Is It Just Easier to Go Left?

Ricochet member @ctlaw posted a link to this thought-provoking video in the Ricochet Film Society group section. The issue addressed was why so many great TV shows or successful movie franchises suddenly become flat and preachy, reduced to delivering the same sorts of lefty messages.

The author of the video makes the not unreasonable inference that this is an intentional process, a planned bait-and-switch to lure an otherwise centrist, conservative or libertarian audience into propaganda sessions. For example, viewers of sci-fi or ancient warrior settings are overwhelmingly young males. That crowd is rarely left-leaning and thus a target-rich environment.

I disagree with that analysis about intentionality for two reasons. One, I don’t believe there are script meetings where a multi-year indoctrination strategy is laid out, especially in an industry where getting renewed is a survival issue and developing that winning concept is rare and invaluable. It is probably exciting to flesh out and bring to fruition on its own merits rather than a clever indoctrination vehicle.

Second, originality is hard. The genre of story (movies, novels, plays, fairy tales, TV drama) is about human eternals like love, journey, struggle, betrayal, transformation, loyalty, and the rest. All of this revolves around animating a well-crafted arc. Story does not care about the era, the cultural setting, or even the race or sex of characters so long as the eternals are reasonably, engagingly and rationally deployed by full and interesting characters.

Freedom, markets, common sense and fundamental values are ingredients for creative and productive action in the real world. However, they are not prescriptive. With all due respect to Horatio Alger, opportunity does not write outcomes by itself. Conservatism does not offer a stock of canned storylines the way victim-based ideologies operate.

In stark contrast, leftism is a web of simple narratives, canned plots easy to unpack. An original plot in a novel setting with rich characters is hard work. When quality storylines are no longer emerging, having those same characters perform the equivalent of a school play about climate, racism, feminism, multiculturalism or homophobia practically writes itself.

So creative exhaustion in a cultural environment (entertainment) where trendy leftist notions permeate everything necessarily leads to weak scripts with predictable messaging and two-dimensional characters where there used to be a vibrant storyline. Not a conspiracy but a predictable cultural and structural defect.

Like creative media, in academia actual scholarship is hard work, and breakthrough excellence is rare. But if parroting ideological pablum is rewarded instead, then a self-enforcing mediocrity will feed on that ideological fodder and aggressively drive out its opposites—quality, substance, originality, discipline and competition. The requisite injection of narcissism that makes leftists always assume they are smarter, more moral and more creative than others blinds them to the fact that whenever their ideology prevails, creativity, objective truth, morality and originality suffer and die.

I don’t know whether some great historical arc is at work to make societal enervation inevitable or that leftism is just a pathogen that preys on weakened societies or that a failure to honor and instill basic virtues and habits instead of entitlements has severe consequences a generation or two later. In any case, it is not likely reducible to conspiracies crafted by people who are not especially astute politically.