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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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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.

The entire art world, root and branch, all the institutions and nearly all the artists, is left wing. There's nothing on the right to subsidize.

Then you invest in your own artists and train them to be just as good.

The money's there, the people can be found, nothing stops you from going to art school and just faking your politics if the credentials matter that much.

I note that this can be done, because the Mormons have done it. When I was in SLC I attended a taping of Music and the Spoken Word with the Tabernacle Choir, and the modern Mormon sacred music made me think “This is what the culture that produced Bach and Haydn would be putting out if it had drifted since 1900 instead of actively self-destructing.” The Mormon Conference Center is very visibly built with the same desire to glorify God as the great European cathedrals, and is the only modern building I have seen built by people who hoped it would still be standing in 1000 years.