The Right’s Focus on Pragmatism is Why it Lacks Cultural Power

Conservative pundits often love deriding the irrational arts path that many on the left head down, priding themselves on more concrete pursuits early on, which helps with important things like owning a house. Then in the next breath, that pride turns into a whine as they bemoan the sheer number of books and movies and television overflowing with leftist narratives.

Seems best to pick one. Art and the pursuit of it tend to involve irrationality, dreams, emotion, and stubbornness in the face of reality — various qualities that talking heads love deriding. I do it all the time, but that’s just self-hatred. Yet doing this discourages those who may share some of your ideology from entering the cultural fray, and leads to the sort of monoculture we find ourselves in now.

Yes, it can be silly to get an obscure arts or humanities degree, and no good day job should be taken for granted to boost dreams. But entertaining those impractical urges is what spurs many into sometimes successful arts and media careers. They then make things that people who didn’t take that route don’t like.

Over-immersion in the arts is lame, but dismissing the arts outright is equally so. Those old cringy conservative lamentations against hippie pursuits never disappeared outright. Instead, they evolved into a generally dismissive attitude to much of the art world in general, especially new and obscure forms.

The National Review is no longer railing against rock music. But conservative pundits are needlessly going after things people sorta like, dismissing comics, video games, pop music, anime, and whatever art form they tended to not like when they were teenagers. It’s not merely a failure to adapt to a changing culture, it further misses the idea that some of the people going into such careers may actually share your politics. And now you’re alienating them.

This attitude is worsened by the off-putting tendency to applaud layoffs in the arts. Even if a movie studio or arts organization produced politically biased content, cheering when people get laid off is counterintuitive. It never helps when an arts industry shrinks, and often most of what they produce isn’t politically biased content, that’s just what gets the most attention online as raging clickbait.

None of this is to say that people who pursue the arts without a backup plan and then complain about struggling aren’t occasionally annoying. Of course, they can be, and I’ve been guilty of such whining as well. But we neither want a society where every young person only takes the most rational, logical, correct path that’s assured of a proper result in income and status. You want those people in your tent, too.

When the right speaks of narratives in art, they often mistakenly ascribe it to conspiracy, as if there’s a bunch of people in a dark, smoke-filled room deciding what political message of the day is going to be in the next Marvel film. It’s not quite that extreme, it’s simply that most of the people who go into cultural careers tend to think alike, and automatically agree on and interpret any event through the same political lens.

There’s little coordination, as the shared biases are simply assumed. And, while it’s somewhat true that such cultural institutions are hostile towards conservatives, this wouldn’t be the reality if conservatives hadn’t ceded away any kind of presence in the media and culture, as well as the careers that go with them, decades ago. Those chickens have long roosted, which is why the last 50 years culturally looked like it did, and the next 50 will as well. This is not something you turn around with a beer boycott or a somewhat weird movie about child exploitation.

Imagine how different the culture would look if the right took a different attitude towards cultivating art in the last few decades of the 20th century, if there were more funding and a system of patronage, if the arts were a less derided career path, and artists weren’t stigmatized as head in the clouds dreamers. Would we be having as many discussions about leftist political messages shoehorned into Yellowstone or SNL or whatever superhero franchise used to be good? Not at all.

The pragmatic path, especially in the current endless pollution of content that makes up the culture, is especially wise. Getting skilled in a trade early on like HVAC or being an electrician is a simple, effective way to ensure a near lifetime of financial stability and better quality of life. One thinks, “Maybe it would be nice to not constantly worry about money,” and it is.

Still, it’s hard to complain about culture when you make so little of it. We’ve seen an evolution with various conservative-leaning companies getting into documentaries and publishing and kids’ shows. That’s all healthy for creating a more balanced arts world. But in still overly prizing the sternly pragmatic over the artistically ephemeral, conservatives are firmly maintaining a blind spot to a new generation of arts, not to mention the people thinking about ruining their lives by going into them.

It’s good to be on both sides of that, not just encouraging the pursuit, but being there on the other side with an empathetic attitude when it may not work out. There are too many lectures in arts and entertainment. We could use less lecturing in life as well.

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