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You Say You Want a Revolution, Part 2
Here’s what this post, and last week’s post are about: The cultural changes in the media that Ricochet readers don’t like didn’t happen by pure accident. They took decades. We propose equally patient, persistent, but ruthlessly effective efforts to push culture in another direction over the next 20-plus years. We are chewing over how to create or capture a big chunk of tomorrow’s media and the arts. It’s a myth that nothing can be done about the entertainment business. Success is Hollywood’s definitive history teacher.
@drewinwisconsin raises a tough point. He said, “So that’s probably why it’s important to try to change or break the current system rather than try to build an equivalent system that will have no users. Consider how much power and scope Google+ had, and it still couldn’t survive against Facebook. And that’s Google — already a malignant influence.”
@sabrdance asks, “What do we mean by a believable path to get there?”
I mean believable in real world terms. A Jonathan Edwards-style Great Awakening would obviously make all of this tactical maneuvering about the mere media moot. Let’s assume that won’t happen and we end up having to do this ourselves.
My distinguished colleague @Barfly asks: “I’m looking for a characterization of the state we’re aiming for. Society is trying to digest a major transformational technology, the educational system has been broken by affluence and tolerance, of all things, and the barbarians are at the gates armed with all of the above. We can’t expect any of these things to work out in our favor unless we know where we want to go. You must have some vision of where those six or sixty things lead – is that coming in the next installment?”
Here we are, now you be the judge. We’re facing a composite force with a dozen power centers. Among many other tasks, we first need to capture one or more of them or build its equal from scratch. We’ll get around to discussing both.
What’s a Long Game to capture a mindshare of Hollywood? Create something like the Sundance Institute and duplicate their success at making it the arbiter of what’s new and valuable. Like Sundance, win the credibility and the authority to hold screenings and festivals, to present awards and honors to praise the good and shame the bad. Hollywood is particularly susceptible to this. Sprinkle our “graduates” and allies widely through the industry, like raisins in raisin bread. Do you want to make heads explode? Let either the First Lady or Ivanka take a leadership role. Hire young women to make programs and announce a continuing scholarship and apprenticeship program, ours.
In the late Eighties and early Nineties, the street locations and bare breasts of underground movies turned into something more respectable called independent cinema, and people criticized Sundance for showing and promoting films that were, they sniffed, insufficiently political. Sundance said, accurately, that they were dedicated to pushing change through the choices of what they decided to show. When that was deemed not enough, Sundance has also bankrolled some independent films that leaned forward—that is, leaned farther Left–becoming in effect a competitor of their own partners. Like Android’s regular endorsement of a Nexus-quality mobile phone, rotated through the major manufacturers, the Sundance label on an “indie” is a trusted mark of quality. They don’t have to make all the radical films, just the key ones. Smart.
How would our first generation of film projects begin? Make an early (but affordable) splash to announce you’ve arrived on the scene. There’s only, oh, about a hundred ways to respond to the bizzaroid cultural atmosphere of our times. One suggestion: we constantly see efforts to honor women in history/herstory. Fine; great idea. Do our version, because nobody thinks we’d be interested in this. Elevate forgotten, politically unconventional female intellectuals like Clare Booth Luce and Dixy Lee Ray, as well as living writers like Liz Trotta and Amity Shlaes, and make an inexpensive bio series for streaming, to inspire girls and give them different role models than today’s dull lineup.
We can and should learn our Machiavellian lessons from how the other guys did it. Face it, they were good at it; look around you. For roughly sixty years, the culture of the media calls itself progressive, however broadly defined. No one central authority set that in motion, but over the decades, time and time again, lots of helpers stepped in to change movies and TV. It didn’t happen overnight. That change ebbed and flowed. Like King Canute, we can’t command tidal forces, but like good civil engineers, we can put them to work. Turn the tide in our direction.
As in politics, the progressive surge of Hollywood’s do-your-own-thing Sixties ran aground in the stagnating, crime-plagued Seventies. A couple of major hits can shape the attitudes and moods of a decade—think of the three years that took us from “The French Connection” to “The Godfather” to “Death Wish”.
Break that down for a moment, because it shows a persistent Hollywood weakness, a tendency towards unanticipated outcomes that resembles Mickey Mouse in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. “The French Connection” was rare in 1971 for declaring “The time is right for an out-and-out thriller”. It was a trend-setter. Cop movies took the place that westerns once had on the American screen; one bold, unappreciated real man up against smug, lawyer-sanctioned lawlessness. In other words, for all its vague gestures towards the supposed futility of the war against heroin, it had an objectively conservative effect on its audience. The filmmakers didn’t mind, but they were surprised.
“The Godfather” was supposed to be based on one central idea: crime and capitalism are deeply intertwined. Comparisons between the civilian authorities and the mob are always dismissive. Mario Puzo was angry at Francis Coppola for dropping what Puzo considered the single indispensable line in the novel: “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns”. Actually, this pseudo-Marxist quip has, I have to admit, spread across the aisle. It’s not without a point. But “Godfather’s” unprecedented success wasn’t based on its acute critique of capitalist ethics and the Mafia in Cuba, but in an unexpected emotional reaction: they loved the idea of a Godfather, because in a time when the cities had become dangerous, he was a protector, the dispenser of instant, final street justice. The biggest of criminals was a welcome force against random crime, the most widely despised feature of the era. “Dirty Harry” all but gave up on due process. “Death Wish” took it farther.
Lasting change must be persistent. The Sixties wave stalled and actually reversed by the dawn of the Eighties. What made 1977’s “Star Wars” so different, a turning point for stunned Hollywood, was optimism, faith, and fun. That can and does happen. It can happen again. Think of Pixar’s hits over the past quarter century. Could you imagine, for example, animation and storytelling of Pixar’s quality, but guided by a creative team from the Babylon Bee? I could.
Google wasn’t built in a day. Suppose that when Rupert Murdoch bought Fox, he not only created a different kind of news channel but a different kind of movie studio. Suppose he teamed up with fellow conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz, who created Walden Media to produce the Narnia films. Suppose they realized they needed tech in depth to create and own streaming platforms. The biggest and most durable computer trade show of the era was owned by conservative billionaire Sheldon Adelson. None of these team-ups happened. But none of it was impossible; if they’d done it, none of it could have been blocked by other media players. And if Rupe, Phil, and Shelly had figured out how to make money at it, which those three guys were rather good at doing, everyone else in Hollywood would have been aware of the development potential of all that empty real estate they’ve left fallow in the center and on the right.
That’s one of the self-limiting factors of my suggestions: If we’re right about what the public really wants, everybody will slowly, reluctantly, grudgingly compete with us. I couldn’t be more pleased at that prospect. In a century of fascism and communism, Hollywood stands proud for what the town has always believed in: plagiarism.
Of course, plutocratic bosses willing to take a chance can only carry a social movement so far. Ambitious writers who see daylight between the pillars of today’s deadening culture are obviously crucial. Form some embryonic institutions that will staff and guide the project. We already have a few, so start by supporting and enhancing them. We’ll need a farm team, its talent discovered and promoted by a media-based tribute to the success of The Federalist Society, with an unbending vision. It should be led by younger people because they’re going to have to maintain that focus, energy, and clarity of goals for more than a generation.
When you read the words “international cinema”, many of your eyes glaze over. They shouldn’t. Filmmakers, liberal or conservative, like to see sympathetic new artists, and being the gatekeepers of foreign films and TV can have an influence on tomorrow’s directors and writers greatly in excess of their effect on today’s audiences. Conservatives, and social conservatives especially, should be watching the principled defense of traditional culture in central, southern and eastern Europe. Here’s one unorthodox suggestion of a possible center of cultural resistance to today’s culture: Orthodoxy. Many of the film and TV artists of eastern and southern Europe still act in confidence that they’re part of a valid, powerful way of seeing the world.
Naturally, I’m more familiar with my own guys in places like Ireland, Poland, and Lithuania, and they too bring topics into serious films that you’d never see in American ones. But at this moment Catholic culture is crippled; I wish I could say otherwise. The posts of @skipsul make a superb case that Orthodoxy, however it compares to your denomination or religion, is one of today’s most coherent cultural forces and critics.
We’re working to promote real diversity of ideas, not merely a stale future of subsidized, institutionalized conservatism on screen. Yes, if done right our project would certainly lead to more conservative and centrist projects being considered acceptable. It might very well lead to fewer films being green-lighted purely because of their ability to insult your beliefs. But it’ll also lead to more projects that are interested in American history, pure entertainment, and yet informed by a non-PC point of view. “Back to the Future” was written by a conservative, “Apollo 13” and “Saving Private Ryan” by liberals. In 1985, 1995, and 1997, no one to my knowledge supported or rejected their insights based on those political facts. It was still possible to hold a conversation. It wasn’t yet an abyss. We don’t just need some room carved out for conservative politics in culture; we need some room carved out for no politics in culture.
Published in General
Well, also the forceful push to make sure children as early as Kindergarten learn all about alternate sexualities. Public schools are indoctrination camps; the left has total control.
Well, that and maybe a personal trainer, that sort of thing.
Your emphasis on “sodomite” et al, though is actually dehumanizing. You are reducing the entire character of a person, by using and emphasizing that term, down to one sexual act and nothing more. By using that term, you are declaring that such a person is defined entirely by that 1 single act, and denying that anything else about them matters. By using that term you are declaring them outside your party.
That the courts as late as the 1980s still used that term is no defense, only an excuse. And moreover it is an excuse steeped in nostalgia, claiming that because the term was used in the past then it was necessarily better. I could cite many instances where people claimed “the old ways” were better, only to be later proven egregiously wrong.
Not all shifts in language are necessarily leftist weaponizing, many shifts are made because the older terms used really are nasty. I need only cite “n*****s” as one, or “bastards” as another – the former’s removal from polite talk needs no explanation, the latter because it declares a person born out of wedlock as personally inferior, as if they themselves are to blame for the circumstances of their birth. And its origin lay in the very medieval concept of bloodlines, where you were always judged in your personal worth by your ancestry. I rather think our Revolution dealt with the bloodline issue.
I already did, in his conclusion, but I would add that the entire screed was uncivil. Ahmari declared a false division in conservatism, and defined it by an indefensible attack on one single writer.
Those are false assumptions.
Again, this is creating a false division by implying somehow that only those on Ahmari’s side want clean streets and low crime, etc. That’s a complete straw man.
Titus and I have discussed Christianity in America before elsewhere, and one thing we’ve both noted is that Christianity in America can be said to have shot itself in the foot repeatedly. The 20th century in particular saw the faith in retreat – reaching a peak of political power for both Catholics and Protestants, while failing to notice how it was hollowing itself out in its own pride, vanity, and internal division.
That Christians in America no longer hold the dominance they once did is something that cannot be laid entirely on hostile forces in the media, academia, or government, but on the failure of successive generations to witness to and prepare their own. If, as a Catholic, the sex scandals of the last 20 years have cracked your faith in Rome as an institution, well fine, that’s understandable. If, however, the scandals cracked your entire system of belief (and they most certainly have), that right there is a sign that your faith was perhaps more grounded on cultural habit and tradition (this is something I’ve noted before – many Catholics are like many Jews, they consider themselves Catholic or Jewish as a matter of the inheritance of birth, even if they don’t actually practice or actively believe. They may never set foot in a church or a synagogue, but they call themselves “Catholic” or “Jewish” because that’s what their ancestors were).
Likewise if, as a Protestant, you’re only going to church out of a sense of cultural obligation, then your children will notice that and likely their faith will be but a shadow of your own. And the hollowing out of many older churches attests not only to the way that many have liberalized, but how the older generations failed to keep the younger ones.
In both cases I would say that for far too long there has been the assumption that sheer cultural inertia would keep people in the pews, and grant deference to Christian sensibilities. But we do well to remember the adage that we’re only ever 1 generation away from losing our society if we fail to teach it and live it. The shifts in government, culture, media, and academia could have been resisted, but those grounds were surrendered, or lost outright in unnecessary squabbles and poorly chosen battles.
Christianity is going to have to re-learn the lessons of its earliest generations on how to survive in a hostile culture not its own.
On this I entirely agree. The hard Left pushed some horrid things on children at a young age.
The Comprachicos of the mind.
Sure, but Majestyk should ask better questions and/or make better arguments.
A reader of Hugo! Well done!
Alas, I cannot take such credit. My reference was only to what I learned in Rand’s essay.
The novel–drama about the cruelty of princes involving James II in England–was also filmed famously in Hollywood in ’28, by Paul Leni, starring Conrad Veidt, The Man Who Laughs.
The snarky reply would be, “From long experience modding at Ricochet,” but leaving it at that would be extremely misleading and unkind. Sexual animus as such (either misogynist or misandrist) is not the problem, but the right developing a bunker mentality in the face of what seems like the left’s long siege against traditional divisions of labor and talent between the sexes can be. A siege mentality against contemporary art and artists also adds to the ferment: can you deny it’s pretty common on the right to treat contemporary artists’ motives as guilty until proven innocent? And that the unfortunate fallout of identity politics and affirmative action is that artists perceived as being in a “protected class” come under even more suspicion of unworthiness?
There’s also a perfectly rational reason conservative youth — male or female — with creative (or any “impractical”) talent may fear dedicating their energies to cultivation of that talent at the expense of more “practical” endeavors, and that is a fear instilled in them, perfectly rationally, by their elders: “How do you expect to make a living?” Their elders are right, as far as it goes: the “starving artist” stereotype exists for a reason, and even if personal wealth were no concern, it’s hard to make art good enough to justify the opportunity cost (not just to you, the artist, but to wider society) of not having done something more dutiful with your time.
There, I’ve said it. Americans who grow up conservative often fear that creative pursuits are un-dutiful pursuits. Even among youth on the right mocked for being raving libertarians, guilt and fear surrounding failure to do one’s duty is pretty widespread (indeed, I suspect libertarian politics has a special attraction for these hyper-conscientious youth as a compensation mechanism).
Now add that it is also reasonable to expect men and women’s duties and talents to, on average, differ somewhat. Specifically, it’s reasonable to expect that most women will become moms, it’s traditional to affirm that this is a good thing, and it’s reasonable for those, like moms, with greater domestic duties to lower their ambitions outside the home to accommodate domestic obligations. Indeed, even someone who might someday become a mother should rationally pre-adapt her ambitions to accommodate the prospect of motherhood (and, once she has, it makes sense for her to be the one called on to provide in-family caregiving even if she’s not a mom… but that’s getting pretty far into the weeds). If all conservative youth feel some pressure to choose more modest ambitions for themselves, since immodest ambitions are too risky to be dutiful, then female conservative youth feel extra pressure on this score.
It is rational, to some extent, to indulge conservative boys’ interest in ambition, misadventure, and risk taking — to even admire it as manliness — and to therefore be less hard on boys when they fail (though the right can be pretty hard on any failure). Boys can spend more time failing before getting it right and starting a family. Girls can’t.
These social pressures in no way necessitate hating women. They do result, though, in a rule of thumb that when guiding conservative youth, it’s reasonable to err on the side of giving girls more discouragement than boys get. When this discouragement is mixed with other, very human things, such as miscommunication or a bunker mentality — especially one borne of a backlash to “you go girl!” boosterism, the girls receiving it might understandably develop a bit of paranoia about how their conservative elders judge their ambitions and aptitude outside the home. I realize this amounts to the girls developing a bunker mentality in response to a bunker mentality, but there you go.
If young conservatives — of either sex — (correctly) perceive their creative ambitions as risky, they will be more easily discouraged from pursuing them. A conservative worldview may (perfectly rationally!) budget more discouragement for girls, though. Of course, budgeting less conservative discouragement for emerging talent irrespective of sex would also discourage talented girls less, so I’m not suggesting conservative must take measures favoring female talent in order to ameliorate a discouragement that, when mixed with the bunker mentality, sometimes appears confusingly close to misogyny.
Naw, it only shows you’re worse at musicology than you think you are ;-P
I hold that contemporary art is crap 95% of the time, just because (as Sturgeon noted), 95% of everything is crap 95% of the time.
It is a gamble. There are plenty of artists whose only problem is not getting the one big break. And there are plenty of talentless hacks.
Sure, it’s a risk. Everyone working in the arts took that risk. Is sports any different? Same deal. I don’t care how good your son is, chances that he’ll ever be in MLB, the NBA, or the NFL are slim. But parents don’t generally discourage their kids from giving it a shot.
This deserves a post of its own. We think of “women in the arts” as a Left-linked concept, and correctly reject boosterism, but women’s lives do involve tradeoffs that many conservatives tend to brush off.
Honestly, I think conservatives are generally good at not brushing these tradeoffs off: part of conservative ideology, after all, is to emphasize these tradeoffs precisely so people don’t forget them.
That doesn’t mean the emphasis, particularly when colored by a siege mentality, is as helpful as we hope, though. A leftist reaction might be, “Screw the emphasis! The emphasis itself is misogyny,” which is wrong, but it’s not surprising if some women become more likely to succeed if they take the Left’s advice to “Screw the emphasis!”, and if women believe “Screw the emphasis!” is the better path for pursuing their dreams, persuading them the emphasis was misogynistic in the first place is considerably easier.
Dissuading conservative youth from pursuing the arts isn’t the only way conservatives lose their voice in the arts. We also lose voices when youth who start out conservative defect because they get more support from the left in developing their talent. This by no means applies to just female youth.
We also lose (in a different way) if those who do pursue their craft without defecting from the right feel obligated to continually prove their all-American conservative bona-fides in very obvious ways like this guy does. Hey, at least this guy produces art for conservatives, by conservatives, and nobody should begrudge his success. But…
Yes, sports is a gamble, too, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be subject to similar problems of not always developing the best talent.
I think it’s harder for conservatives to treat athletes as talentless hacks, though, even if their talent is not outstanding. Athletics competitions have rules that are artificially clear, rules which also aim to be artificially fair, compared to the messiness of everyday life. Spectator sports would have no audience if the competition weren’t fairly easy and satisfying to follow. Spectators are supposed to feel reassured that talent and hard work is what wins when they watch sports.
Arts don’t have sports’ neat system for tracking who’s won, and why they deserved it. There’s the art you see, there’s the art you never see (which of course you cannot know about), and while art can be an investment, well… most conservatives seem to feel the less we know about the Podestas, and the less we’re like them, the better.
Yeah. It still needs to be considered though. There are plenty of excellent musicians who need their day jobs to get by. There are quite a number of superstars who couldn’t battle their way through “Abide With Me” in the key of C on any instrument, but who just happened to be there (wherever “there” was) then. There are rewards for hard work, but there is no justice.
Philistine! No hymn should be in the key of C. They should all be twelve-tone rows! (What, you’re saying they only sound like twelve-tone rows because the congregation can’t sing? Philistine!)
I was trying to keep it simple for the dummy … I mean … the accompaniment.
Gary McVey: We don’t just need some room carved out for conservative politics in culture; we need some room carved out for no politics in culture.
There is a moral code known as the 7 Noahide Laws that deserves wider recognition. I wonder if someone could make them into some sort of film, TV, or even animated production.
Did you mean that by the end of the movie, the solution is to “have rules, but within those rules allow as much freedom and creativity as possible” or did you mean to indicate what you believe the overall solution needs to be?
I certainly don’t agree with everything Jerry has been posting, but I had to respond to this bit of your rebuttal: Trump’s (and the multitude of of fellow-travelling dissident voices, such as on Youtube) greatest success has been, IMO, the nearly complete destruction of the mainstream media’s credibility outside of progressive circles. This has come about largely through uncivil means, aggressively confronting and attacking the institutions and personalities of media opponents, and in the process making political independents more susceptible to persuasion from those who wish to concentrate on more constructive means toward the same end. And yes, this entails using the Left’s tactics against them, just as physical wars involved using an aggressors tactics against them. There are obviously limits one should not tolerate crossing, but the destruction of an enemy’s fighting capability (their institutions) remains the goal. Those institutions include things like the aforementioned mainstream media, online payment processors, ‘woke’ Universities and tech monopolies, etc.
Political Quakerism just doesn’t work, and increasing numbers of conservatives are unwilling to risk their families and country operating within its constraints. Boiling it down to the two personalities that have outlined this debate: I have my own issues with Ahmari, but his polemic probably wouldn’t have gained so much traction if French hadn’t been doing things like going to the New York Times (who had already hired Sara Jeong, I believe, though its been awhile) to attack conservatives over our response to the kneeling football players, all the while claiming his position and actions were made imperative by the brand of Conservatism he espouses.
No. The end of the media credibility came the day Facebook became popular. When users become intimately, painfully aware of how everybody is in the news-entertainment business of celebrity, of advertising themselves, they see that that’s what TV did all along.
If you look especially at what are called extremely online people–then you’ll see. They became disenchanted with the media even though they wouldn’t be caught dead watching Fox News or reading anything conservatives say. They still don’t. Conservatives are terrible at persuading these young people to join the movement, I assume, in no small part because conservative are busy claiming ideological victories in what are technological shifts. Only very old people watch TV news anymore. Tough, but there it is. To see what technology has done to Millennials & younger people, you’d have to go online. Reddit would count more than FOX.
When Americans saw Trump turn celebrity into scandal–well, at that point there had been a decade of people doing that at least. They finally realized, advertising is no longer tied to liberal politics. All TV always does is advertise fantasies, you can choose your own. Then you can be your own fantasy, say on youtube. It’s always telling you, on TV shows or on the news, this is the villain, this is the hero, this is the moralistic victory-& you need us to tell you these important things, or you’d be in the dark. Hit shows as much as the news were supposed to be MUST SEE TV. There’s a vast over-supply of TV, but nothing is must see, or even should see, or at least oughtn’t you to see it!
Tech changed. Habits changed. People no longer believe what they believed before, i.e. in advertising, which conservatives are so far behind the times that they call indoctrination or propaganda, as if this was still FDR’s time in office!
Sometimes I undervalue the factor of chance. Suppose twenty years ago you had to bet on the success prospects of obscure cable guys stepping up to new shows: Dennis Miller, an SNL veteran of Weekend Update and enormous popularity; Jimmy Kimmel, the host of the loutish, little seen The Man Show; or low profile actor Jon Stewart.
But here’s the deal of the cards for Miller: CNBC was once a pretty popular channel for an evening talk TV crowd. That’s where Charles Grodin did his nightly OJ fest. But by the end of the 90s, NBC moved most of that action to MSNBC. CNBC’s role as the business channel was sharpened, and that’s where The Dennis Miller Show landed–the right show on a wrong channel for it.
Kimmel, on the other hand, got lucky, really lucky. After nearly 20 years, Nightline’s suprising late night stand at ABC was finally fading, and the network wanted to transition to comedy. (Interestingly, Ted Koppel and the Nightline staff consistently refused to give in to network requests to co-feature Politically Incorrect in ads with Nightline, who felt massively dissed.) Kimmel was able to turn down David Letterman’s offer of the CBS time slot after his in favor of competing with Letterman on a network show, though one that had never made a go of conventional, late night comedy.
And Stewart, to be fair, made his own luck, being a clever liberal in the age of the despised GWB. Contrary to his legend, he didn’t make all his luck. No question he made The Daily Show a much bigger deal. But Comedy Central was the right platform for Stewart and the audience was there for a show like his, unlike Miller’s exile on a channel better known for Dow Jones updates. Plus he was inheriting a going concern; Daily Show staff of the period, accustomed to the fact of Jon Stewart’s deification, still show a certain wary annoyance with TV historians who make it sound like he picked up a ramshackle operation of hacks.
If only, if only. The Dennis Miller Show was at least the comedy equal of what The Daily Show was doing but the fight for power and influence became more and more unequal.