Earlier this month, Adam Bellow wrote a cover story for National Review calling on conservatives to contest the terrain of American culture more fully by investing more heavily in the arts — up to and including including “writing programs, fellowships, prizes, and so forth,” together with new “production and publishing companies and distribution platforms for music, film, and other forms of conservative-themed entertainment.” (Bellow has founded his own imprint, Liberty Island, dedicated to publishing fiction with conservative, libertarian, and “contrarian” themes.)
Out of the many interesting responses to his argument, I was struck by the partial convergence between NR’s Jonah Goldberg and the literary critic Adam Kirsch, who both argued (albeit in different ways) that Bellow’s essay overlooked how much room there is already for conservative themes in the pop and highbrow arts. Goldberg, focusing on mass culture, pointed out that Hollywood’s movies are often less left-wing than Hollywood’s actual politics (more pro-military, pro-family, queasier about abortion, etc.), and suggested that the entertainment industry knows at some level that if its stories don’t “tap into something real about the human condition, they will fail” — which means that they have to encompass conservatives insights and ideas even when their creators are reliable liberal partisans. Kirsch, meanwhile, argued that the conservative “temperament” and attitude toward reality is “in fact a major strain in contemporary American literature,” visible in works by authors like David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, or Philip Roth and Bellow’s own late, famous father … and he accused Bellow fils of seeking something else, something fundamentally un-conservative — a fiction infused with “simpleminded ideological dogmas,” which are by “their very nature hostile to literature, which lives or dies by its sense of reality.”
My own tentative thoughts on this issue overlap in part with these critiques, but I think there are some complicated problems here that Kirsch’s dismissal, in particular, doesn’t give their due. Rather than repeating myself on the overlap, I’ll quote myself, because I touched on the “conservatives and the arts” question recently in this interview with the online journal Family Studies:
RD: … I would resist the idea that popular culture never offers a more conservative vision of human flourishing, never advances traditional ideas. Liberals have a pretty strong monopoly on the more explicit forms of agitprop, yes. (Though not a complete one: Go re-watch “Forrest Gump.”) But the entertainment industry includes lots of talented people whose first loyalty is to an artistic vision rather than to an ideology. And because reality has a well-known conservative bias, any serious artist who sets out to capture the world in full is going to end up illustrating or illuminating aspects of what I would consider a more traditional vision of human nature and human affairs.
And this can hold true even when the artist in question is militantly ideological! Nobody doubts that David Simon is a card-carrying left-winger, for instance, or that Lena Dunham’s politics are pink right down to the underwear she so reliably doffs. But both “The Wire” and “Girls” admit of conservative, even deeply reactionary readings, because their primary loyalty—at least in their best episodes and seasons—is to truthful portraits of a given world. And while I think there would be more such portraits, more such truthfulness, if Hollywood were less ideologically monolithic, I wouldn’t want to deny that sometimes they show up, especially when the work in question is particularly well-executed, particularly rich.
That said, in terms of culture-shaping the best of pop culture probably matters less than the worldviews embedded in the average sitcom, the average glossy magazine, the average reality TV show …
After the ellipsis I went on to talk about the specific ways that pop culture portrays sex and dating and romance, and how a certain kind of cultural liberalism might influence contemporary attitudes and mores … a subject I’ve gone into before, and don’t need to rehash here. Rather, I want to make the broader point that there are ways in which both Kirsch and Bellow can be right about politics and contemporary culture: Kirsch about the best of literature (or the best of cinema or TV), and Bellow about the breadth of pop culture, the artistic and cultural scene taken as a whole.
By this I mean (as I say above) that to be truly great, truly lasting, a novel or any other exercise in storytelling has to transcend cliches and oversimplifications, has to capture something of the deep complexity of human affairs. So at a certain level of seriousness or genius, the problem-or-is-it of conservative underrepresentation in the contemporary arts melts away, because you’re dealing with a range of creators whose talents effectively transcend partisanship and ideological fixations. This is what Kirsch is talking about, I think, when he describes the “conservatism” of a David Foster Wallace or a Zadie Smith, and I’d argue (again, as above) that his point applies just as much to a Lena Dunham or a David Simon and a whole range of contemporary figures and productions. (To pick one of-the-moment example: My review of Richard Linklater’s greeted-with-hosannas “Boyhood,” in the latest issue of National Review, could have easily been expanded/rewritten into an essay on why the movie is a conservative masterpiece … not because Linklater is being deliberately reactionary, but because his story’s richness admits of that reading, for those with eyes to see.)
But then drop below that upper level, into the more mediocre terrain that most TV shows and bestsellers and pop culture ephemera occupy, and the picture looks different: You still have the reality-based constraints and commercial pressures that Goldberg mentions, so you aren’t enveloped by pure agitprop … but you also feel the weight of the culture industry’s biases and preconceptions more heavily than you do while watching, say, a movie by Terence Malick or the Coen brothers — or for that matter Lisa Cholodenko or Joon-ho Bong. It’s that mass-market territory that more often vindicates Jonathan Chait’s powerful argument about the essential liberalism of the culture industry; it’s there that you’ll find the big-business bad guys and multicultural preachiness and paranoid stylings and caricatures of religious conservatives and Ted Mosby-ian sexual assumptions and enviro-propaganda that the right tends, understandably, to react against with anti-Hollywood fury or resigned frustration.
But this suggests a rather strange-sounding riposte to Kirsch’s question, posed after his elevation of writers like Foster Wallace into a kind of conservative literary pantheon. “With all these books to read and admire,” he asks, “why does Adam Bellow continue to believe that conservative writers are a persecuted minority?” Well, one might say, because there aren’t enough mediocre conservative writers and artists at work! Which could just be taken to prove Kirsch’s point that conservatives mostly just want more “simpleminded ideological dogmas” from their fiction … but actually reflects a subtler point that a culture’s biases are manifest in the mean rather than the extreme, and that the proof of conservatism’s marginalization in today’s cultural scene can be seen among its middling and mediocre participants, not among its finest talents.
That subtlety notwithstanding, though, there’s still the question of whether a project that’s too cognizant of these realities, too explicit in its desire to close the “hack gap” in the arts, won’t just end up branding conservative artists as, well, a still-lower and more painfully ideological sort of hack. I don’t know the answer, which is why I’m ultimately ambivalent about Bellow’s exhortation: I, too, would like to see far more conservative money and energy invested in the arts, but to the extent that it’s conscious of itself as a conservative investment — as opposed to an aesthetic one, which is how most writing programs and fellowships are conceived even when their politics are fundamentally liberal — it may be foredoomed to failure, or at the very least be putting a limit on the quality of the work it fosters, and a ceiling on its potential success. (Better a consciously religious investment, in part because religion has a different relationship with the aesthetic than political ideology and thought … but that’s a subject for another post.)
At the very least, there are some paradoxes here, related to the nature of high and mass culture, genius and mediocrity, that I’m not sure any conscious strategy can solve. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to fundraise to endow the Lena Dunham and Richard Linklater Fellowships For Reactionary Art …