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Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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It seems like lots of artists and creatives are going right wing lately. I suspect it's due to their (or our, speaking as one of them) predisposition to stand against mainstream culture, as it's impossible to miss the mainstream/capitalist adoption of left wing ideology lately. There's just no excitement or energy in trying to champion leftwing causes when every leftwing cause has been coopted by mass media and tech giants (which are also criminally censorious to creatives currently) and wall street corporations. The artists and creatives who continue to work within the spaces of leftism are increasingly boring and uninteresting and creating work that parrots the capital line more than any genuine transgressive feelings within the artists' vision.

Anyway, my point in making this post is to ask if there has ever been a situation like this in the past? I am interested in history but it's not my strongest subject. It feels like perhaps there are parallels with the French Revolution: wherein the masses were increasingly disgusted with the nobles and quickly defected. I remember reading that even Louis XVI was criticized as being out of touch by vaccinating his family against smallpox, as an aside.

Looking at figures like the Red Scare girls and their whole scene, (which has spiraled out to include Kanye and tons of other millennial thinkers from MIA to David Rudnick) it looks like the disillusionment with leftism is huge. I wonder how much of this is actually an interesting signal that 20th century leftism is dead, or if millennials are simply getting too old for the naivety of that ideology and we're seeing a generation go more conservative which happens with every generation.

I fully empathize with people who are sick of the leftist chokehold on discourse and culture over the past few decades (culminating in the Trump presidency) but I wonder what it leads to. Optimistically, it seems like a "back to basics" situation where people are seeing the contradictions of the recent past and trying to correct them for a new, more coherent ideology, but I also feel like it's a bit of a bizarre situation when a class of people who basically banked their entire social capital for decades on progressive ideology and LGBT/racial inclusivity are starting to tear it down. I applaud it but when has this happened before? In a way it reminds me of the shift in European art from being purely religious in nature, funded by the church, to suddenly having wealthy private clients in the Dutch merchants of the late 1500s.

Sorry for the rambling tone of my post, I just like to read the things posted here and I wanted to kind of post this as a prompt to have some discussion to expand on some thoughts I've been having lately. As an aside, no one in the artist or creative scenes I frequent seem to be able to articulate this shift, as most are still afraid of cancelation or being put out of work or shunned by social media or deplatformed or the many other situations one can get into when defecting from mainstream opinion. Or alternatively creative people are not as invested in the specifics of politics as much as people here are and would rather not engage with the situation from a political lens but rather from their personal/creative artistic angle.

I’m wary of social hypotheses that start with “it seems...”

Right-wing creators, black antisemitism, effective altruism. That’s just this week. A month ago it seemed like woke advertising was hitting a peak; a year ago, maybe it was Democrats, or election deniers, or lockdownists.

This isn’t a dig at your post, because I think discussing the possibility is worthwhile. I’m trying to keep in mind that “it seems” does not imply “it is.” Maybe it’s the filter/algorithm/Current Thing. Seeming is a natural hedge when we aren’t actually sure, and I’d like to skip to the part where people ask for and provide sources.

The third paragraph in my post was an attempt at pointing to some of the evidence I have seen of the rightward shift in art and culture. Others would be the podcast The Perfume Nationalist, countless tumblrs I've seen lately that glorify poor white underdog Trump's America type imagery and identity, and so on. Also the Barragan Spring 2023 fashion show, and the fashion brand called Praying. Brandy Melville. Recent Prada.

As I said in my last paragraph, most of the people in the scene are sort of doing this shift covertly and hiding behind a mirage of ambiguity as to what they are doing (for example, the Red Scare subreddits are filled with people who have no apparent awareness of the rightwing nature of most of the talking points presented on the show.) So it makes evidence difficult to point at. Indeed, much of art and fashion is based on "seeming" rather than anything overt. For example, I can look at Nicholas Ghesquiere's recent collections from Louis Vuitton and see his weird ugly belle epoque-meets-18th century panniers as a kind of rightwing trolling misogynistic hostility against modern women, while the same modern and progressive feminist women can look at the same garments and imagine them as empowering pieces to help them be single mothers with, or whatever.

I don't think that art and fashion, or the politics of people who participate in creating culture, is the sort of thing that you can study, so I don't know how I could provide sources other than by relating my personal anecdotal observations. I'm not going to dox myself but I can tell you that in the least, I'm very interested and personally invested in the creative industries and read themotte enough to be able to identify newly emerging rightwing patterns when 5 years ago you would have gotten you canceled to the ends of the earth for the same thing.

As an aside, I posted in the small scale thread because I didn't really want to attract the hostility and pedantry of the main thread but it seems I've attracted it anyway. I enjoy themotte because I think most of the posters are smart and have unique points of view but the aggression can really be a lot to take when I'm just looking for a more friendly conversation sometimes. I wish there was another thread that was more low stakes than this one, but the friday fun thread says it's not for culture war content so I don't know what to do.

Post as a standalone text post. It doesn't get nearly the engagement typically, only the interested people are clicking.

On your thesis, I think the problem with the evidence for "The Creatives are turning to the Right!" is that it's very "The Boy who cried wolf!" if you've hung around the dissident right wing internet for a minute. It's the Right wing equivalent to "Goldbugs have accurately predicted 14 out of the last 4 recessions" or (if you're familiar with fashion blogs) the way between 2010 and 2020 I read post after post calling that the skinny silhouette was over and it was all about loose pants now. The same articles that are written about the stylish RedScare girls were written in 2015-2016 about how Richard Spencer and Milo represented a new, well read, funny and good natured, nattily dressed and undercutted white nationalism. That wave didn't happen.

Now, in the year of our Lord MMXXII both the goldbugs and the loose pants posts have become right, we are seeing ruinous inflation and skinny jeans are "off trend." So maybe they're just ahead of their time, but when it comes to fashion how do you distinguish "ahead of your time" from "just plain ol' wrong?" I'm not sure. And how do you time it? I'm really not sure, or I'd be richer. Fwiw, I'm still not sure inflation is even a valid concept when so many goods are so much cheaper (or higher quality) than they once were, at the same time that other goods are vastly more expensive; I'm not sure we're seeing inflation as much as price divergence, and the internal mechanics of calculating the CPI are going to have bigger effects than ever, so even then the goldbugs aren't really right.

In this case I find the evidence of the shift to the right among creatives to be weak. The redscare girls are cute, but the "big break" their fans are panting over is a secondary character's love interest on one premium cable TV show; not even a starring role off Broadway or something. Righties are dreaming on Kanye and Kyrie as "big gets" for their team. Kanye's best years are behind him, kids conceived when their parents hooked up at a party listening to "Gold Digger" are 17 now; for us oldies it's equivalent to, when I was 17 in 2009, the right wing celebrating getting Eddie Van Halen to shift Right wing. Kyrie's politics just imploded a high priced superteam that was already selling finals tickets. Whatever your thoughts on the vaccine, Shaq had the best line on it from an NBA perspective: "I played with Kobe, I played against Michael; if Kyrie tried that shit on them they would have pinned him down in the locker room and injected him themselves."

Now maybe Dasha gets the Oscar in a big film next year, Kanye comes out with his Blood on the Tracks coming off the wreckage of his marriage like Dylan before him, and Kyrie and Ben Simmons lead some team to the finals and win co-MVP next year. But I'm not sure I see it.