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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 problem for right-wing art is that as far as I can tell it has no well realized vision of the future that it wants.

Left-wing art has stuff like Star Trek, at least, which in its earlier incarnations makes SJWs a bit uncomfortable because of the hiring hot actresses to wear short skirts and so on but overall still articulates a pretty attractive vision of a post-scarcity future where humans have overcome their differences and enjoy exploring the universe in their pajamas while having minor conflicts with each other that all get resolved in the same episode or maybe one episode later by everyone learning a moral lesson.

What does the right-wing have?

There is Tolkien, but from what I can tell most of his current fans are more into the movie style happy ending than into his actual relatively complex ideas of the long defeat and the inevitable failure of mortals, ideas that might be relatively unappealing as a worldview to the mover and shaker type of personality who shapes political narratives. And the fact that his stuff is set in the past of our world makes it relatively hard to build a future vision from it. And anyway, even the original texts have a clear "diverse group learns how to work together and wins against the bad guys" narrative that is antithetical to many modern right-wingers' desires.

There is also stuff like John Milius and his Apocalypse Now and Conan the Barbarian, but he himself does not self-describe as a right-winger.

And anyway, it would be hard to make Apocalypse Now into a right-wing movie in the modern sense given that it depicts how a war against communists degenerated into insanity and corruption.

As for Conan the Barbarian, the truth is that its beaten-down-guy-beats-his-oppressors narrative, with all its love of muscular masculinity, has nothing particularly right-wing about it unless you think that just getting big muscles and unashamedly being proud of it and fighting your oppressors is somehow right-wing. But to me that seems like a very niche online take. If right-wingers get roped into celebrating muscular masculinity just because a relatively small group of leftists on Twitter get triggered by muscular masculinity, I do not see that as a big win for the right or a sign that they have created their own successful art.

Left-wing art has stuff like Star Trek, at least, which in its earlier incarnations makes SJWs a bit uncomfortable because of the hiring hot actresses to wear short skirts and so on but overall still articulates a pretty attractive vision of a post-scarcity future where humans have overcome their differences and enjoy exploring the universe in their pajamas while having minor conflicts with each other that all get resolved in the same episode or maybe one episode later by everyone learning a moral lesson.

The latter makes them far more uncomfortable than the former. They're progressives, they cannot have a particular goal that they'll be satisfied reaching, or they'll become conservatives. There's a reason why they reintroduced racism and economic inequality in the new iterations of Star Trek, and a reason why a lot of TNG fans aren't SJWs.

I think it can be misleading to conflate the Eternal Struggleists with the leftists, even if at the moment they are a very nearly perfect subset. My understanding is that other times and places have had plenty of space for people who were existentially offended at the idea of an attainable/attained success criterion while having ideas that our modern classification would unambiguously label "right of center". Any setting with religious crusaders comes to mind (in "Environmentalists are the new Christians" arguments, I always like raising the thought experiment of presenting Catholics with a worldly plan to discharge Original Sin once and for all).