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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.
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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