Tue. May 29
Acculturated Symposium: Are Conservatives Bad at Pop Culture?
Editor’s note: This piece introduces a symposium in which a variety of writers and thinkers weigh in on the relationship between conservatism and pop culture. Look for further contributions on this topic throughout the week on Acculturated.
Are conservatives bad at pop culture? Erik Kain, who blogs for Forbes, thinks they are:
And it’s not as though no good conservative art or literature has ever been produced. It’s just that today’s conservatives have lost any sense of proportion or subtext. Everything is so overt and over-stated. I think that The Lord of the Rings is a basically conservative text. It’s just not explicitly conservative and doesn’t say anything nasty about Obama.
Today’s conservative pop culture is reactionary, which is fitting I suppose. There was a mockumentary conservatives made a couple years ago that attempted to not very cleverly spoof Michael Moore. But an attempt to beat Moore at his own game is probably going to fail, if only because it’s little more than preaching to the choir (and this isn’t even to say that Moore isn’t deserving of his own criticism – the left is actually very good at leveling its own critique at Moore.) It’s the same in politics: conservatives aren’t so much interested with their own ideas about governance as they are about responding to and obstructing the ideas of their opponents.
And perhaps that’s the crux of the issue. Conservative art mimics conservative politics rather than the other way around. And so it can never really be art.
That’s a bold claim and one that, on its surface, makes sense. Conservatives have a reputation for being anti-pop culture. They seem to spend more time bashing pop culture than either praising it or creating it. Conservative traditionalists see pop culture as low, degrading, and a symbol of moral degeneration. Some boast that they do not watch movies or that they do not they listen to music that isn’t classical. Even jazz is considered too pop for some—and don’t get them started on hip-hop. Other conservatives are rightly critical of Hollywood’s endemic anti-American elitism. Earlier this month, The Hollywood Reporter ran a special issue on Hollywood and politics, which featured a column by Ann Coulter called “Why America Hates Hollywood.” Here’s an excerpt:
Let me give you the plots of two true crime episodes I recently watched, back-to-back, on ID TV. The show was titled Unusual Suspects – “unusual” only if it were a Hollywood production. In the first, a woman was raped at home, stabbed through the heart and her house set on fire. The police looked at suspicious white guys in her life. Then, in the last five minutes of the show, DNA proved that her rapist/murderer was a Hispanic who wanted to have sex with a virgin. In the second, a married couple and their son were stabbed to death in their sleep. Various white guys were arrested, but all were let go when their DNA didn’t match or they had airtight alibis. Then it turned out to be a random Hispanic kid who committed the murders as a gang initiation.
In other words, the exact opposite of a Law & Order plot. I like watching beautiful rich people with fabulous Manhattan apartments killing one another as much as anyone. Maybe more. But why do ALL the wealthy white people, Christians, Southerners or WASPS in these scripts have to be racist, misogynist snobs? Whatever happened to diversity? Hollywood learned to stop stereotyping black characters. Can’t it learn to stop stereotyping the rest of America?
Not to brag, but I’ve been to America. The natives do not need coaching in tolerance, certainly not from beautiful airheads who are paid like Enron executives to lecture us — the child-molesting, greedy racists — about learning to be decent human beings.
America may hate Hollywood’s elitism, but Americans still love and consume vast amounts of pop culture.
When it comes to pop culture, conservatives act like outsiders looking in (curmudgeonly outsiders, in some cases). I can kind of understand why they’re less than pleased with the current landscape: the institutions that shape America’s cultural conversation — Hollywood, the music industry, the media, the academy, the arts, etc — are dominated by liberals. But rather than penetrating the liberal cultural establishment, the conservative movement erected its own institutions. James Piereson pointed this out in a 2010 essay for The National Interest titled “Conservative Nation.” He wrote, ”Conservatives have in this way created their own ‘nation’ within the nation, replete with its own culture, institutions and prominent personalities.” Those institutions — think National Review (1955), the Heritage Foundation (1973), and the CATO Institute (1977) — which were founded during the heady days of the Cold War, were often more concerned with politics, policy, and economics than they were culture, let alone pop culture.
In the forthcoming June issue of The New Criterion, Piereson elaborates on the point he made in “Conservative Nation,” writing:
Nor have Republicans had much success in penetrating leading cultural and educational institutions on behalf of ideas that have wide support among voters. College faculties and editorial boards are more resolutely Democratic and liberal today than they were in the 1960s. Republicans have so far been unable to parlay their considerable electoral success into commensurate influence over cultural, journalistic, and educational institutions. Conservatives, in fact, have done something altogether different: they have created their own newspapers, magazines, think tanks and research institutes, and colleges and schools to circulate their ideas. They have, in effect, formed their own “counter-establishment” through which they communicate with their supporters and wage ideological warfare against Democrats.
Here at Acculturated, we are less interested in politics than we are in how the virtues — like creativity, beauty heroism, responsibility, joy, and generosity, to name a few — play themselves out in the popular culture. The virtues transcend politics and, we think, the best pop culture transcends politics as well. Pop culture is the realm where human stories unfold and reach a mass audience. When conservatives or liberals adulterate the pop culture with politics, then those stories suffer, plain and simple. But when those stories are emotionally honest portrayals of human life, with all of its emotional highs and lows, then there is nothing better than to lose yourself in them.
Emotional truths help us get to moral truths, and that’s where the virtues come in. Neither conservatives nor liberals have a monopoly on these virtues, but the conservatives certainly believe in their value in enhancing the human experience and are vocal about it. The good news is, the pop culture is packed with those virtues and audiences respond to them. If you don’t believe me, just think about the painful maturing process that Judd Apatow’s characters undergo. Or the themes of heroism and loyalty in the Harry Potter books. Or any number of things that we’ve covered on this blog.
This is all by way of context. The bottom line is that Kain’s provocative blog post intrigued us and so we set out to ask some prominent writers that we know, many of them conservative, about the relationship between conservatives and pop culture. Some of the questions we asked them were: Are conservatives bad at pop culture? Or, is that a myth? If they are inherently “bad” at pop culture, then why? More broadly, why do conservative writers and pundits appear uninterested in pop culture? Can you think of good examples of conservatives doing pop culture today?
The responses that we have received from people like Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, Megan Basham, Lee Siegel, Diane Ellis, Mark Judge, James Poulos, and others, were enthusiastic, impassioned, insightful, and so very different. Each makes for excellent reading. It makes us wonder if conservatives are more interested in pop culture than they’ve been letting on. If they are, it’s time for them to come out of the closet. It’s time to start a conversation about it. We hope that this symposium can contribute, in some way, to that conversation.
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Speaking as a conservative who made his living as a photographer for ten years… We’re not good at pop culture because the pop culture machine demands something new, and conservatives by their very nature do not easily embrace that which is new. The talent is there in abundance: Go to any church service on a Sunday morning and you’ll find musicians that would shine in any TV talent show, it’s just that we’re more comfortable in doing things the way they’ve always been done, while Hollywood et al demands something different.
Now libertarians, on the other hand…
I don’t know if Hollywood et. al. is demanding something “different”, as much as they are demanding something that diminishes the value of responsible/respectful living, in the hope that this will also diminish the likelihood that their own mellow will be harshed about their recreational/lifestyle choices.
It’s always amazed me (since those long ago days when artists like Frank Zappa and Prince took the stage) how people whose talent and creativity are clearly evident, keep traveling down the same, well-traveled path to vulgarity and irresponsibility as many who came before them, justifying the trip as evidence of their “free-thinking” minds … as if they needed to wallow in the filth to attain commercial success and/or the respect of the artistic community.
Conservatives do not fear the new … but we believe in keeping what works, and adopting what works better. If anything, we are averse to throwing out babies with the bathwater.
I take a look at where the music in those church services has gone … from hymnals and a pipe organ and denunciations of the “demon beat”, to PowerPoint and a Les Paul and a driving beat … in my adult lifetime as an example of this, especially when I’m also involved in “managing” the teen musicians in my own church, with the full support of the pastors and church leadership, to express their faith in the sound of their generation and continue to “rock the flock” as my generation has learned to do.
There are plenty of conservatives doing quality pop art. It’s just a good idea to keep a low profile in the era of teeth nashing Bush hatred from the folks who by and large run the media production factories.
Mother, May I?
By Robert Winkler Burke
Book #4 of In That Day Teachings
3/30/09 http://www.inthatdayteachings.com
Men who are men, who know what to do,
Are marginalized by the empowered few,
Who fear because men know what to do,
Which is to dethrone the deceiving few.
But now men can’t do what they’re born to do,
To protect the weak-minded from the brazen few,
Who enslave so cleverly without overt shackles,
Men see, but blind sheep love their wolf hackles.
The prey wolves warn their sheep against wolves divine,
Divine wolves defrock prey wolves, no pay in mind,
Other than to do what’s right for right’s sake alone,
Get rid of evil and help all to make good homes.
Since prey wolves stop divine wolves from power,
What’s needed is a mama bear wolf at this hour,
Once set; good men will ask, Mother, may I?
She’ll nod, and then: Prey wolves will hide.
The divine wolves, ever gentlemen, need not growl,
Divine wolves bare plain words and prey wolves howl,
But their words are as mighty swords from apocalypse,
Truth’s enemies melt from rule-of-law documents fixed.
Conservatives have an hard time with popular culture because too many of them think that a poem’s rhyming half-decently were all that were needed for a decent poem, as opposed to decent metre and well-formedly cogent ideas.
Fox’s attempt at a conservative version of “The Daily Show” was in fact a form of doggerel: it got forms right, but the content was always awkward and poorly-timed.
That’s just a silly thing to say. Read that back to yourself.
I think to be “radical” in some art forms you’d have to be willing to espouse some “conservative” themes. Imagine Lady Gaga singing about how nice it is to have a couple of hours to herself while the kids are at vacation bible school.
Conservatives are bad at pop culture because they tend to try to make it overtly “conservative.” Leftist entertainers don’t set out thinking, “I’ll preach a leftist message today,” they portray/parody/sing about what they think the world is like, full stop.
Conservatives just need to set out to make good movies and music, not to make “conservative” movies and music.
Oh, I think that plenty of leftist entertainers set out thinking, “I’ll preach a leftist message today,” or what were all of those “war” movies that tanked? But they do get *made* and there seems to be a whole lot more professional leftist preaching than the conservative sort. So it’s probably right to say that Hollywood and pop-culture is “leftist.”
Thing is, when they do it, they’re not any better at it than conservatives are. I don’t like preachy stuff from either direction. I’d rather be entertained. And I do think that there is a whole lot of conservative entertainment out there, or what was Avengers? In the literary world, romances sell by far the most and they are often profoundly “conservative”; one man, one woman and true love.
What do you call Country music if not conservative? And how many gun toting heroes do there have to be in Hollywood movies before conservatives realize that, yes, there is plenty of conservative pop-culture. Maybe because it’s not spelled out so obviously, they don’t believe it.
Besides, liberal values rule pop culture because liberals are just more inclined to question prevailing norms, whereas conservatives only question prevailing liberal norms. It’s sort of the same reason most journalists (but not their company owners) are liberal: you see the world, you ask questions with an open mind and you come out liberal. Sorry conservatives, but you’ll always be underrepresented at the cutting-edges of culture.
Agreed that country music and action movies could be considered conservative-friendly, if not outright conservative.
But as for the idea that “you ask questions with an open mind, you come out liberal,” give me a bloody break. I assume you’re a liberal, since you’ve said that. How open is your mind on the liberal/conservative divide on, say, the public employee pensions that threaten to bankrupt cities and states across the country? If you’re like pretty much every liberal political leader, you will unhesitatingly and *unthinkingly* side with the unions, no matter what. That’s not open-minded; it’s digging in your heels.
Liberals are no more open-minded than conservatives are. In fact, given the hatred and vitriol spewed at conservative figures (Bush = Hitler, hanging Sarah Palin in effigy to go along with rape fantasies about her, etc., etc.) I think the evidence is rather compelling that left-wing people are the most intolerant people in the country. Given that both the traditional news media and the academy are overwhelmingly left-wing, it’s nearly impossible to be a conservative in our society without having had your views questioned at every turn and tested in fire.
So, give me one piece of evidence that having an open mind is correlated to being liberal.
Au contraire, I would be willing (though I’m in no position to do so) to discuss public-employee pensions and nearly any other staple of liberal orthodoxy provided the conservatives on the other side were equally willing to the same, which they increasingly are not. When you say liberals are intolerant, what you really should say is that liberals are intolerant of intolerant conservatives.
But to the point, the proof of liberal open-mindedness: first your contention that the media is “overwhelmingly” liberal is bunk, the position of Fox atop TV news oulets is only the most obvious example. As far as academia is concerned, there’s nothing preventing an equally robust conservative academic tradition except conservatives themselves. The reason that academia and journalism (if not the journalism business and owners) may be more liberal is exactly the “proof” you ask for regarding liberalism’s open-mindedness. Hordes of conservative journalists would be redundant because they would all ask the same question. Conservative academia also by its very nature would approach all subjects as closed books. Great for some things, business maybe, but certainly not liberal arts (which I’m assuming we can agree is extremely important).
SirJane, your very refusal to admit that the media is overwhelmingly liberal is itself evidence of a lack of open-mindedness. Yes, Fox skews right. I’ll certainly admit that. (See how open-minded I am?) But that’s hardly evidence that the media on the whole are balanced.
For instance, the New York Times running a front-page story on a non-existent McCain affair during the 2008 election, while it (and every other media outlet except the National Enquirer) refused to delve into Democrat John Edwards’ tawdry affair (the consequences of which are now playing out in the courts)…. well, the fact that the New York Times hasn’t endorsed a Republican candidate for president since 1956, and that media members’ political contributions run something like 95% for Democrats…. those are just a coincidence when things like that happen, I suppose? Never mind that these same media refused to explore the Clinton scandal until Drudge forced their hands. Let’s not even get into the kid glove treatment Obama has ridden to the presidency.
In short: the members of the mainstream media vote liberal. Their donations are liberal. Their editorial pages are thoroughly liberal. Their endorsements are liberal. But somehow the media itself is not liberal? Absurd on its face. In fact, you start out by saying the claim that the media is liberal is bunk but end by pretty much acknowledging that it’s true. And you have to acknowledge it, because it’s so obvious to everyone.
As for academia, your arguments there are simply begging the question. More open-minded people become liberals and academics? How do you know? Because academics are liberal.
So, if I understand you correctly, even though the U.S. population is divided roughly evenly between liberals and conservatives, the fact that journalists and academics (I must admit I’m thinking mainly of humanities and social sciences when I discuss academia) are overwhelmingly liberal arises because of an inherent flaw in conservative thinking that closes any conservative off to open inquiry… and this is the famously open-minded liberal view of the world? Wow.
Jonah Goldberg is right: liberals are incapable of admitting their biases.
Conservatives obsess over the NYT as if there is no other media outlet. No WSJ, no Washington Times, no Post and on and on.
If the media and academia skew liberal, then why? What prevents conservatives from dominating media, academia or popular entertainment? I’d say the weakness of their ideas is the reason – it’s certainly not because conservatives lack money or influence. For what it’s worth, you just as glibly ignore all the negative press given every Democratic president or hopeful, including Gore and Kerry who were definitely not given any preferential treatment.
So what’s the reason? How can liberalism – the ideology of beta-males – have such an iron grip in all these areas (or so conservatives say)? As you say, it’s not because a conservative market doesn’t exist, so it must be the product.
And please, there is no comparison as to which side of the political divide is more prone to examine their own biases, the redoubtable Jonah Goldberg notwithstanding.
I concede the argument. You have guarded your open mind with an impenetrable wall of belief in the intrinsic inferiority of any thought that does not match your own. Kudos.
It’s been my experience that conservative blogs, and the readers who comment on them, make far finer musical references and links than those I find on more liberal blogs. As a northearst libertarian/conservative, I am expose by necessity to both view point. I find the conservative bloggers and readers better humored also.
This question could really be broken down into two separate questions: (1) Why do the people who make pop culture overwhelmingly support left-wing causes? and (2) Why do the products of pop culture overwhelmingly spout left-wing messages?
I submit that the answer to question 1 is that, like academia (though certainly academics would quixotically deny the charge), Hollywood more or less consciously seeks to exclude those who do not share the dominant opinions of the group. And becoming a member of the group no doubt reinforces the bias that already exists in most people.
As to the second question, I believe the answer is: they don’t. That is, the actual products of pop culture are not as left wing as the biases of their producers would lead us to expect.
Consider the dominant “tentpole” movie genre these days: the superhero flick. The superhero doesn’t report to any government. He’s an individual with remarkable gifts who uses them to help mankind where government is powerless to make a difference. Rather than identifying himself as a member of an identifiable community, he stands apart from the people he has sworn to help. One could make a case that such figures are conservative by their very nature. Indeed, several conservative critics saw in Christopher Nolan’s “Dark Knight” an implicit support for Bush’s war on terror. You could argue that’s not what the movie is saying at all; but the point is, conservatives could embrace it.
Consider a vastly different kind of pop culture production: the Jane Austen/Downton Abbey period piece. While these types of entertainments don’t rake in the same money that superhero flicks do, nevertheless they tend to be enormously popular when done well. Almost by definition, such creations depict societies whose values are vastly different from current liberal impulses. They are worlds of propriety where scandal is actually possible because of rigid traditional values — values which are, within the pieces, not undermined or mocked — indeed, those values serve as the very framework of the action.
Now, do I think that Hollywood is intending to promote conservatism with these shows? Obviously not. But Hollywood goes where the audience (i.e., the money) is, and the audience has a taste for conservative values far beyond what Hollywood itself would ever endorse. The vogue for Jane Austen arose, I would suggest, because people crave romance marked by decorum and yearning — conservative romance — rather than “let’s hop in the sack” — liberal romance.
Obviously, I am painting with a very broad brush here. But I don’t believe that the products of Hollywood are uniformly left-wing, even though the people who produce them are.
It is simply not enough for the right writ large to create their own institutions. The vast majority of apolitical Americans are not touched by these at all. The cultural influence professions of education, media and entertainment have a huge impact on what average Americans believe and ultimately how they vote. We cannot change the direction of our society through politics and policy alone, as the last 40 or 50 years has made clear to we on the right. Either we populate and promote our young people going into these professions, or the drift away from a culture of liberty and personal responsibility will continue.
Why would anyone want to work at being good at something that has little to no value?
Pop culture by definition is whatever the teens & tweens are into. (Which is why a boys dance gang beat out Sarah Boyle on ‘Britains Got Talent’ a few years ago. Of course, anything beyond one year ago is the dark ages for pop culture.) Conservatives are grown-ups. Unless they are parents, there is no reason to pay any attention to pop.
You do yourself a disservice by dismissing all pop culture so glibly. Continue to stay out of touch and wonder why the world keeps changing while you remain mystified.
“Today’s conservatives are reactionary”, in the fashion of artistic ezperssions like “Raygun for Shah” or “Chimpy McBusHitler”?
Please.
And let’s not forget the Ramones support for Ronald Reagan. “Punk is right wing”, and “I think Ronald Reagan was the best President of my lifetime.” (Johnny Ramone.)
And lets not ignore the Punk movers and shakers in the FSU (Former Soviet Union, of USSWere), and Burma.
DJR12, top of the class.
There are plenty of righties who are knowledgeable about pop culture (see: Jonah Goldberg), but not necessarily adept at producing it–although this may be a generational thing more than an ideological one. I also think you have to make a distinction between everyday conservatives and conservative politicians, who might be the least hip people on the planet. McCain came across an an old fuddy duddy in 2008 (with good reason), while Romney just screams “square.” In the meantime, Obama is rubbing elbows with the Hollywood glitterati, crooning on Jimmy Fallon, introducing his daughters to Justin Bieber, and pretending that “Mad Men” and “Homeland” are his favorite shows. As a conservative myself, my problem isn’t with pop culture per se so much as politicized pop culture. Family Guy’s grossly unfair, over-the-top savaging of the Tea Party (written by an OWS protester, no less) is only one in a long line of unprovoked televisual muggings that non-libs have to endure on a regular basis. Last week’s episode of “Veep” saw the VP’s staff analogize border fence advocates to Klansmen; this despite the fact that the VP’s party affiliation is supposed to be a mystery. Yeah, right.
There is a reason conservatives created alternative institutions … when your opponents have embraced ends-justify-the-means relativism as a feature, not a bug, gaining credibility in their established institutions becomes a combination of a greased-pig contest and a shell game.
Pop culture is only part of the story.
Art in Western civilization has always been about transgression, where creativity is preoccupied with reconciling the things one makes with the life one lives. Revolution comes naturally to the Liberal Left as the protection and preservation of social institutions comes naturally to the Conservative Right. The problem for the Left is that transgression has been blown out and the current impasse has brought them to the brink where the only thing left to transgress is transgression itself. The problem for the Right is that they have internalized some or most of the cultural products and thinking of the Left, enough to threaten their own self definition to some degree.
Much of the friction between Left and Right comes from a refusal to recognize the possibility that the two sides belong to one another. The Right is willing to fight for the freedom that forms the basis for self expression that the Left revels in. The Left provides the modes of transgression that ultimately drives the marketplace, the taxes from which powers the dreams of social virtue that they indulge in so frequently.
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Conservatives are bad at pop culture for the same reason that liberal political dramas are often pretty good and conservative political dramas are inconceivable–even to conservatives. The same goes for why conservative talk shows are popular and liberal ones are un-watchable/un-listenable.
It’s ultimately pretty simple: conservatism is boring. It’s boring because everybody knows what to expect. It’s boring because it’s not self-destructive. When articulated properly (a rare thing), it doesn’t cause cognitive dissonance, which is the essence of good drama. It’s boring because the core ideas about trial and error, planning for human fallibility, understanding that failure is part of success, and that a stable social fabric is necessary to allow true freedom are non-intuitive, un-visceral, and, frankly, kind of juiceless. It’s boring because it requires saying “no” a lot.
Boring public policy is good. Boring art, not so much.
But a word of warning: the only known way to make conservatism interesting is to turn it into a freak show. If you can get a bunch of yahoos saying ridiculous things, that’s interesting, in a cringe-inducing sort of way. The electorate has no problem with boring politicians. They have a big problem with inflammatory ones. Conservatives need to resist the temptation to grab attention through the same mechanism that causes drivers to slow down and gawk at a traffic accident.
Very well said!
These are good points. On the other hand, I think it will always be hard for modern, libertarian-tinged, conservatism to gain a foot-hold among actors and writers because our experience puts the lie to any notion of an active meritocracy. Mind you, I’m not contending that we (except for our more feeble-mindedly envious) think that only bad actors and authors succeed, or even that that this happens much. However, any successful actor or author with a jot of self-honesty (and not feeble-mindedly proud) knows that there are easily ten other actors or writers who could have got the part, the book contract, the series job…and done about as well or better. Too many libertarians and modern conservatives I’ve heard seem wedded to the idea of a morally normative Market operating in a world which were just thereby, as opposed to one which were flawed but optimal, and this flies in the face of the lived experience of those in creative fields.
That is to say, if John Galt were an actor, he’d've had more rachmones.
Humourously enough, more traditional Tory conservatism has a better handle on the extent to which chance really can rule much of our lives in a fallen world, that no man may boast or deprecate beneath him in status and wealth.
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I do hope that the detective story – the ‘mystery’, in AmE – shall be dealt with. It’s inherently ‘conservative’ (meaning, of course, ‘Classical Liberal’) – and, I rather think, currently suffers from the fracture between the presumption, necessary for ‘fair play’ and the old Detective Club rules, of a shared morality common to writer and reader, and those very rules of the genre.
I hope also that popular history and popular biography are addressed: I think that a rich vein to work in this context.
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As a former liberal, I have to say that today’s movies, at least, are in many ways deeply conservative — in subtext, anyway. The sheen of popular culture, though, part of the democratization that started with the Impressionists and damned attractive, stops us from experiencing the real meaning of, say, a movie like Dead Man Walking, whose subtext tells us that Sean Penn’s character was saved only when he experienced the full punishment for his deeds. That’s conservative! Conservative filmmakers need to master the conventions of film and then use them. I’m going to see For Greater Glory in hopes that Garcia has done just that.
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