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This week, we go it alone. And by that we mean no guest, just our guys performing some Rank Punditry® on the news of the day, energy on Texas, WandaVision (well, James tries to talk about it), Rob’s recently completed trip to Kenya, Peter’s sojourn in Wyoming, and various other personal and political points of interest. We’ve also got new Lileks Post of The Week, courtesy of David Foster (our apologies on the tardy jingle, David), and Rob tells us how to get forbidden cheese past U.S. Customs. Information for life.
Music from this week’s show: Ladysmith Black Mambazo – (Mbube) The Lion Sleeps Tonight
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Point taken, but remove the bit about artists and I stand by my argument. There’s nothing American about materialism (as in dialectical not the consumer sense) and running down ideas.
The odd thing there is that it’s white people like Biden and Pelosi etc who want to stay at the top. How do they do that without being awful racists?
James, your “rebuttal” to what I was saying amounts to a recapitulation of it. I was saying that Conservatives have a coldly practical mindset that often runs counter to the sheer intangibility of art … or, as you just said, Conservatives have often found that “the languages of abstraction were unappealing.”
Tomato, tomahto.
And it is this hostility toward abstraction – – or at least, many Conservatives’ impatience with it and hence their unwillingness to sponsor it (in the form of drama, TV, and film) — that has contributed to the monoculture we are witnessing in the arts right now, a monoculture that is openly hostile toward classically liberal values.
“Rebuttal” in quotes to indicate your opinion of the quality of response noted. I think it is entirely possible to regard modernism – the unraveling of the representative, humanist tradition – as unappealing from a purely aesthetic viewpoint. That would be the artist’s perspective. People who were coldly practical were unlikely to engage art on its own terms in any case. Perhaps we should clarify whether we are talking about artists with conservative inclinations, or everyday people who have a set of ideas that does not align with whatever the vanguard proposes today.
But the contemporary arts you mentioned, suffused with antipathy to classical liberalism, get their points across through traditional means. Story, character, plot, drama, catharsis. There is no abstraction in TV or film.
Yes they do. But James, those are all features of form, not content, and until just a few minutes ago the issue under discussion here was content. That antipathy toward classical liberalism you mentioned? That’s a function of content.
A book by Ta-Nehisi Coates might arrive in traditional, even attractive, form (graceful English; perfect punctuation and syntax; classically ordered paragraphs and chapters, etc.) but the content of his book will be openly hostile to tradition, and mendacious in its portrait of America.
Once again, the issue here isn’t form, but content, and the Right — for reasons that pass understanding — has decided to cede the creation of content to the Left.
I say “for reasons that pass understanding” because it wasn’t all that long ago – – a few decades, perhaps – – that Conservatives were well-represented in the arts. Was there full parity there? Of course not. But — to use motion pictures as an example — unabashed patriots such as the great William Wyler, the almost-as-great George Stevens, the bombastic-but-terrific Cecil B. De Mille, the somewhat-overrated Frank Capra, the often-maudlin John Ford, the wonderful Howard Hawks, and many more, were able to ply their trade unmolested.
Nor was their work wholly uncritical of America and its history — nor should it have been, which is the key difference between art and agitprop.
I say this only to remind ourselves that a Conservative worldview is not inimical to the creation of great drama, or great art (and I’m sure Kipling would agree with me). Hell, one could even argue that artists tend to thrive when they are defying cultural orthodoxy, and seeing as how the Left controls the commanding heights of culture now, and seeing as how the Left’s point-of-view is both dishonest and illiberal — the Right has a grand opportunity. But will it take it?
Frankly, we’d be dumb not to. In fact the consequences of our not doing so could be very grave indeed.
So yes, I’d say these conversations are crucial right now, because not only does culture matter, I think it matters most of all.
Incorrect, James. You write beautifully (and surely know that). I put rebuttal in quotes because after you said “Not so sure” you proceeded to agree with me. So your rebuttal amounted to a restatement of my own argument. It was kind of like:
”Plenty of antiques in this place.”
”Not so sure. All I see is a lot of old valuable furniture.”
The way movies, for example, are done now, even if conservatives made a great conservative movie, they would also have to buy or build theaters to show them in. Or create another Amazon or Netflex to show/stream them online. Because the existing structure is more or less determined to only show the “agitprop.”
The Constitution cannot function as intended if four companies control the public square.
you could have that pipeline in place and still not get your intended response. Agencies are run by hard lefties, acting schools, theatre companies, improv schools, production companies. To function you have to join unions as well.
In order to build this great conservative entertainment infrastructure, you need hundreds of right wingers in the arts who aren’t found to be in the arts enough to overwhelm the inherent biases of being found to be conservative. Because art doesn’t just “happen” it has to be cultivated and nurtured like any other skill.
My issue with Rob’s rant on “narrative” is that narrative is the filter through which facts come. It’s not just culture war stuff, it’s day to day life and issues.
Example:
-America is a racist country
-Law enforcement goes around killing unarmed minorities
-Women and people of color can’t make it in America due to systemic issues, make less money than white men, and we need laws to even the playing field.
-White supremacy is a large widespread problem in American life.
None of these are factually true
Narrative becomes “fact” which then becomes policy.
So refreshing to hear James passionately crossing swords!
Exactly. When it comes to describing the world as it is, we have fallen down a rabbit hole. Douglas Murray has said that the most insidious part of culturally-enforced “Wokeness” is that it requires one to agree with things one doesn’t actually believe. In Woke World, things we all know to be true become lies, and things we all know to be false become indisputable truths.
All of which can be stressful on the psyche.
A rounding error at Amazon is potentially millions of dollars of sales for some other actor in the market.
Imagine how much money somebody could make by deciding to market all of the “banned books”?
Mike Rosen was always fond of pointing out that there is no grand conspiracy among the left in this regard; i.e., Geese don’t get together in the back of a smoky taproom in Deadhorse, AK and decide to fly south for the winter. It’s just what they do because that’s their nature.
On average, young, conservative people are simply disinclined towards seeking careers in the arts when they could be doing things in the engineering or business. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s just part of their nature.
This is an insoluble problem in some sense because conservatives believe that human nature is more or less intractable – particularly in the short run.
Welcome back, @roblong !
“That’s their nature.” Uh huh. So how would Rosen account for the long list of Conservative artists who worked and thrived in the U.S. film industry? Such a list includes (but is not restricted to) James Stewart, John Ford, Cecil B. De Mille, George Stevens, Howard Hawks, Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, Harold Lloyd, Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Bob Hope, Clint Eastwood, Robert Taylor, Borden Chase, John Milius, etc.
How would Rosen account for those people? Yes, they mainly worked in the last century, so does Rosen think Conservative nature underwent some sort of change in the last few decades?
How would he account for them?
You mean these people from the stone age of media? An age when socialists and communists were running rampant through the media environment?
Certainly, conservative temperaments haven’t undergone some radical transformation, but this is a question of the average propensities of people in various psychometric categories. If conservatives (as a question of temperament) are half as likely as the average liberal to be interested in exploring the arts and media as a career – let’s say because it is perceived as being higher in variance WRT salary and employment – then you’d expect a considerably lower number of conservatives going into that field.
Then, what if there is a sort of ideological screen which further discourages conservatives from being out for fear of blackballing? Voila; very few conservatives can be found in media.
I’ll accept your “half as likely as the average liberal” speculation as fact, because it seems reasonable to me, but even with that figure — 50% — as a kind of baseline, the ratio of progressives to conservatives in scripted entertainment should be 2 to 1 — and right now it is something like 10 to 1.
And if that “ideological screen” you mentioned is what’s discouraging conservatives from entering the arts and achieving that 2 to 1 proportion (which they probably enjoyed as recently as 40 years ago), then this needs to be brought up, hashed over (and over and over and over), and — fingers crossed — solved. Or at least ameliorated.
Because the culture is too important to cede to the ones who would destroy it.
@filmklassik — “I’ll accept your ‘half as likely as the average liberal’ speculation as fact, because it seems reasonable to me, but even with that figure — 50% — as a kind of baseline, the ratio of progressives to conservatives in scripted entertainment should be 2 to 1 — and right now it is something like 10 to 1.”
Do you mean conservatives, or conservatives who have come out as conservatives?
Actors usually come out as conservatives only when they are ready to retire. Because after they come out as conservatives they will generally have no choice but to find some other way of making a living.
Years ago, I used to keep a box of old TV Guides next to my bed, to help me get to sleep. The quality of the writing was very high — TV Guide was an enormously wealthy publication in those days — but the subject matter of the articles was unlikely to get me riled up (and writing letters to the editor in my head).
One thing I noticed in the ubiquitous actor bios was that the subjects would often describe themselves as “not political”. I of course understood what that really meant.
You should listen to this week’s show.