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The right wing should do patronage of good culture and right wing culture and abandon an ethos of disengagement and libertarian ethos.
Why?
Because if you know artists, they care first and foremost about doing their things and getting money and recognition. The reason the left has been so successful its because it is willing to provide support, and to deprive them for not aligning with them.
Secondly, people who are actually on your side will also act based on incentives.
And thirdly, because the end result is desirable. A culture of just whining, about leftist cultural output is impotent. There is nothing wrong with complaining about what is bad, but you should also promote what is good. We need a society that promotes good art and and good culture. There is more to life than line going up. And if you don't try to fill that vacuum, someone else will.
What this means effectively? A right wing goverment should defund leftist artists and promote rightist artists and allow people to join the side. Soon you will discover that many artists are actually rightists who were afraid to express themselves.
It also means promoting art programs.
Also some kind of art tends to be of a more negative and leftist form like rap and modern art. Not all but more commonly.
Beyond the goverment, right wingers and not leftists should care more about networking to promote art that isn't left wing. It doesn't have to be explicitly political. Lord of the Rings for example qualifies. Just accurate adaptation of great classics of western literature without left wing ideological blinders would also qualify.
Putting regulations in place to make them illegal or underpromote far left racebending art and make them less financially viable, and giving incentives for art that respects the source material for example.
Of course, someone could object to a certain particularly aggressive moves in terms of what you promote and not promote, and in being excessively far to the right and excessively intolerant. And I could even agree with them in some cases.
However, in the current status quo, things are so lopsized in the direction of the left that it is pushing the culture landscape in a more pluralistic phase to have less race bending far left culture being promoted and more right wing.
This means that more right wing patronage of art is good even from a more neutral, pluralistic standpoint. Which is a general pattern of the culture war, even outside art. If someone is fine with leftist domination and escalation then a position in favor of an impotent disengaged right makes sense. We don't have a sufficiently neutral and moderate status quo though for defence of the status quo to be the neutral position.
Excellent comment, can't agree more. It's a shame that right-wing and conservative values often disparage art as useless or impractical.
Part of the issue to my mind is that historically conservatives have highly valued oration. Older cultures were entirely oral, and most grand Western stories that conservatives love have classically been told orally and repeated generation after generation. There's something about the format of the spoken word that lends itself to these repetitive stories that slowly change the shallow pieces, but keep the deep structure the same.
I see this tendency cropping up even now. I discussed with @ArjinFerman earlier this week about how the majority of right wing discussion that is shared or held up as quality tends to be videos and podcasts. While I'm sure that many of these pieces and discussions are excellent, the information is far slower to absorb, and harder to spread. When you have simple images or the written word, these forms can be consumed and spread much more quickly than spoken alternatives.
Unfortunately, the right wing 'base' seems to denigrate the written word more than ever. Even one of the leading lights of the intellectual right, Richard Hanania, has outright said books are a waste of time. It's a tragic state of affairs, and I appreciate you putting forth the argument so eloquently.
It feels like you're working your ways backwards from an already conclusion on this, and I'm not sure what am I supposed to say to change your mind on this.
It would be difficult to change my mind, this is an implicit perception I've built up over years of trying to find forums and discussions by that outline right wing or conservative values. You have sent me some good Substacks, but I still haven't found a solid argument against why the vast majority of text driven sites like Reddit, or the majority of political best sellers are all left wing.
Because redddit bans rightwing subreddits, and the publishing industry leans left?
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In a word, censorship. Not always government censorship (but sometimes, as the Twitter Files demonstrated, though because of that same censorship they had all the impact of a fart in the wind), but the fact that the gatekeepers and (in the Internet's case) even the infrastructure is manned by political idealogues.
Fair point, the left is horribly censorious, I don’t deny it. As I’ve said to you many times though - why is that the case? Did the left just magically take over these institutions, or was their political worldview more suited towards art and writing?
They've taken over pretty much every institution, not just art and writing. It's been over a century-long project by now, but it has been quite successful.
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