Politics Mean Nothing If You Ignore This.
Electoral victories mean nothing without cultural investment.
The left is done.
Their political power is destroyed.
Their ideals, as manifested in social and institutional policy, have fallen from favor.
Critical information and idea-generating institutions under their command—namely the press, the academy, and the humanities—have collapsed in credibility. Consequently their near-monopoly over national discourse has been busted.
Their racial politics are reviving segregation. Their gender politics are driving men and women apart. Their attempted “queering” of society is turning what was becoming a remarkably tolerant public against sexual minorities.
Their abandonment of all sense and sensibility during the COVID era, the froth-mouthed authoritarianism they embraced, the revelation that they are willing to drive society off a cliff with no thought to the second and third-order consequences of their hysteria—is permanently disqualifying.
Worse, as they’ve made the personal political, relationships have died, friendships have dissolved, and families have disintegrated, all due to politics.
In the decade since Donald Trump rose to power we’ve watched in despair and astonishment as people we once knew to be reasonable and decent have succumbed to “ROID” Rage—Rapid Onset Ideological Deterioration—all for the sake of a #Resistance that has failed to accomplish little other than social division and the derangement of everyone involved.
There are few places where this derangement is more concentrated than in our cultural and arts institutions.
Recently I learned:
- A friend who crushed his competition for a top spot in a symphony orchestra had his guaranteed job offer rescinded after “certain things came to light” (i.e. that he is conservative).
- Another friend, a successful and award-winning choreographer, informed me that she has trouble hiring dancers and booking venues, thanks to pressure and threats from gender activists.
- Another insinuated they are contemplating suicide after being chased out of Portland, Oregon and relentlessly hounded by terrorists masquerading as theatre artists.
Anyone who believes “Woke is Dead,” who believes that one election wiped the slate clean, is not only naïve, but a fool.
And such naivete and foolishness ensures that meaningful and lasting cultural change will never occur.
For all the political pendulum-swinging, and for all the growing public disdain—particularly among young men—for anything with the slightest whiff of “woke,” the arts and humanities remain a blind spot for the ascendant right. They typically take interest in art and entertainment only to mock it, or to seize on high-profile cancellations for viral views.
They build no infrastructure, develop no talent, invest in no institutions, patronize no creatives.
They despise pop culture yet offer no alternative; they force talented, like-minded professional artists to live and work “in the closet” for fear of blacklisting; they remain mired in market mentality, deeming art of little “use” and therefore little value—as they complain about how all the movies suck now or how the music their kids listen to is trash.
They rue the “Closing of the American Mind,” seemingly ignorant that investment in the arts and humanities would encourage and inspire American Minds to remain open, inquisitive, creative, and wise.
For all its flaws and failures, the left is vastly superior to the right in one aspect:
They understand and revere the power of art. As such they are, by default, America’s mightiest Culture Warriors.
The left offers artists prizes and prominence and paths to prestige. They’ve built conservatories and concert halls to train and showcase them. Their “Culture Warriors” include filmmakers and movie stars, novelists and pop icons whose vocation literally is the creation of culture, and who exert profound social influence.
The left’s whole-hearted embrace of the utility of the arts—their knowledge that man is at his boldest and most brilliant when engaged in the act of creative expression, and their understanding that the arts are the most effective delivery mechanism for their ideas—makes them far more powerful than any politico in inspiring social change—or revolution.
Meanwhile, the self-professed “Culture Warriors” on the right are X “poasters” and podcasters, more accurately described as “Custom Warriors:” proselytizing for the preservation of old norms, but useless in fostering the creation of new culture.
This asymmetry means that no matter who wins elections, the left will always have a direct line into the heart and soul of the people.
And those people will vote.
While the pragmatism and Godliness so highly-prized on the right—“we are too busy working jobs and worshiping God and building businesses and rearing families to care about art and artists”—is highly valuable in terms of preserving the infrastructure of a functioning society, it means surrendering culture creation to those who do not share those values.
It’s also a poor excuse: previous generations of God-fearing, callous-handed Americans managed to produce some of the world’s finest actors, directors, dancers, composers, musicians, singers, novelists and more, rapidly establishing America (still a young nation) as an international cultural superpower.
Black America in particular—classically religious, disenfranchised, and held to menial and labor-intensive jobs—puts haughty conservative pragmatism to further shame. It was poor and working-class blacks that gave us the Jazz that eventually permeated Broadway’s Tin Pan Alley in its Golden Age; it was their Blues that inspired the Rock & Roll that took the nation by storm.
The progenitors of Hip-Hop were people who had nothing—yet they managed to birth an international movement that has dominated pop culture for the last 40 years.
The arts are the final frontier in the “Culture War.” That’s why prominent arts professionals would sooner destroy institutions like the Kennedy Center than cede such territory to conservatives.
Yet those who are fully aware of the “long march through the institutions,” who understand the necessity for “parallel institutions,” who fully believe in the creative force unleashed by competition, make no effort to erect parallel and competitive cultural institutions1. Those who claim to be patriots ignore America’s place as an art and entertainment superpower which has introduced the world to some of the most popular artists and art forms in human history.
No—far easier (and, frankly, more remunerative) to be a content creator than a culture creator.
This is even more galling, considering that conservatives—whose religiosity leads them to value the sanctity of human life; who recognize the tragic nature of man and the human condition; who embrace the transcendent and the spiritual; who pine for a return to the beautiful; who hold a “classically liberal” bias toward individuality and free expression; and who respect the discipline, industriousness and conscientiousness required to do meaningful work—could be ideally suited to revivify the cultural landscape.
But conservatives are also “facts don’t care about feelings” people, and feelings are the artist’s fuel. They are “grow up and get a job” people, where artists must remain young at heart. They are “why can’t everyone just be normal?” people, and artists are not normal people.
Alas, it must fall to artists themselves to pave the way forward.
Artists are uniquely positioned to unite a polarized public. It is artists who can bring total strangers together—into concert venues or galleries or theatres or stadiums—be those strangers left or right, religious or irreligious. And great art transcends all boundaries, including time: the paintings, music, literature, architecture and sculptures of centuries ago remain with us now, while the civilizations that produced such works have faded into history.
Today’s artists must learn to wield technology to share and distribute their works; they must embrace entrepreneurship and extroversion; they must become as “value focused” as the businessmen that they are often inclined to mistrust. They must get over their aversion to money matters and market mentality, abandon the romance of being the Starving Artist, and learn to attract investors and donors and philanthropists on their own.2
And of course, they must dedicate themselves to lifelong education, practice, and—like Ernest Hemingway—never stop working.
The Great American Renaissance must happen. There has never been a better time. And those who claim to care about America’s future need to support those actually creating culture.
Otherwise, you’ve surrendered American culture to those who’ve destroyed everything they’ve touched.
CD
While exceptions such as Angel Studios and Bonfire Legends exist, they are outliers. Conservative outlets like The Daily Wire are guilty of ideological fare from the other direction, instantly alienating audiences.
I have already shown that this is possible, and that there are people ready to invest in the creation of new culture—and I am eternally grateful to them.
I've been skeptical of the recent conservative push for STEM-only in higher education, and you point out exactly what bothers me about that. As a big fan of film, music (especially hip-hop, which has been unfairly demonized as a deep-state operation by our more conspiratorial friends), theater, and comedy, I'm just hungry for open-minded views in those vehicles, not the cancellation of the mediums. I do have to say, many comedians, like Rob Schneider, Jimmy Dore, Tyler Fischer, Adam Carolla, Joe Rogan, etc.,have stepped up during the COVID-era. Maybe they will lead the way for the other performing arts.
Everything you say is true!
How do we get the devoutly religious to embrace art when museums and galleries revel in the disdain they have for questionable installations like the The Holy Virgin Mary, created by artist Chris Ofili, featuring a Black Virgin Mary on a glitter-like background, with pornographic magazine images collaged into the work. It is affixed to the canvas with hardened balls of elephant dung.
The painting was part of the "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" exhibition, which opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 1999 and drew the ire of then Mayor Giuliani and most Catholics across NYC.
There was a lawsuit that the museum rightfully won but I know Catholics, including my mother, were very wary of investing time and money on places that they felt were disrespectful to religion.
Even my father, an extraordinary artist, had And I point this out as the daughter of an