what ever happened to right-wing art?

nothing good

I’ve seen a lot of commentary lately comparing the current political moment with that of 2004, when the Republicans also won a trifecta and seemed impossibly ascendant. I agree that there are some similarities, but as a geriatric millennial and an insufferably pedantic person, I feel compelled to talk about some of the important differences between the current culture and that of 20 years ago. Back in 2004, gay marriage resolutions had failed in multiple states, and American culture seemed mired in a permanent far-right, pro-war, pro-torture mindset, against which nothing else could penetrate or change. Popular TV shows and movies were full of torture and xenophobia (24, 300, other numerical titles presumably.) There were very, very few gay people on TV or movie screens, and usually then only as jokes or loyal best friends; trans people were just a punchline, as were fat people, as were sluts. And this was, I need to emphasize, not solely the product of some assholes online. This was mainstream fictional media; this was MTV; this was the news; this was high school. It was everywhere and it was in everyone. It was a cruel, stupid, and vicious time.

I was in college from 2003 to 2007, which was an excellent time to drop out of mainstream culture and read the great dead writers. I did attend a few antiwar protests and help circulate some reports about U.S. torture facilities overseas, but nobody involved had any real anticipation that they would amount to anything. The College Democrats instituted a couple of actions, limply. The one Socialist Alternative meeting I attended involved a white guy with long hair haranguing us for not caring enough about what was happening in Iraq. (I really, really wish that guy had not been so much of a living stereotype, because he makes the story sound improbable, but I swear that he was really like that and this really happened.) The apathy and frustration made sense, however, given that liberals and the left alike believed that the U.S. was simply a war-mongering far-right country, and it was against us forever.

But then Obama won, and eventually Obergefell happened, and a number of other social shifts occurred if not too many political ones. The cultural conversation around fictional media slowly shifted from “how many homophobic fat jokes can you fit into a 2 hour runtime” to something more like “is this insufficiently diverse superhero film endorsing or condemning the villain’s plan to kill all of Earth’s puppies.” There were a few prominent pieces of mainstream right-wing art in the Obama era (Zero Dark Thirty - more numbers - American Sniper, etc.) but almost none, curiously enough, under Trump 1 or Biden. We’ve had Yellowstone and its spinoffs (arguably conservative)¹ and the usual parade of supercop shows, though most of that is too diverse now for many far-right viewers.² In a few short years, the bigoted far right has gone from dominating the culture—or at least, having a mainstream culture that catered to their interests first and foremost—to being on the outside looking in.

The newly ascendant right is in many ways the absolute product of this cultural backlash: they’ve never recovered from being very slightly decentered and denormalized after Obama’s victory in 2008. They are still so mad about it, all the time, even after they’ve won. I’m sure there are Trump voters this time around who are more generally upset at the high price of burgers and houses, but economic frustration easily interweaves with a sense of cultural loss, as well as anger at the wokes who supposedly don’t care about the economy but only in counting the number of Black and brown lesbians on TV. We used to be a proper country, and now we aren’t.

This used to be the dominant conservative mindset in literature—that is, once upon a time, back when conservatives actually wrote novels. I referenced this in my old post about Brideshead Revisited, but reading it (or rather, listening to Jeremy Irons read the audiobook) made me goblin-mode around my apartment in a silky robe, intoning in Irons’ mournful voice: “things used to be good once, and now they’re not.”³ There are a lot of great (dead) right-leaning novelists and poets who remain fun to read: Evelyn Waugh, Dostoyevsky,⁴ T.S. Eliot, etc. Probably the most influential conservative artist for the contemporary far-right “counter-elite” is J.R.R. Tolkien; these mfs don’t read a lot, but they read him, or at least they’ve read enough to slap Elvish names on their venture capital firms and spy-tech startups. But there isn’t much new intellectual property that lends itself so readily to their use: the culture has in many ways passed them by, and this makes them anxious and furious.

Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Moldbug, the intellectual heart of the far right (lol) wrote an infamous and incoherent piece a few years back in which he called upon his fellows to act as “dark elves” indoctrinating the simple “hobbit” populace in right-wing ideology. This is necessary in Moldbug’s mindset because the cultural sphere is dominated by “the Cathedral”: the media and academic nexus of woke ideology, which is why there are people of color in your IP adaptations, a near-total lack of mainstream films pushing far-right ideas, and almost zero popular conservative novelists to speak of.⁵ Moldbug’s boss, Peter Thiel, has covertly (though not that subtly) attempted to influence the culture by funding the astroturfed Dimes Square movement, which (if you’re unfamiliar with it) is a fake, moneyed, and largely heterosexual imitation of a New York artistic scene. In the last few weeks, the Dimes Square squad has taken to their newsletters and podcasts to crow over their coming cultural victory—but surely they would have had this victory before, in the late Trump 1 and early Biden era, if their art had any sticking power. As it is, Dimes Square has largely failed to manifest outside an online/downtown rumor because they haven’t produced much interesting art—and, because producing interesting high art, i.e. exclusionary New York “scene” art, isn’t really what would suit them. Yarvin gave the game away with his dark elves, his sub-Tolkien reference. Dominating mainstream pop culture, low fiction, would be the real dream for this squad—if they could make it happen.

They can’t—or at least, they haven’t yet. And as angry and impotent as their decades-long loss of artistic power and cultural influence has made them, they’ve channeled their rage into something probably much more dangerous: controlling all the elements of the culture that fall outside of art, which includes quite a lot of human expression these days. Far right influencers are on TikTok and Twitter and YouTube and podcasts, spreading conspiracy theories and generally being boring and hateful. This is where the right’s real creative energy has gone: not toward art (representations of things) but to mean, enraging bullshit that passes itself off as true or probably true. In many ways the distinction here is the one that the philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out in his short excellent book On Bullshit—art is a lie, but the anti-art of the right-wing infosphere is bullshit, something that’s totally indifferent to truth or lies and only cares about power. On Bullshit was published in 2005, the heart of the Bush era, and it’s one of those points of real similarity between then and now: a neuronal lightning-flash between one generation and the next.

My guess is that right-wing cultural production will continue to move away from art and—since successful—toward the manufacturing of anti-art memes and false information. It’ll also continue to embrace AI, an ideal tool for anti-artists. I felt like the real cultural breaking point came a few months ago during the North Carolina floods, when Facebook lit up with an AI-generated photo of a sobbing little girl and her puppy in the water. The image was obviously fake, but even when this was pointed out to those who liked it, the response was generally, “well maybe that specific image isn’t real, but something like it definitely happened (and Joe Biden’s government is to blame).” This kind of belief in images—not, again, as artistic representations or interpretations of real things, but as in the simulation and usurpation of actual reality, awakening kitschy tenderness and rage—is an outright fascist impulse. What’s real is what you want to be real. What happened is what you say happened, the pre-constructed narrative that fits a reality which can be bent to your will.

This is bleak, and here’s something even bleaker: the liberal/left may have won the culture war in the last two decades, and lost everything else. This is, however, exactly why it’s important to not give up on art, or on social gains for marginalized groups, or on refusing AI.⁶ If the far-right is willing to cede the territory of art-making—or more accurately, if they’re giving up because they can’t hack it—then we can’t surrender it, or consider it useless just because the sight of a little diversity in TV shows didn’t magically turn Americans into good people. Art is worth making, even in a vacuum, even against a seemingly dominant tide of hatred, cruelty, and indifference.

It’s important to remember that the far-right remains first and foremost obsessed with us: with triggering the libs and leftists, with forcing us to react negatively and abandon our positions. Therefore, every piece of diverse and interesting and beautiful art you make is an enormous insult to the fascists. It’s a cliche, but an accurate one, to point out that fascists are often failed artists: not necessarily through lack of talent, but because creation is never their real goal. They don’t want to go through the painful process of creating great art, but just to be someone who has already made great art. They want to reap the benefits of cultural capital without artistry: they want to dominate other minds, the mass mind if possible. I think we need to be realistic about the power that art actually has over other people’s minds: certainly creating art, even really extraordinary art, can’t possibly defeat fascism on its own. But its existence does remind those far-right assholes that they’re useless and talentless, and that history is often very surprising, and once again likely to pass them by.

1. I still haven’t seen Yellowstone. I know there have been attempts to reclaim it from the left, Jacobin-style, which may be justified or may be silly—I obviously can’t weigh in without seeing it. At the very least, I think it’s fair to say that Yellowstone and its spinoffs appear to be the product of one tireless showrunner rather than a right-wing cultural ecosystem.

2. In her excellent book Wild Faith, Talia Lavin details the various popular evangelical novels and films that form their own robust psychotic culture but mostly haven’t broken containment. A recent exception might be Sound of Freedom, aka the QAnon movie, which did fairly well in theaters but isn’t a mainstream Hollywood film. I also cover the Sound of Freedom phenomenon in my book (did u know I also wrote a book, sorry I have to keep promoting it for at least a few more weeks, those are the rules apparently.)

3. This feels like a good time to mention that my husband is very patient and kind and puts up with a remarkable amount of novel-induced creature-moding.

4. Dostoyevsky isn’t really doing “things used to be good once, but now they’re not” as much as grabbing you by the lapels and shrieking about God, but that’s still fun and still counts.

5. “What about Houellebecq?” you may be asking. As I said before, these mfs don’t read, and especially in translation, unless maybe it’s The Camp of the Saints, and only then because it’s such a gleefully hateful book. Again, see my book for more on The Camp of the Saints, which I discuss in detail.

6. Beware: a lot of recent software updates contain sneaky AI features that scrape your text. Here are tips for disabling these elements in Mac’s new operating system (Sequoia) and in Microsoft Word (both Mac and PC).