All Great Art is Right Wing

And transgression is as sterile as a neutered panda on Reddit.

A recent piece by

Yakubian Ape

as well as an earlier one by

Walt Bismarck

got me thinking about rightism and art. Bismarck had the following to say:

One of the biggest things holding back conservatism in the West is that conservatives are terrible at art, don’t understand it, and behave in a way that artistic people find repulsive. This is a massive obstacle to success in the culture war, for obvious reasons.

This phenomenon is mostly caused by differences in personality and temperament. Quantitative studies show that liberals are usually creative thinkers with low conscientiousness, high openness, and high neuroticism. Meanwhile, conservatives are linear thinkers with high conscientiousness and low openness and neuroticism.

This means conservatives are better at making money than liberals, and are also happier and less likely to kill themselves or chop their dick / tiddies off. Sadly, it also makes them boring and uncreative people who lack a mythic vision for the world and are far too “sensible” to pursue the risky and precarious life of an artist. They also tend to simply lack the verbal intelligence to properly understand things like subtext and symbolism and irony, and without these tools it’s virtually impossible to create emotionally satisfying and sophisticated art.

These factors combine to make conservatives laughably inept at influencing popular culture in mainstream society. And this is the main reason conservatives always lose—the culture is always shifting beneath their feet and throwing them off balance.

Is it true that liberals or leftists have a monopoly on art due to their willingness to transgress, take risks, and thumb their noses (and other parts) at the establishment? Are they just more interesting and creative? I’m obviously hardly the first to ask this.

Cernovich

, referencing Peter Thiel, posed the question a year ago; it’s a modern perennial. There’s a good reason for thinking this way, which is to say, the very obvious liberal and leftist cultural hegemony present in all mainstream institutions. But I think that fact can be a bit misleading.

Behold the profound mythic vision of our creative superiors

Yakubian Ape’s latest dealt with the Eurovision contest, where a few dozen countries- not all of them necessarily European anymore- sent their ostensibly best performers to compete with each other essentially for bragging rights and a surprisingly- and perhaps ominously- fragile statue. The performances this year fell into two basic categories. There were those, like the winner- Nemo of Switzerland- who were basically the aural equivalent of seed oil, and then there were the transgressives, like the Finn who performed as Dog the Bounty Hunter with a codpiece and the English guy getting sexually assaulted in a men’s room (George Michaels tribute?). But as Yakubian Ape noted, the outré performance of the night was from a group called Bambi Thug performing a song called “Crown the Witch,” which was little more than a satanic ritual with a knock-off Guillermo del Toro aesthetic. They dared to take on the oppressive norms of Christian civilization in the very heart of the West, and the reaction was… polite applause.

Back in 1994, the Irish entry was Riverdance, then little-known. Based on traditional Irish folk dancing, the act became a worldwide sensation. The Irish decided to abandon this heritage for Satan. Score one for the liberals.

I recall posting a note about this performance a little while back, where I remarked, only partly in jest, that the performance could have taken place in any of a number of normie venues where it would have met with the same general indifference. It’s literally just what people do now, the approved, system-sanctioned way to be edgy. It’s lame, tame, safe, and sterile, like life generally under neoliberalism. The sorts of people attracted to ‘art’ like that, as producers or consumers, are completely devoid of the traits Bismarck lists as being essential to art and inherent to liberals- there’s nothing precarious about their lives and no risks taken; there’s no clever use of or appreciation for symbolism, irony, or subtext. The ‘mythic vision’ in this instance is warmed-over Sam Smith, which is in turn warmed-over Marilyn Manson, King Diamond, et cetera. It’s the rehash of the sort of thing that worried parents in the 1980s when the last gasps of normative Christianity still rattled around in the lungs of a culture entering its autumn days. But the power to shock, the only reaction it’s intended to evoke, is long gone. Like the vast majority of art produced today it is parasitic on earlier iterations of tropes, themes, and entire creative universes fed upon until their dry bones rattle, passed between artists and audiences for whom that allusion is meaningless.

See, he’s “subverting” Satanic panic. You dumb conservatives don’t get that that’s smart people code for being queer. And queer is just smart people code for elite human capital.

Liberalism isn’t creative and never has been, nor leftism for that matter. Such artistic power as it has it draws from earlier and healthier modes of civilization. The one genre wholly indigenous to the liberal US is the western, which is compelling only insomuch as it operates in a kind of mythic Dreamtime divorced from the liberal norms of the civilized East. When liberalism became the dominant mode of political and cultural life after WWII American culture entered a phase of primitivism and fetishization of youth reflected in film, fashion, the plastic arts, and literature. And when liberalism became fully, globally hegemonic after the collapse of the Soviet Union culture simply ground to a halt, though that wouldn’t be clear for some time. But the seed corn had been eaten and the soil was exhausted, and all that is left to do is drag out older works to be ritually updated for modern audiences, which is to say, fearfully and enviously stripped of what made them interesting in the first place, the empty places filled with the same didactic political messaging Bismarck finds so grating in conservative media.

“I bet all those dumb conservatives thought he was going to treat the lightsaber with respect because that’s what was established for that character over the course of three movies and an expanded universe of media but I’m too creative for that so f*** them!”

-Rian Johnson

In fairness to Bismarck, he uses “conservative” rather that “rightist” when describing the sort of people who don’t get art, and I’m sure he’s clever enough to understand the difference. But of course, in an American context (and a good many places beyond) a conservative is just a slower version of a liberal. The country was founded in liberalism; its culture was set in motion by men like Emerson who rejected books in favor of the truth within each individual soul, and with it the same Christianity mocked by Bambi Thug. Everything a conservative conserves is from a previous iteration of liberalism, right down to his Constitution and the freedom of religion protected therein, which served as the pretext to strip his public spaces of the faith of his forefathers. Conservatives don’t produce art anymore for the same reason typewriters aren’t used to produce scripts- they’re yesterday’s model.

Interestingly, Bismarck dismisses the oft-heard criticism that big entertainment outlets blackball conservative creators as follows:

First I need to dispel the fiction popular among Boomers that conservatives are deliberately driven out of popular culture or the world of art because of their beliefs.

This opinion is retarded. Hollywood is all about money, and artists like Mel Gibson, Clint Eastwood, and RDJ are untouchable despite their conservative views because they’re actually talented and their creations print money.

The real issue is most conservatives are uncreative and untalented, and can only raise funding from expressly ideological entities interested in a “conservative movie”.

If Hollywood only cared about money they would be racing to produce God is Dead sequels once a week, as that film (crappy though it is) earned $62 million on a budget of $2 million. To put that in perspective, for the cost of making and marketing The Marvels a studio could have expanded the GiD cinematic universe out to more than sixty movies and cleared a substantial profit on each one, merely by meeting the demand on the part of NormieCon Evangelicals to make fedoras spin with rage. They left that money sitting there because they hate that audience, hate their values, and would rather light $300 million on fire filming a feminist comedian punching an elderly Indiana Jones in the face than give Kirk Cameron a dime.

“Being a liberal who’s creative and willing to take risks, I’m going to do something bold here and make a movie depicting a beloved character from Gen-X youth as a miserable old man embarrassed in his final outing by an insufferable Mary Sue. No one’s thought of that before, right Rian Johnson?”

- whoever directed this crap.

And this is an important point. Liberal and leftist movies are every bit as formulaic, didactic, politicized, and trite as the Churchsploitation works of the Kendrick Brothers. We simply don’t notice it because it’s so pervasive as to fill the air with a suffocation, sickly-smug cloud. It’s so bad you can guess the whole plot of a film from the trailer just by taking note of the race, sex, and flamboyant gender-cues of the actors. Is that an old white guy- villain or idiot, or both. Who’s going to be the strong female protagonist? Whoever is the most diverse. Are all the representation boxes checked? If not, you know what you’ll be seeing in the inevitable sequel. And you’d better believe the writing team is the most diverse array of college-educated leftist women in their 30s who’ve never left LA that ESG money can overpay for.

“… and then, the rich corporate lawyer lady is going to let the Hulk have it about how angry she is!”

“Is is because she’s single with no kids in her 30s because she chased the empty dream of material success while neglecting what really mattered, and the Hulk is going to help her direct her rage into positive, selfless channels?”

“What are you, some dumb conservative? She’s just going to keep complaining and occasionally twerking, like we all would. Also, let’s destroy Daredevil too.”

-She-Hulk writers’ room

It’s telling that neither Bismarck nor anyone else who thinks liberals are natural artists ever gives any examples of the great works these people produce, their social-science indicators of creative ability notwithstanding. What is the liberal masterpiece that has really stood the test of the ages? I contend that liberal works, even more so that leftist art, are products of their time, inherently so. Liberalism is an ideology based on progress, and as such necessarily must replace what is with what must be next. It’s why yesterday’s heroic statement of principle- like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or To Kill a Mockingbird- now comes with trigger warnings. And of course, the people who want to keep them on the curriculum are conservatives.

Great art is everywhere and always rightist, not in a political sense, or an ideological sense, but temperamentally and philosophically. By this I mean that only art informed by Tradition has the ability to reach the status of greatness, first because it admits the possibility of excellence in the first place (quality being the opposite of equality) and secondly because Tradition, being the link that binds men through time across a sea of cultural differences, allows for works to truly be timeless. In my own work, fiction and nonfiction, I often have recourse to the image of a well or fountain, and that’s for good reason. Tradition is the font from which all true creativity comes, and what is good even in movies otherwise coded liberal or leftist is solely due to their engagement, even residually, with Tradition.

Darren Aronofsky gets it.

Consider a film I’ve wrote about before, Big Trouble in Little China. The director, John Carpenter, is a flaming commie with no love of anything ostensibly conservative or rightist. And yet, his was the perfect tale of the modern band of questing heroes on a journey to save their community from both spiritual pollution and economic exploitation. His other 80s cult classic, They Live, extols the violent rejection of neoliberalism and its attendant materialism and vapid cultural products in favor of guiding Those Who Would See out of Plato’s Cave. And though they were made in the 80s there’s a timeless quality about them; with a few changes they might have been Silver Age Latin novels, medieval romances, or 19th century pulp fiction.

Or consider a genuine rightist masterpiece of this very century, Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. Jackson threaded the very delicate needle of staying true to the powerful Traditional themes of the novels the movies were based on while creating something all his own from them. He had to understand not only the mythic imagination of the West generally and Tolkien’s own mind-bogglingly complex universe, but also create his own visual language to convey it all. While the liberal deconstructs, the rightist metaconstructs, building around, upon, and through what came before, using a particular legacy as a foundation for his own superstructure. Jackson succeeded by every possible metric, creating works that were widely praised and commercially megaprofitable.

“Where’s all the irony and subtext..? Where’s the queer inclusion..? Why aren’t my expectations subverted..?“

“Crap. Movies.”

-Amazon Studios

That his success was not merely due to cashing in on an already successful IP is evident in the counterexample of Amazon Studios’ own adaptation of Tolkien’s lore. At the cost of the entire budget of the original Matrix movie per episode, the leftist writers at Amazon created a hideous, loveless, and unloved pastiche of Tolkien that barely a third of initial viewers could bear to watch to its conclusion. With all the money on earth behind them, the best liberals could do was Girl Boss #17373. On the other hand, here are some creative, risk-taking, edgy, sophisticated liberals talking about why it’s awesome:

If only conservatives were urbane enough to generate hot takes like these!

There is an appetite out there, in the most noble sense, for right wing art, art that speaks to the soul of Western man. We live in a decadent age, where jaded souls have become inured to the intoxication of transgression, and long for the pure water of Tradition. Let us go back to the well, to myth, to history, and above all to the Faith, and devote to time, energy, and resources in our individual lives to learn about these things, so that if we’re not given the talent or space to create great world ourselves, to at least be able to appreciate them. Our culture is stale and repetitive, and no amount of dancing transgender demons brought to you by Disney will change that. As corny as it might sound to some, we must RETVRN.