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There seems to be an idea around many open discussions forums that the left has captured many cultural institutions. This perception seems so persuasive because certain leftist thinkers coined the idea.
While it’s undoubtedly true that many major institutions lean left, it’s also a convenient dodge from the right wing or conservative side in the culture war allowing them to avoid self criticism. In fact it seems that almost any time folks question why right wing values are not more represented in popular culture, the knee-jerk response by conservatives is that the left has captured institutions, so there’s no hope. When the reasonable point is asked as to why this state of affairs can’t be broken by right wing institutions or a similar capture by the right wing, I haven’t seen a good answer.
How has this state of affairs come to be the default? Why did the right lose institutions, and why is there so little discussion about how they can realistically take them back?
Fundamentally, conservatism and reaction are not really very appealing to intellectual and creative types. People with an inclination towards thinking, ideals, criticism, reform, improvement, progress, solving Big Problems will naturally gravitate towards a movement that embraces those things.
It's come up before here that the Right often struggles to articulate a positive vision for the future. This is, of course, true. Conservatives are not visionaries or imagineers, their goals are articulated in terms of things that actually exist and are possible. Maybe recreating the social and economic conditions of the 50s or 00s wouldn't be ideal, but at least it's something that was actually done before and could actually exist again. And to many conservatives, the lack of Big Crazy Radical ideas is precisely the appeal of the movement, though they might not phrase things in those terms.
I think suggesting that the right doesn’t attract thinkers is wrong. As I said below, I think it does. The difference between liberal and conservative thinking types is where they gravitate to. Conservative thinkers tend to end up in the business world where the ideas are built in various forms. I don’t think anyone would say someone like Elon Musk doesn’t have a Big Crazy Radical idea for the future. The reason he’s not an academic is that he’s too busy building rockets, self-driving cars, and Starlink. Hollywood left has long been criticized for reusing characters and turning famous and popular characters diverse. What they aren’t generally doing is creating new franchises they aren’t making the kind of entertainment that can stand on its own.
Which is more attractive to thinkers? Go to work in academia, make peanuts for decades write reams of journal articles that might maybe be read once or twice, write books that nobody cares about, and teach classes. Go to work for Elon Musk and build a platform that will put a man on Mars within ten years. Build AI that can solve problems, build cars that drive themselves. Build that big bright beautiful future. I just don’t see how a starry eyed thinker who wants a better future for humanity would be content simply dreaming about that future when building it is within reach. I think academia is likely to be more attractive to people who lack self confidence and confidence in their ideas simply because it’s the place where ideas go to die in a sense. It’s perfectly safe to put your dreams in a journal nobody will ever see. It’s perfectly safe to advocate for changes to society or criticize art from the safety of a job you can’t be fired from.
I think the difference is that conservatives tend to attract the doers rather than the idealistic.
As someone who is smarter than the average academic and chose to go into industry, this is how I've always thought of it. A lot of leftists have an ideological hatred of industry, or at least think of it as vulgar. So they just stay in academia forever, if they can, even if they have to accept adjunct wages.
I had the grades and test scores to get into a high-ranked PhD program, but I wanted to go into industry, partly for the money, but partly because industry is awesome. In the years since, I've gained more respect for what academia could have been, while simultaneously losing respect for what it actually is. Sometimes I wish I'd stuck around for a PhD so I could do research, but if I had, I'd be doing research in industry.
This creates a vicious cycle, where the overrepresentation of leftists in academia allows them to make it less attractive to non-leftists, which further increases their overrepresentation, and now it's become so extreme that they've been allowed to enforce ideological tests for hiring.
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Conservative thought and art is rich, deep, and tragic. Any tradition that includes things as disparate as the Scottish Enlightment, the Classics, American Founding, the first fantasy novels, etc. is robust.
So it should appeal to the intellectual type. But perhaps the problem is that while there is a lot to learn there is perhaps little to say (the field is robust). So in publish or perish perhaps The incentives are against re trodding well trodded areas?
it seems like conservativism in the context of the arts is either really deep or absent, whereas liberalism in the arts is a wider spectrum of high, low and middle-brow tastes.
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This didn't seem to be true until the modern era. I don't think it's a fundamental human trait, more that the fact that our modern mythos is one of Science and Progress, and so our stories and myths (i.e. media) attract that type of person. Stories that contradict the holy march of Progress are not as popular or accepted.
I think conservatives do have a vision of the 'future', but we've come to conflate the idea of 'future' with increased technological progress. Without more and better tech, there can be no future. It's baked into the core memeplex of modernity.
Before the modern era, Westerners had a utopian vision provided to them by their religion, and most of their intellectual life centered around that. Today’s leftism has a utopian vision that’s even better because it requires less suspension of disbelief, whereas conservatism has nothing. Maybe if the right fully embraced something like National Socialism, they would be more competitive.
Striving after a sublime ideal may not be a fundamental human trait, but it may be an upper-crust European trait. I shouldn’t need to explain the concept of different selection pressures here.
No, it does not. Left wing utopianism is more appealing to intellectuals than right wing religious utopianism in large part because it promises a utopia without restrictions on their behavior through it's-best-not-to-ask-too-hard. Part of the appeal of blaming systemic whatever is simply that it doesn't demand a change in personal behavior. You can do drugs, have casual sex, seek pleasure, and only tip your waiter what you want to tip- it doesn't affect the systemic problem because systemic level problems require systemic level solutions.
By contrast right wing religious utopianism demands strong restrictions on personal behavior. Puritan New England is famous for its harsh and micromanagerial rule of law- yet it came much closer to being a shining city on a hill than the USSR ever did to being a worker's paradise. Religious right wingers are correct that casual sex has lots of negative and no positive externalities, but realistically it can't be stopped by getting people to decide to abstain voluntarily. And the decision to voluntarily avoid engaging in anti-social behavior is frequently hitting 'cooperate' when everyone else hits 'defect'. And notably intellectuals are almost by definition smart enough to figure that out.
Systemic this and systemic that doesn't actually demand changes to personal behavior. You might be guilty of systemic racism, but your personal obligation to fix it is to pressure someone else, which is a lot less of an ask than having to go personally do things.
It helps that the liberal intelligentsia utopia is also conceived by those very intelligentsia in which they are the self-anointed rulers of their utopia. Right-wing religious utopia always puts god on top.
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I think you underestimate the degree of hypocrisy religion involved traditionally. Not that there aren’t exceptions, there are always cults and monasteries for people with extreme propensity to self-sacrifice, but generally, wholeheartedly believing something is wrong and then doing it anyway it very easy and natural. Christianity even explicitly accounts for this with its concept of universal sin. The Christian utopia is not the shining city on a hill but the kingdom of heaven. And since the kingdom of heaven is supernatural and salvation is a gift of God, it’s even possible to be a complete antinomian without compromising on any of the metaphysical beliefs.
Moreover, is modern society less restrictive because it’s less supernaturalist or is it the other way around, or are the two developments unrelated? Seemingly anyone’s guess.
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