few generations ago, reasonably cultured young adults–and that was just about everyone, aspirationally, from lower class to upper class—learned to play the piano, and to appreciate the Old Masters of western classical music. Certainly, in the early 20th Century, a lack of recording technology forced our great-grandparents to create their musical entertainment themselves; published scores of both popular songs and classical pieces were big sellers. Not everyone who learned to read and perform the scores were great musicians–in fact, few were–but the act of reproducing great music was a tremendously powerful teaching tool.
Times change, and the ubiquitous availability of recorded music has made it unnecessary to create one’s own home musical soundtrack. But one need not play an instrument–or, indeed, to attain proficiency in painting, writing or filmmaking–to have the materials required for the enjoyment of complex, more abstract works of art; it only requires reasonably attentive exposure.
It’s unsurprising that the heyday of modern jazz’s artistic and popular zenith–and influence on popular culture–occurred in the mid- to late 1950s.
Its audience had grown up with and internalized the music of the Swing Era, and was thoroughly familiar with the melodies and chord structures of popular songs which were the basis of much of the improvisation. With that widespread basis of knowledge, it was relatively easy for millions to be drawn to the fascinating variations which great artists can bring to the material.
Like bluegrass, classical, or samba, jazz is more than just sonic signatures and aesthetic characteristics; it is a music with a canon, or standard repertoire. Of course, it can be enjoyed by a new listener who’s simply attracted to the sound or ambiance of the music. But to really understand what made a Miles Davis or a Paul Desmond or a Thelonious Monk unique and brilliant requires a bit of familiarity with the canon. Back then, the canon was in the air, all over the radio. Diving into it now requires a kind of musicology; in the era of free streaming and the ability to quickly click to another track or genre, it is work that few want to undertake, even if they know how to begin.
In the last several decades, all of this has collapsed. Not only are young adults no longer expected to be familiar with the great works of art; the expectation of maturation, knowledge and experience has disappeared. The concept of children’s music–or films, or books, or any cultural product–no longer really exists. We still have things for actual babies, but today we’re living in a cultural universe where there’s no longer a boundary between things that are made for pre-teens and things that are made for adults.
Children’s Art for Adults
Sadly, GenX was responsible for breaking this barrier. Many of us grew up as Star Wars fanatics as kids. By the time we made it to 10 or so, we had left it behind for other, more grown-up obsessions. A few kids never really moved on, and clung to this childhood fandom well into high school. We used to call these kids “nerds” or “dorks” because we knew there was something fundamentally wrong—something very arrested development—about an adult who watched or cared about Star Wars.
Then, in 1997, the movie theater re-release of the Star Wars trilogy washed away all of this judgmentalism. The flood of media (paid for by the largest entertainment companies in the world) told so many millions in my college-age GenX cohort that it was okay to obsess over this franchise as an adult; it was cool to be a nerd.
Today, most cartoons, comic books, and fantasy epics–which were once genres and forms only popular with young boys–are made for adults.
And now, we have superhero movies that are marketed to everyone from pre-teens to adults. It’s crowded-out the marketplace, and now we basically have only superhero-type movies–where we once had dramas about relationships, romantic comedies, or other films for adults. These entire genres have disappeared because, like classical music, we no longer have the taste to appreciate or want them.
“It’s just science fiction,” you might say. Or you could justify Star Wars as a hero’s journey. These arguments are exposed to be phony cope with greater emphasis each year, as subsequent installments in the series are more political, without even the tiniest shred of thoughtful content. This aesthetic arrested development also locks people into a conveyor-belt of mass-marketed product rather than creative art, where we are reliant on the only institutions that are capable of producing what people now crave–the explosions and comic book drama on screen in a dazzling and real-looking way: massive, woke multinational corporations.
In the subsequent two decades, the renewed interest in Star Wars and children’s fantasy dovetailed with to fetishize the franchise. The men of GenX continue to demand entertainment based on the universes of characters in the comic books they loved as children. Adult audiences are now so attached to these narratives from their childhood, they seem incapable of taking interest in and developing relationships with new, multi-dimensional characters based on the relatively ordinary people that once appeared in most films. Of course, the abject creative exhaustion and woke obsession of Hollywood now makes for largely unfulfilling and cringe franchise installments, as even many conservative critics are more worried about the destruction of intellectual property with which they have a sentimental familiarity than a desire to see a different, more mature and creative type of cinema.
Some Hope
Within the cultural mainstream that has been created by and maintained by the Left, we have a completely different world. It is one that’s seized by the fetishization of grievance in the form of the Intersectional Stack. And when it’s not “literally shaking” obsessing over race, gender, etc that ethos has infected everything in contemporary culture, and the corporate product that passes for art, with degeneracy, apathy, and the post-modern.
But if you’ve seen right-wing twitter, you already know that there’s been a kind of a reaction against all this. People don’t want it, and they’re searching for something better. They’re already doing it in their own lives. We see it in an embrace of beauty, health and fitness, and tradition (meaning, effort, and longevity and standards).
Architecture is a big one–as tweets and accounts that post contrasts of beautiful old buildings side-by-side with big, ugly brutalist monstrosities get millions of interactions.
The New Right cares about aesthetics, because at the most basic level, it stems from the idea of making an effort.
The body positivity movement is a great example of this. Behind the propagandistic and false mantra that women are “beautiful at any size” is the subtext: don’t try; it’s not worth it. That apathy is appealing to some–but, as the popularity of Jordan Peterson shows, there’s a massive audience out there for people who do want to try. People laughed at how “Clean Your Room” could inspire so many people–especially men– but it’s a real thing, and it is significant culturally and artistically.
On the Old Right–the Acela Corridor establishment Movement Conservatism of magazines, think tanks, and political consultants–we see folks who have for the last several decades been obsessed with things like superhero movies and sportsball. A close second would be fast food and obesity. “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” “Is Die Hard a Christmas Movie?” It’s not surprising that all these things are as passive as they are. For as much as we might hate the companies, social media really changed everything culturally–Twitter and IG has allowed us to see what people care about in a way that we couldn’t just reading their white papers.
It’s especially acute in the younger cohort, who were unfortunate enough to have missed, during their formative childhood years, the last great period of American optimism and civilizational self-confidence in the 1980s. But they’re intelligent, and they grew up with the digital tools with which they could see (and romance) many of the things that they missed. What they see in the past is a world free of ironic detachment. What they crave is what they see as the authenticity of a past time in America that clearly no longer exists. This is a quiet but significant revolution against the materialism that defined post-Cold War conservatism in America.
Conclusion
This is a cultural catastrophe, because consuming this type of disposable trash impoverishes the imaginations and stunts the creativity of all people. Even worse, it dispenses with the idea that there’s some work involved in appreciating, understanding and assimilating art.
We face many challenges here, at the tail end of the American empire. The aesthetic arrested development of our people is hardly the most important of these, or even the one that’s causing so much of our current trouble. Still, it is not without cost: it makes people less sophisticated, less able to use their imaginations, and it distracts them. We want a virtuous people, but we want a capable and intelligent people, too; cultural rot is making people dumber and less interesting by the year.
Lionel Trilling said one has a moral obligation to be intelligent. That’s probably true–but one also has a moral obligation to have good taste. Or at least something better than no taste at all.