The Problem of "Right Wing" Art.

The entrance of the right into serious cultural conversation matters. But one major flaw ensures they'll never be contenders in the real "Culture War."

A healthy society would have fewer podcasters and more Tolkiens.

In the wake of conservative tantrumming over the 2026 Super Bowl performance—mirroring similar outrage in the wake of Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 showing—Twitter has been ablaze with right wing personalities, including Christopher Rufo and Matt “Videogames and Comic Books are a Waste of Time” Walsh, suddenly snapping to the realization that the “right”¹ should perhaps rethink its approach to culture (here defined as a society’s creative and intellectual output). Such rethinking is long overdue

Liberals and progressives have zombified the arts. Given their relentless discrimination against non-leftist creatives, they and they alone control America’s cultural institutions, therefore they and they alone must own the stagnation and unpopularity of said institutions. Meaningful change would require their developing a tolerance toward divergent visions, the capacity to see proponents of those visions as human beings, and the humility to consider that perhaps they have some things wrong.

These things will never happen. But there is also no reason to expect a renaissance of “right wing” art, as some might hope.

---

---

A culturally astute right wing would have realized long ago that culture is up for grabs in a way never seen before. Champions of the “marketplace of ideas,” they’d have been savvy enough to understand that art is the greatest vehicle for ideas humanity has ever devised. They’d have acted on their zeal for the creativity inspired by competition and their knowledge of the need for parallel structures to create an armada of institutions with which to effectively wage a “Culture War.”

A culturally astute right wing would have realized long ago that the unapologetic far-leftism of America’s arts industries has created severe Celebrity Fatigue and a massive market of alienated Americans seeking exciting new work that speaks to them. Instead of pouncing on stories of “cancelled” artists for views they’d have capitalized on what Andrew Breitbart knew nearly 20 years ago, that “there are a lot” of non-leftist creatives who would welcome the work (and the freedom) if viable professional alternatives were available.

Instead they’re reduced to raging about a man who calls himself Bad Bunny, or kvetching about songs called “Wet Ass Pussy.” They pour their time, energy and resources into content creation, but not culture creation.

This expenditure of resources is understandable, given the demonstrated power of New Media. But a culturally astute right wing, no longer ghettoized into talk radio and Fox News, would long ago have moved beyond endless “Anti-Woke” slopjockeying and Based & Black-pilled memeing and howling about our impending communistic collapse. They’d have long ago realized the importance of profiling and patronizing artists.

But the right wing is not culturally astute. They are light years behind their left-wing counterparts—and there is a real possibility that they will never be truly competitive in this arena, for one simple reason:

Art is sacred to the left in a way that it is not to the right.

---

---

The importance of art is taken for granted in the left wing vision.

The regular attendee of the opera or the ballet, or the avid museum-goer, is not an outlier in liberal circles. Even if there is only one lone arts enthusiast in a left-wing social group, he won’t be seen as unusual. Should he resist pretentiousness there is a fair chance he’ll be admired, as arts knowledge (and patronage) boosts the left’s self-conception of superior sophistication and intellectual enlightenment.

For the liberal-minded individual, arts engagement is as much ego validation and identity reinforcement as it is a sincere appreciation of culture.

Right wing disinterest in art is not due to a lack of sophistication or intelligence (as is presumed in the left wing vision), but to the prioritization of the practical. They forego the chaotic and unpredictable life of an artist; they urge artistically-inclined offspring to get “real jobs.” This is pragmatism from smart people who embrace what is stable and normal. Careers in the arts are not stable. Artists are not normal.

The lone artist or arts enthusiast in this milieu is not embraced as he would be among liberals and progressives. He would be fortunate to garner much respect at all. If a successful artist manages to find themselves in a group of conservative-minded individuals, they will not be given any particular esteem; art is not a “real” job and produces nothing of tangible use or value. There is nowhere near as much admiration for the singer who sells ten million albums as there is for the farmer who feeds one hundred thousand people, or the married father whose family is healthy, happy, and well-provided for.

In short, right wing disinclination toward the arts is not a question of education or sensitivity, but of a different value structure.

Rightist pragmatism also explains the market mentality they often misapply to the arts. It’s understood that in a price-based economy capital flows to where it is most valued. This approach does not work as well in evaluating the arts: history abounds with geniuses who died penniless, with classic films and albums that were commercial failures, and with disposable pop slop minting generational wealth.

The left-wing valuation of art transcends money. They are much more willing to invest in the arts, even with little or no promise of a return. They may wrestle with the conflict between art for art’s sake and art for commerce—but the central importance of art is never in doubt. Where a more practical vision is logically focused on monetary investment, the left-wing vision regards the arts as a social investment².

For the right to be true contenders in America’s cultural landscape, it must not only expand its self-concept, it must radically rethink what is truly valuable: to humanity, and to a thriving civilization.

---

---

The significance of rightists finally engaging openly and seriously with the necessity of the arts should not be ignored.

In an era wracked with cynicism and nihilism—where politics is woefully inadequate to address what ails us and where those who control our cultural institutions have turned those institutions against the public they’re meant to serve—the recent shift in right wing discourse to grappling with the purpose and meaning of art indicates a shift in values that has potential to push America’s stagnating cultural output in a bold new direction, satiating a society yearning for revivification.

In that light, debates about “right wing art” miss the mark. The public may be sick of art produced by left wingers, but there is no need for “right wing” art. What does that even mean? And do the pontificators not see the potential trap in intentionally creating art through an ideological lens—exactly the problem that has poisoned progressive arts institutions over the past decade?

Why threaten the public with more politically correct art—only now from a rightist perspective?

To paraphrase poet Isidor Schneider, no artist need be politically correct if his work is faithful to reality³. Schneider was writing in 1945, warning his peers of the pitfalls of using art solely as a political weapon. Schneider was a Marxist, writing in a communist periodical; today such commentary would win him accusations of right-wing adjacency, by the left-wing artists who’ve failed to heed his advice. Repeating their mistakes would be foolish.

Americans are appalled by a myriad of issues: a deteriorating moral code; falling educational standards; rising political polarization; glorification of the drab and ugly; collapsing social mobility; a brazenly inept and horrendously corrupt ruling class. That is the reality. Addressing it with aesthetic and compositional élan—and continuing to explore timeless human themes—will thrust non-leftist creatives into the national psyche far more effectively than a masturbatory mission to create work that merely appeals to one’s own tribe.

Of course, intelligent artists already know this. What remains to be seen is if the right is truly ready to evolve past posters and podcasters, and finally fight the “Culture War” with the proper army.

CD

1. One difficulty is definition of terms. “The Right” is a nebulous concept. In popular, often lazy usage it includes a constellation of ideological perspectives which can describe anyone from traditional conservatives to non-woke liberals, depending on who’s assigning the label and the issue being discussed. For simplicity’s sake, I offer a broad definition of a right-winger in Sowellian terms—one with a more “constrained” vision of reality, which leads to the following assumptions: trade-offs are better than solutions; wisdom evolved over ages is often superior to radical new ideas; humanity is a flawed creature whose limitations can only be coped with, never eradicated. These assumptions underlie people’s preferences in multiple realms—including law, economics, and social customs—that express themselves politically in ways that, by today’s standards, would be considered “right wing.”

2. Hence why the starving artist romanticized by the left is viewed as a failure by the right. Moreover, artists who openly dream of commercial success are viewed skeptically within left wing creative circles.

3. From an essay called “Probing Writers’ Problems.” New Masses. October 23, 1945. pg. 25