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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25750 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Uh, you can find conservative writers and musicians pretty easily. The appreciation guild just tilts left.

You can't participate in literarature or music culture as a conservative without holding your nose at the politics of people involved. You can ghettoize yourself into country music and a circle of conservative authors, but you can't even read the important authors of fity or seventy-five years ago without dealing in a great many socialists and libtards. Yes, you can read the dimes square guys and listen to Morgan Wallen, but you can't read the authors and musicians whose style they're riffing on and influenced by without dealing with artists with politics you'd find disgusting.

Similarly, a liberal can ghettoize themselves into certain niche sports or women's sports and be assured that they would find the athletes to be Good People, but they can't just watch a normal big-5 team without knowing there are a lot of Jesus freaks (or worse as the case may be) on the team.

Music and film, sure, but libs also have to do a lot of nose-holding (or, more often, misrepresenting/ignoring the politics of historical greats) to read literature, poetry, and philosophy. Three out of the five greatest Modernist poets were avowed fascists, for instance. Cormac McCarthy subscribed to neo-Nazi publications, DFW wrote a hagiography of John McCain back when McCain was one of the Evil Fascists, you go further back and you have figures like Updike, Wolfe, etc. Europe is a little different because you have so many great Jewish novelists, who were understandably sensitive about the hard right, but you also have plenty of Problematic figures like Junger. Literary culture is way out to the left because, like other culture industries, you can come in, pack it with your friends, chuck out all the dissidents, and rewrite history (and this certainly didn't start with 'wokeness', it started with capital-C Communists), but great literature is certainly well-balanced between left and right.

Cormac McCarthy subscribed to neo-Nazi publications

Comac McCarthy also included a positively-depicted transsexual in his penultimate book. Checkmate!

In seriousness though, what neo-Nazi publications?

I misspoke slightly, far-right anti-semitic stuff but not neo-Nazi. https://slate.com/culture/2023/06/cormac-mccarthy-dead-garbage-el-paso-texas.html.

Which he threw into the trash.

Truly, the man is Adolf Hitler.

I'd also like to know.

Cormac McCarthy DEAD DFW DEAD Updike DEAD Wolfe DEAD Junger DEAD

This is like saying that the US Olympic team has always been left coded because they gave the Black Power salute on the podium in Mexico City.

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to get at with this whole line of argument, so I may be speaking past you, but yeah that's how literature works you're mostly reading dead guys, i.e. "the authors and musicians whose style they're riffing on and influenced by". There just really aren't a lot of great living novelists (my three would be Krasznahorkai (hates post-Soviet consumerism, hates Russia), Knausgaard (not conventionally political but says things unacceptable to the left), and Houellebecq (self-explanatory)). I guess Pynchon and Delillo (boomerlibs) are still alive, but have not written meaningful work in a long time. For literary culture, which is not the same as literature, the institutions are gigalib but we're also an a hundred flowers moment of right-coded spaces and presses. And that's fine. One of the eternal truths of counterculture is that the people with all the money rarely throw the best parties or write the best books.

Basically, to return to the Olympics stuff, if you are determined to be a fan of the US Olympic team wherever and whenever, you have to accept both the black power salutes and the photo-ops with Trump. The same thing with literature. There isn't any qualitative, and no major quantitative difference in the level of nose-holding conservatives and liberals have to do with literature. The main difference that appears from the outside is that, where possible, liberals downplay the conservativeness of writers they can claim as their own or apolitical, and only exile the real Celine types where you can't hide it, whereas conservatives who read admit they're often reading libs and discussing books with libs.

Ok, but current literary authors people actually read seem about evenly split right/left- it’s just that lefty authors get more accolades.

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