What is Right Wing Art Anyway?
A date with Ross Douthat and the New York Times, the relationship between art and politics, why left wing art sucks, and why the right shouldn't make the same mistakes
About a month ago I recorded a nearly three hour conversation with New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat for his new podcast, Interesting Times. The conversation, which was edited down to an hour for publication, was released last week.
Before getting into the meat of it, let me first say that Ross was a great conversation partner and approached our ideological and philosophical disagreements in good faith. The New York Times editors, who I had some reservations about going in, emphasized certain aspects of the conversation that I think maybe weren’t as interesting or important as some others, but it’s their show and their audience and those decisions are theirs to make, and nonetheless on the whole they did a fine job of capturing the tone and vibe of the conversation, and didn’t engage in any deceptive editing at my expense nor distort any of my arguments or anything like that, so I thank them for their efforts and withdraw my reservations.
We discussed many things, but at the heart of the conversation was the question over whether or not the right could wrest back any kind of significant cultural ground after decades of near total domination of American arts and letters by liberals, and if so what the characteristics would be of the new “right” cultural production that would occupy this ground.
These are fair questions, but they get at the problem a little sideways, and so I thought it might be worthwhile to clarify a few points about what we’re even talking about here and what the take-away should be for anyone thinking about the intersection of art and politics.
In the interview, Ross and I began by contrasting the old right that he graduated out of (NRO) with the new right that I graduated out of (Twitter). After explaining some of my criticisms of conservative culture from years past—that it’s too moralistic and didactic, that it traffics in nostalgia and sentimentalism, and that it’s too pre-occupied with grievance, with its own sense of cultural subordination—Ross then asked me to name an example of "successful right-wing art” to help flesh the point out.
On the spot, I came up with three examples:
No County for Old Men (book or film)
anything by David Lynch1
and the HBO series Girls.
Ross then asked the load-bearing follow-up question: “What makes [these examples of cultural production] right wing to you?”
I glibly responded that these things are right wing because I like them and want them to share my political preferences (true), and then followed up by adding that they are right-wing because they tell the truth about the world and about the human condition. Here is the full quote:
What constitutes “right-wing art” — which is, by the way, labeling we’re grafting onto this thing after the fact, so it’s actually a very flimsy labeling, but what these pieces of work are doing is telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences about how these events and these characters and these people, what society wishes were true about these people.
My thing is that if you are telling the truth about the world, then you are going to make right-wing art.
In short: Is it good? Is it honest? If yes, then right.
This is a rather simple formula, and has the scent of tautology, but is nonetheless perfectly coherent and perfectly adequate as a basis for defining “right wing” art. The problem with this definition is not that it’s wrong, but that the question itself is asking us to conjoin two spheres of human experience that are mismatched in the way that quantum mechanics and general relativity are mismatched. Both art and politics describe the world, but do so for different purposes and at different scales and when you force one set of descriptions onto a space of inquiry that belongs to the other, the math just doesn’t work out.
In other words, politics and art are NOT the same thing. There is a feedback loop, yes, but politics does not circumscribe art. Art is not contained within its boundaries, or not totally, and so to apply ideological labels to art is a fundamental category error that got us into this problem in the first place.
We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.
Firstly, what does one mean by telling the truth in art? I have written about this here, spoken about it here, and spoken about it elsewhere here. You can draw this idea down into more and more fragmented claims about epistemology and what it is for something to be true in the philosophical sense—which discussions will get you precisely nowhere, and not incidentally are the foundations for post-modernism—but instead, at a higher level of abstraction, rather than be concerned by truth, you can more plainly identify whether the artist and the art he is making is honest to itself, whether it passes the test of verisimilitude, or, to the contrary, whether it compromises itself because it is forced to or because the artist makes bad (inauthentic) artistic choices.
What in practice does that mean? Here is a straightforward and highly-visible case of dishonest art: anything that requires “sensitivity readers.” Sensitivity readers first emerged in the mid to late 2010s, mostly in the world of young adult fiction, which had already become an ideological wet market for tumblr-style identity politics. Publishers and editors would hire “sensitivity readers” to flag manuscripts for perceived moral offenses. One of the earliest high-profile cases was the novelist Keira Drake’s The Continent which featured a battle royale of warring tribes that were described in “racialized” language. Bowing to political pressure, the publisher shelved the books, hired two sensitivity readers to correct these transgressions, and then had Drake spend six months overhauling the book before republishing it again.
In the years since, the practice has become commonplace. At many major publishers, last I checked anyway, sensitivity vetting has become baked-in to the regular editorial process. In one instance, which I have discussed previously, the novelist Bruce Wagner’s book The Marvel Universe was flagged by a sensitivity reader for the inclusion of a character named “Fat Joan.” Wagner refused the publisher’s demands to rewrite the character and his book was subsequently dropped. More notably, earlier this year, the British publisher Puffin retroactively edited the works of Roald Dahl to remove words like “fat” and “ugly” and to rework gendered descriptions into gender-neutral ones. In one of the more absurd cases, Augustus Gloop of Willy Wonka fame is no longer “enormously fat,” he is just “enormous,” which presumably makes him more morally acceptable. Dahl’s estate and the publisher both justified this bowdlerization of his work with vague appeals to “making the books work for modern audiences,” a euphemism for treating literature as a kind of hazardous material that must be made safe for public consumption, or, even more to the point, a kind of compliance document for whatever political fashions are currently in style.
But of course, these crude and ham-fisted examples of political imposition on creative output are just the visible eruptions of a much deeper cultural condition. The more pervasive and more insidious problem is the quiet, habitual self-distortion that creatives and the culture industry more broadly now perform reflexively, often without even recognizing it as compromise. They learn early on, often before they publish a single word or screen a single scene, what can and can’t be said, what kinds of “representations” will sell to distribution platforms, which characters are “allowed” do this thing but not this other thing, which moral frameworks must be affirmed, which narratives can be subverted and which can’t, who the heroes are, and what constitutes both evil and its salvation. The audience knows this too. We can smell it. And we don’t like what we smell.
This is why the antidote to this is so deceptively simple. If you truly believe that your worldview, and how that manifests as politics, was accurate in its suppositions and predictions about human nature and the social world, then you wouldn’t need to coerce your creative output into alignment with it. This will all happen naturally as a simple function of honesty, of artistic integrity. Just tell the truth. Whether, as in No Country for Old Men, it’s the evocation of civilizational precarity and the nature of entropy, or in the case of David Lynch, the fuzzy, ineffable, semi-permeable veil of reality that our lives all nervously breech from time to time, or in the case of Girls, the cold, bitter consequences of total “liberation,” being honest, being uncompromising in your vision, tapping into the root conditions of the human experience is enough. That will get you as far as you need to go and that is all that art can hope for anyway. Art is not a tool for winning elections. Again, that is a category error.
And so long as your politics are anchored in an honest assessment of how people behave, including their limitations and messy particularities, “honest” art will confirm those politics more powerfully than anything you can say explicitly on the subject. And if it doesn’t, if the true and beautiful things you experience through art keep pointing elsewhere politically, then you should follow where they lead.
If you are on the right and you care about culture, this puts you in a pretty good place. The question Ross posed—what would right-wing art look like, and can the right produce it?—is, in the end, the wrong question. Or rather, it’s the wrong way to solve the problem of reorienting legacy institutions and incentive structures and distribution mechanisms that are artificially gunking up the system and preventing good and better culture from piercing the mainstream membrane. Yes, something is wrong with contemporary culture. Yes, it is politically compromised, often boring, and swarmed by the lamest people imaginable. Yes, there is an opportunity for artists who reject those conditions to make something better. But that better thing will not be made by trying to make it “right-wing.”
The moment you begin with the assumption that art must serve politics, even yours, you’ve already forfeited its power. Stop worrying about that. Make it honest. Make it good. The rest will sort itself out.
Bluesky libs were particularly offended by my inclusion of Lynch as an examplar of right wing art. A deeper examination of Lynch is probably warranted at some point. Suffice to say, he is /ourguy/.
Great interview. Reality has a right-wing bias. Also explains why Ross and the NYT crowd clutch their pearls so hard over memes ;)
I know Star Wars gets brought up a lot in this context, but there's a reason for that. It's both an important cultural touchstone and a great example of this dichotomy. The OT and prequels were rooted in ancient myth and symbolism, fiction that points at something undeniably true. They were good. The Sequels and subsequent TV releases were box checking exercises rooted in nothing real. They were very, very bad.