This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A recent piece by Rod Dreher is the latest example I’ve seen on the Dissident Right of references to “Theater-Kid-run America” and to the dangers of giving power to “Former Theater Kids” and, well, it’s got me feeling called-out in a very uncomfortable way. Certainly this far from the first time I’ve felt conspicuously out-of-place and unwelcome on the Right; my sparring with @HlynkaCG and @FCfromSSC in this space, and with a number of users when I was an active poster in /r/CultureWarRoundup, have reinforced my acute awareness of how my upbringing and personality profile make me somewhat of an uncomfortable fit in the right-wing ecosystem. But the “Theater Kids” discourse hits me particularly hard because it touches on something over which I’ve agonized for a long time.
The question of “why are artistically-inclined people nearly universally left-wing” has occupied my thoughts extensively ever since I began my journey to the Right. As I’ve mentioned here before - probably extremely ill-advisedly, from an OpSec perspective - I have a theatre arts degree and spent over a decade heavily involved in the local theatre scene (both musicals and “straight plays”) in my city. At one point I was incredibly enthusiastic about pursuing a professional career in that field, and made my participation in it a central part of my identity. My political conversion isn’t the only reason I’ve drifted away from theatre (even my use of the British spelling gives me away as a Theater Kid), but it was by far the biggest accelerant of that decision. Another reason, though, is that even aside from their politics, theatre people can be… difficult to be around in certain ways that made me stick out like a sore thumb sometimes even without politics entering the equation.
So, when I see right-wing commentators taking potshots at “Theater Kids”, part of me wants to not only applaud, but to amplify their criticism: “Oh, you don’t even know the half of it!” I’m far more intimately aware of the particular failure modes of artists, because I saw them up-close and personal for a huge part of my life, and can recognize some of those failure modes in myself. Another part of me, though, becomes very defensive and wants to leap to the defense of the creative class; not only because, despite my current politics and estrangement from that scene, I’m still one of those people at heart, but also because I think right-wing people tread on dangerous ground when they too-eagerly dismiss and alienate artistically-/creatively-oriented people.
It is undeniably true that people involved in the arts are overwhelmingly and ostentatiously left-wing. Look at surveys of political orientation among any even remotely creative-adjacent field and you will find support for progressive parties/ideas well above 80-90%. The question of why this is the case is complicated and fascinating. Has it always been that way? It is dangerous to apply modern political categories to pre-modern societies, but if the “theater kid” personality profile existed in ancient/classical societies, would it be possible to say that those types of people would have been more “proto-woke” than the average citizen?
Remember that the great literary classics of Ancient Greece - the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Theogony - were epic poems delivered orally and accompanied by music long before they were written down and codified in literary form. The bards who would have invented, transmitted and augmented these epic poems were real people with real personalities, and I think there’s a significant likelihood that they were not too different from the actors and rockstars of today. Besides implying a degree of narcissism and superciliousness that we associate with artsy people today, does it also suggest that they would have been the “shitlibs” of their day?
There’s an interesting discourse about how the character of Odysseus is a sort of prototype for the theater kid’s idea of a hero - the idealized self-image of an artist imagining how he would be as a hero. Odysseus is a trickster and fabulist; he achieves his heroic deeds largely through craftiness, subterfuge, deception, and pretending to be anybody other than who he actually is. He can conjure whole worlds and identities at a whim through the magic of wordplay and storytelling. He is labile and mercurial, indirect and full of what we might call chutzpah. He prefigures more modern examples of the “trickster/bullshitter with a heart of gold” archetype epitomized by musical theatre characters like Harold Hill in The Music Man, J. Pierrepont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and the funhouse-mirror version of P.T. Barnum presented in the movie musical The Greatest Showman. The guys writing these musicals can’t imagine themselves as Herculean heroes of might and action, but they can imagine themselves saving the world by being so good at spinning a compelling story that they make it come true.
So, what does this imply about the self-image of artists, and what can it teach us about the likely consequences of giving the reins of power (cultural, political, or otherwise) to people who come from this milieu and/or have this personality type? Many on the Right - I’m thinking especially of the blogger The Z-Man - have noted that modern American politics are dominated by a sort of Carny (meaning a carnival performer or huckster) type of personality. There’s a persuasive case to be made that democracy inherently rewards and gives power to that exact type of person. I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.
And yet. By telegraphing its open hostility to artists and creatives - by throwing up a big sign that says, “people with liberal arts degrees, go away!” - I believe that the Right severely cripples itself. Firstly, on a practical level, it deprives the Right of its ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people. Right now, the only interesting art that most people in first-world countries will ever be exposed to is made by leftists. We can talk about the reasons for this; certainly some of them are structural, and are downstream of the fact that Hollywood and creative industries more generally are dominated by powerful leftists who limit the ability of right-wing content creators to access the kind of resources and backing required to produce and distribute media. But even when right-wingers get a chance to make art, it… generally doesn’t measure up.
Why is that? Is part of the reason why right-wingers (myself included) are so interested in pre-modern art is that they can keep Retvrning to it and are relieved of the burden of having to create something new? Why is it that the only people who go to classical music concerts and operas are PMC shitlibs? If the Right achieves its glorious counter-revolution, will the end product look like the town from Footloose? Distrustful of art and self-expression for fear that it breeds degeneracy? Forever fighting a battle to suppress artsy types who will corrupt the youth and bring the poison of leftism back from the dead? Should creative types who are otherwise on board with the Rightist project be concerned that we are helping to build a future that will have no place for us?
Maybe the fact that I’m asking these questions is proof that Red Tribers are right to be suspicious of people like me. If a conservative and traditional life is ideal for the vast majority of people, who cares what a tiny minority of whiny self-obsessed “artists” want? Aren’t people like me the reason we got to this point in the first place? It’s a tough subject for me to think about. To what extent can I whole-heartedly commit to a political project that will marginalize the people most similar to myself, in order to secure the greater good for the great mass of other people on earth? Am I just overthinking this entirely and letting a flippant shitposty meme trigger me into neurotic despair?
A bit of a tangent, but three years ago, one side of the political aisle enthusiastically called for nightclubs to be shut down to stop the spread of an allegedly deadly virus, and it wasn't the Right.
More options
Context Copy link
There is definitely something upstream of politics that makes someone a Theater Kid, but I think the particular political inclinations of the Theater Kid are path dependent. What separates a Theater Kid from Someone Who Likes Theater is that the desire for attention is the number one priority at the expense of everything else, so I think any sort of ideology the theater kids hold is merely what’s useful at the time for gaining attention. I have basically no knowledge of art history but the idea of art being dominated by the left seems like it started no earlier than the late 18th century and possibly much later, and is downstream of the political and intellectual movements in that time. I think the Theater Kid archetypes in medieval Italy would be loudly proclaiming their piety to anyone who would listen, or boasting about how great their local Duke was or whatever would get them approval.
This is also why it seems like different artistic mediums in the modern world have different political splits. I think the artistic types who are drawn to theater specifically are at the right tail of the bell curve for “desire for attention”, followed by movies/tv, music, visual art, and writing. The majority of popular work in all of these mediums is “left coded”, but it seems like there is still at least somewhat of a market for conservative-leaning movies/TV, music, and writing, whereas the idea of a conservative broadway musical is laughable. The tendency for the conservative-ish versions of popular art (network cop shows, Michael bay films, country music, etc.) to be low-brow, while the prestigious versions (classical music, hbo shows, opera, art galleries) are overwhelmingly left wing is probably just a result of the rural-urban divide. I would think ~70 years ago when rich urban PMC types were WASPy republicans, things like classical music performances and art galleries were right-coded.
The “hostility” of the average red tribe person today towards art is also a result of the hostility that modern art has towards them. There’s definitely some sort of practical-mindedness more common to right leaning people as /u/hlynkacg mentioned that makes them appreciate art less, but I think in the past those types of people wouldn’t have been actively hostile towards art, but probably just apathetic or uninterested. The modern hostility of the average right winger towards art is from being told they are uncultured for not appreciating Jackson Pollock and piss Christ, being shown as villains in popular movies and tv, watching satanic themed live musical performances etc. Modern art as a whole is almost like a reactionary movement against the type of “objective beauty” that even more practical-minded people can appreciate. There isn’t an inherent distrust of art in right-wing thought, there’s just an inherent distrust towards art that is anti-right wing for obvious reasons, and as of now effectively all of the “important” art is anti-right wing.
More options
Context Copy link
This is my first encounter of this term in the wild, and I have no clear idea of its boundaries. The obvious features of this specific example seem to be a photo-negative of the ubiquitous "church lady" slur: ignorance, irrationality, and superstition, combined with a supreme self-confidence and self-satisfaction and an aggressively judgmental moralizing attitude toward others. This archetype, it seems to me, deserves criticism; I have no idea how "theater kids" label got attached, but just from Glee alone it seems reasonably appropriate. Is there a better one available?
Is the hostility aimed at artistically/creatively-oriented people as such, or is it aimed at the existing artistic/creative establishment? I would argue the latter. Is there a way to be less hostile, given that this establishment loathes Reds and has dedicated itself to their destruction? I would argue no. Past a certain level of hostility, it's you or them. We're well-past that level with the given establishment. I guess my question is, what do you expect a counter-cultural revolution to look like? Did the Beats and the Hippies and the Dadaists and the Postmodernists and so on politely ask for permission before they burned down what came before?
I don't think so, no. We can readily observe that art overwhelmingly served right-wing goals of values-homogenization, individual edification and social cohesion in previous eras. We can observe that the modern left-wing focus on revolution and hostility to tradition, structure and stability is in fact modern, that it has specific, easily-identifiable beginnings, and like most social transformations of the modern era, matches well to a theory of cause and effect flowing downward from the Enlightenment.
...Your thesis seems to be that creativity, intelligence, and cunning are innate markers of Blue identity, that people blessed with these traits always have been and always will tend toward Blueness. I don't see things this way at all. Blues aren't blue because of their immutable characteristics, but because they're captured by a dominant ideology, in the same way that relatively smart, creative people were overwhelmingly doctrinaire Jaguar-Cultists in 1000s Central America, doctrinaire Catholics in 1400s Spain and doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists in 1930s Russia. Given sufficient enforcement, social conformity is the smart, cunning, creative thing to do, so smart, cunning, creative people conform. The question is simply who is in a position to enforce their standard.
Homer was in no meaningful sense a "shitlib"; the Iliad and the Odyssey are not revolutionary texts aiming to undermine the structure, norms and values of Homer's contemporary society in pursuit of a questionably-achievable utopian ideal. Neither are the great Cathedrals, Dante's Inferno, or Beethoven's 9th, nor the works of Shakespeare or Dahl or Rostand. You're mistaking the results of an obvious, pervasive, overwhelming social enforcement mechanism for the product of bedrock human nature, in the face, it seems to me, of overwhelming contrary evidence of both the past and present. Cunning, creativity and intelligence are not the distinguishing markers of Blueness, but rather a specific form of humanistic utopianism and a fundamentalist faith in "progress" based on a highly specific and idiosyncratic set of values and philosophical axioms.
I am quite confident that Blueness is not an innate, immutable feature of human nature, but rather the product of a very specific set of historical circumstances that have now largely concluded. One way or another, I think Blueness is going to go away, likely relatively soon, and once it is gone it will not be coming back for the foreseeable future. Creative, intelligent, cunning people will go back to using their gifts to the benefit of themselves and/or their society, as they always have, not in service to the peculiar aims and goals of Blue ideology.
Odysseus is certainly a trickster, but what of Achilles and Hector? Where do they fit into this model? The Norse have Loki, but they also have Thor... and with both Loki and Odysseus, it seems to me that their trickery is not portrayed as an unalloyed advantage. Do you find other examples of the pattern you perceive?
Just politics? Take Freud or Jung or BF Skinner, Ford, Dewey, Sanger, Duranty, Mead, heck, Rousseau... The list of luminaries and fields dominated are comprehensive. The Enlightenment was a scam from the very start, and it has remained a scam in every iteration since: a mask of science and rationality worn by the unscientific and irrational to bypass the defenses of the unwary. It was a novel exploit, and a highly successful one, but it works less and less well each year, as the woke themselves demonstrate. Soon it will not work at all, and the structures we've built upon it will inevitably fall.
Point being, this isn't new, and it isn't escapable.
Do you think future outcomes can continue to be determined by who can craft the most aesthetically-compelling narrative indefinitely, or will Reality, at some point, intrude? If you believe that, for entirely contingent reasons, Evil currently has a commanding advantage in crafting aesthetically-compelling narratives, should you try to beat that advantage, or invest your hopes in a reality-check? Sure, the former would be cleaner and more elegant, but is it actually possible? ...Is it, and its objections to alternate strategies, Red, or just more Blue Carny bluster?
Leaving aside all the questions of if and why this should be so and taking this statement as a given, why should we care?
You could argue that art is useful because it is persuasive, but it does not seem to me that Blue dominance is derived from the quality or persuasiveness of their art. It seems to me that the dominance of central institutions came first, on the strength of pure ideology, and the bright colors and whiz-bang presentation came later. Elite consensus, force of law, then media propaganda to the masses. And note that such propaganda, while effective in many ways, clearly has limits. Abortion, guns, and racial segregation are three areas where the propaganda has pretty clearly failed on its own terms. Trans issues seems to be following that pattern, and gives me some hope that the Pride movement itself ought to be reversible. All this is to say that while art is useful, it is not infinitely useful, nor infinitely valuable. It would be nice to have Red art. It would be nicer to have Red social dominance of existing institutions, not least because right-wing art would then follow.
To the exact degree that Reds actually resemble the mocking caricatures Blues make of them. That is to say, considerably less than the degree to which even the imperfect victories of Blue culture already resemble this cartoon. We already have the humorless scolds, the censorship, the fanatical puritanism, the callouts, the gossip, the unreflective, narrow-minded bigotry, the fear of anything unusual or out of the ordinary, the purging of image and language, the constant, industrial-scale injection of moralizing sermons into every medium of communication, the purity spirals, the policing of one's neighbors, the constriction of speech and thought within the coils of smothering, irrational dogma. Why worry about the potential arrival of an evil already present?
...All the above amounts to an argument over definitions, unfortunately. What makes a Blue, a Progressive, a Leftist, whatever we want to call the type? Is it an innate expression of human nature? Or is it something more limited than that, an artifact of our present time rather than something core to human nature? What defines its nature, its boundaries? That's the question that underpins a lot of these questions, isn't it?
I suppose it needn't take that form, but I imagine many revolutions and counter-revolutions can be headed off at the pass by granting lesser concessions until the heat dies down--that is, any movement will first demand changes that the Establishment could possibly implement, before thoughts turn to revolution. Sure, you can't pacify every revolutionary this way, but you'll take enough momentum out of movements to make it no longer a problem.
Just to pick on an issue I care about, I feel like copyright in the First World is slowly becoming a target for burn-it-all-down thinking. If copyright law was rolled back to a 50-70-year maximum, then the idea that it's all bullshit might be inconceivable to begin with.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No comment on this enormous topic, for now. I sympathize. Have a galkovsky.
More options
Context Copy link
It's not worth much thought. Every worthwhile 'Right-wing' artist is either: A. Formerly left-wing; B. A revolutionary progressive at heart. That's it. People who kowtow to the status quo never have anything interesting to say. Here I shall invoke the views of Parmenides, being too lazy to try to quote him: the sole constant in the pantheon of artists' beliefs is that they always go against whatever has been most prominently arrayed against them. I.E., what's the sole thread which connects them all? The fact that they're all different is what shows that they're the same, not actual engaged in impartial or transcendental truth-seeking but just taking the dogmas as they're given and accepting/rejecting them.
Change or innovation of the beliefs-that-be is the preside of thinkers; advocacy or spurning of them that of artists, however much they might like to think otherwise.
I don't think this is accurate at all, "right wing" art is still being made and "right wing" artists are still out there, successful ones even, they're just not "fashionable". Passion of the Christ remains the most successful film of the 21st century in terms of budget to box-office, but it will be a cold day in Hell before anyone in the Hollywood establishment acknowledges it.
It depends on definition of "right wing".
Is this an art that will shield your kids from socialism?
Flippantly, I'm skeptical about whether that's even art.
More to my point, how many time have you heard someone say something like "I listen to all genres of music except pop and/or country". Fact is that the press and "the Academy" can shower all the attention and awards on non-binary Satanists with questionable fashion sense they want but at the end of they day they aren't the ones filling stadiums. Taylor Swift is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
So, would you say that people who support the progressive-woke status quo in western countries are the “real” rightists, and people who oppose it are the “real” leftists?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A tangent, but just coming out of reading the Odyssey, I was fascinated by the rather self-serving emphasis Homer puts on hospitality, especially towards bards and weirdo strangers. Not only are they to be wined and dined (the gods demand it!), they should also be presented with lavish gifts upon their departure. Sure, Homie...
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW, I think it's a really interesting topic, and it touches on a number of things.
I don't think the narcissism is the key point -- I think you've got those on both sides.
I think the willingness, and push, to break tradition and authority is certainly a part of it. There's an assumption that convention is bad, and to be subverted, which is pretty inherently anti-conservative.
However, I think the biggest aspect is the ... well, to be a bit politer, let's say a good creative is providing services for the upper layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- entertainment, mental stimulation, belonging. And most can only do so on largesse of people who fulfill the lower layers (safety, food, shelter, wifi). So they don't have to worry about how things will work, they just sort of assume it will be there, and they just need to persuade people to give it to them. Someone else characterized it as childlike empathy, and I think that's a part of it too, but to me it's more this idea of things not having consequences -- if people are poor, give everyone a million dollars.
I think that's also where a lot of the frustration with them comes from; maybe that's an area the not-psycho left should work on -- explaining why the things they propose will make the world a worse place, rather than a better one.
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for the interesting perspective. I dont have much to add other than Rod Drehr isn’t what I would call dissident right. From what I know he is firmly in the old guard and on the way out.
Most of the newer voices explicitly talk about leveraging art to win or hold ground.
Agreed, but as I said in this comment, when Dreher uses a DR meme I know it’s really got legs.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Your post brings to mind a bit that occasionally comes up in rationalist spaces about "shape-rotators" vs "wordcels". I've mostly just rolled my eyes at it, but now I'm thinkin there might be actually something to it, but not in the way Vice and rationalists typically describe it. I think the better (more accurate) distinction is between "thing-manipulators" and "symbol-manipulators". To me it seems obvious that the creative/theater-kid archetype is very much a "symbol-manipulator". Their world revolves around manipulating, language, allegory, emotion, etc... Conversely a plumber or Electrician is very much a "thing-manipulator" their world revolves around analog processes with clear and immediately observable consequences. The Shit and/or Electrons either flow or they don't.
While I don't think it's accurate to say that all "symbol-in the manipulators are left wing" or that "all thing-manipulators right wing" I do think there are elements of both that actively select for the respective sides. I have a degree in mathematics, but coming into it as I did, IE later in life through the GI Bill after already having had a career in the military, I often found myself butting heads with my fellow math nerds over questions of "practicality". I was that guy who would ask the lecturer "ok that's really clever and all but what's the use case", which always seemed to rub certain sorts of "pure math" guy the wrong way. For those longer-standing users who where wondering on what occasion I had to to interact with Scott Aaronson professionally here is your answer.
In any case I feel like there is a clear tension in math circles between "Pure/Theoretical" Math and the "Applied". Similarly I feel like there is a tension between more symbolic fields of engineering like software and the more physical fields (civil, mechanical, electrical, etc...). And I feel like this tension maps pretty neatly to what both you and Dreher are talking about regarding "theater kids". Back when Scott was first formulating his thrive/survive theory I speculated that the reason that the "working class" seemed to skew right-wing/survive relative to the gentry was that they were generally less insulated from consequences than the gentry were and I feel like a similar line holds here.
Being a "theater-kid" in this context is something of a luxury. The sort of luxury enjoyed by someone who doesn't have to worry about base level analog bullshit.
You were around for the GI Bill? Much respect, sir.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I know 3 guys who studied theater and acted professionally before becoming right wing political consultants.
Are they Kevin Sorbo, Andy Garcia and Scott Baio?
But seriously, someone like David Mamet comes to mind, as someone who has combined theater, to say the least, with right-wing political views. Although he may be more of an "anti-woke liberal" coming around only recently.
Between The Verdict, Oleana, Glengarry Glen Ross, Ronin and Spartan I'd say Mamet's right wing sympathies were pretty well established before the current battle lines were drawn. He may be an "anti-woke liberal" (for a given definition of Liberal) but more in the mold of Kipling or Tolkien than a Libertarian.
Fair shot though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
FWIW James O'Keefe is unironically, unabashedly a theater kid. One of the details that came out of his departure from Project Veritas was spending foundation money to fly staff out to see him perform in Oklahoma!. Perhaps his familiarity the culture might explain how he gets some people talking (or is able to hire undercovers with similar abilities).
Is he out for sure then? That's a pity, it seemed like he was most of the energy behind it.
Yes Though it looks like they might be pulling a Top Gear/Grand Tour type scenario with the
BBCboard "winning" the battle for ownership only to lose the audience, staff, assets, etc... that made the brand valuable in the first place.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you need to be more careful about ascribing generality to your experience in your culture in the present day, based only on that which you observe in your immediate environment and glimpses of past and foreign art that are mediated through the interpretation of those inhabiting that same immediate environment. It is not at all clear to me that for instance the medieval European bards that brought us the chansons de geste or the Song of the Nibelungs had a progressive bone in their body, and getting an interpretation of the Odyssey that is not memetically contaminated by a Western Classics department of the last 200 years seems like a lost cause. You can come up with a somewhat compelling-sounding story that efficient acting - literal theatre - necessitates a degree of mental promiscuity and openness that you can't do that and then return to the sort of loyalty to a single narrative framework intended to be shared by everyone in society that conservatism almost definitionally requires, any more than a three-digit bodycount Tinder 1%er (m/f) can happily settle down with a boring unattractive accountant; however, theatre narrowly defined does not seem like a wide enough domain of art that an ideology locked out of it would be forever barren. Narrative-weaving artists considered more generally, though, especially in other societies, seem to have no trouble sustaining right-wing attitudes. Japan had Yukio Mishima, and anime runs the gamut from Miyazaki's surface pacifism that is still bulging with a barely repressed fascination with blood and steel, via every vapid piece of romance (I only realised just how trad the delta from reality to fiction is after interacting with actual Japanese youths), to the unapologetic jingoism of something like GATE. Russia among many others had Solzhenitsyn (and perhaps our very own Ilforte), and I gather that even Limonov was so charismatic and fun in his writing that he won over a significant fraction of the intelligentsia.
I liked your whole post, but I have one tiny quibble:
Is that what you could call it? I know Miyazaki has a love of old-school aviation, I'm not terribly sure there's any real appreciation of the displays of power associated with pre-Cold-War planes. Granted, as someone who saw The Wind Rises in a theater, I will concede that there definitely seems to be a conflicted love of that subject matter there.
Have you read Miyazaki's Tigers In The Mud?
Whole thing(?) Not the best image quality I'm afraid, but enough to give you the idea. He's an absolute model tank and rifle collector who reads Nazi tank ace autobiographies. Really great stuff done in his style.
I've never heard of this before, huh.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't know. I'd think that artists were pretty libertine and unconventional at least since the Renaissance. No idea what, say, the Indian or Ancient Greek version of Michelangelo was like...or what artists were like in, say, Tang Dynasty China.
More options
Context Copy link
As somebody with basically libertarian views (and therefore is very much out of tune with the current progressive zeitgeist) but who has also been involved in music and theater since early childhood, I am very much interested in this question, and have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. After reading the other comments in this thread, many of which I think are grasping at different parts of the elephant, there's one potential explanation that I haven't seen and that I would like to suggest:
Parents know that some activities/careers are right-coded and some are left-coded.
Children are likely to absorb some or all of their political opinions from their parents.
Parents are likely to encourage their children to participate in the activities and/or career paths that are more aligned with their politics. For example, conservative parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in sports or cheering, and progressive parents are more likely to encourage their kids to participate in things like music, theater and art.
Or it could just be as simple as people naturally sorting themselves into groups of other people who are like them. If all the people you know from your church are on the football team, you're more likely to play football. If you're gay and the other two openly gay kids in your school do theater, you're more likely to do theater. (There was a discussion on here recently about the search for the first openly gay Premier League soccer player and the inability to find anybody like that, and while the idea of a genetic explanation is appealing to me, especially given the high percentage of female professional soccer players who are lesbians, I can't discount the argument put forward by others that if you're gay and everybody in the locker room of your youth soccer team is constantly spewing homophobic slurs, you're probably going to find something else to do for a living.)
More options
Context Copy link
There are plenty of artsy-political people even on the edge of the hard right. Moon man for music, ZHPLovecraft for writing, stonetoss for cartoons. Or on the more moderate end of people who reveal their actual names on their publications, there's P. J. O'Rourke's books.
There's a rich history of anti-communist songs. Ain't I right is a banger: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vvzmBhCpWvA
In modern times, there are bands like Rome, Xurious and Triarii (who are German and thus obliged to say they're not ideological or political even though they surely are). There's more stuff that you just don't find unless you look for it, or only find it on niche places. This is because there's significant amounts of suppression going on! Of course you're not going to find something seriously right-wing in Hollywood. How would it get funded? Yet even there you have Mel Gibson.
The reason most rightish stuff repurposes other content is because of a lack of funds, not a lack of creativity. I saw a scene from a Disney musical that had been repurposed and revoiced to be an exultation of HBD and IQ tests, it was rather well done IMO. But you can tell that webms dispersed on /wsg/ don't have the production budgets that Rian Johnson can wield.
If there weren't any people on the Right with the 'ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people' why would there be magazine articles decrying evil right wing memes and pepe the frog infecting vulnerable youths?
It's really the neoliberal, boring Republican end that struggles creating art. How do you glamorize tax cuts and bleating over leftist policies but not doing anything substantive about them? I believe you have to have serious convictions and beliefs to create good art. There were plenty of people making Trump music videos back in 2016 but they really dried up after the election. Take E;R for instance, he was genuinely taken in by the election results and interrupted his stream of long-form movie reviews with some short pro-Trump clips. Later on I got the sense that he was even more depressed and cynical than before.
Even North Korea has their own aesthetic with lasers and jets and neon: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jAHR3nVoIAU
Thanks, that led me down a 2 hour rabbit hole. https://old.reddit.com/user/zaruka
What's the relation? Zaruka is not Mauzer so far as I can see.
More North Korea stuff. Zaruka has many pics and impressions from visits a decade ago. I finished the rabbit hole after Zaruka and figured someone might be interested, but it's a bit hard to choose any comment and even "top" isn't helpful. But I'll try this: https://old.reddit.com/r/northkorea/comments/n8ysx/i_travel_to_north_korea_annually_ama/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you might be ahead of the curve. Over the past few years the right has taken the first stumbling steps towards a culture that might actually stand for something, but none of it is in the "respectable world" where people have faces. (I'll ignore the Right Inc. grifters.) My read is that it started in the chans (maybe for the last time), then went to pseudonymous poasters on reddit and twitter, but it's still at the level of books, where a) the author can publish under a pseudonym (pen names being a thing for a long time) and b) the marginal benefit to the author vastly exceeds the marginal benefit to the megaplatform hosting his work. Whereas in theatre, you're putting your identity on the line. I imagine many of the problems you see in theatre are also repeated in Hollywood; either you stick your head down or you go full Daily Wire or whatever. But theatre doesn't yet seem to have a Daily Wire to shelter people and bootstrapping it seems like a hard problem.
Look at podcasts. Red Scare is the one most people are familiar with but The Perfume Nationalist is a really great piece of art and I strongly recommend it to anyone for an interesting right wing/libertarian take on art and culture.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not really contradicting your comment but I'm a little surprised to see Dreher categorized as dissident right. What are his dissident right bona fides?
He seems to have one foot in the dissident right, if anything by taking off to Hungary. Like he's Matt Forney.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, he’s at best peripherally on the DR, but he sometimes absorbs DR memes by osmosis, and that’s when I know that they have real caché. I’d encountered this meme before and didn’t know how seriously to take it, and once I saw Dreher use it I knew it had become entrenched enough to be worth paying attention to.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Probably. I think "Theatre Kid" is just a broad stereotype, like, say, tech-bros or rainbow-haired SJWs or the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons.
That said, the intersection of Art and right-wing thought is an interesting one. I'd give a couple of possibilities as to why the right tends to be disinterested in art. (mostly just spitballing here)
Institutional dominance. The creative organs are so overwhelmingly left-wing that it's virtually impossible for anyone on the right to gain traction, and thus most potential creators just don't even try.
Tied in with the first is that left-wing messaging alienates those on the right, so they tend to consume media that has withstood the test of time (the classics) or is from cultures that are disconnected from the Western zeitgeist (Anime)
Signaling. There are some hobbies/activities that get closely associated with a political position even if it doesn't necessarily make sense, and fine art has been tied in with the Left, in much the same way that NASCAR is tied in with the Right.
Survive/thrive mentality. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/). Art for art's sake is very much a luxury hobby, so it seems somewhat useless to those on the right who just want to work, raise their families, and grill.
Leftward pull. Humans are social animals, and so a right winger creative will naturally be influenced by the environment around him. If that entire professional environment is left-wing, he will naturally be inclined to moderate his views and output in order to fit in with his peers.
https://www.tumblr.com/rightwingart
This guy J Arthur Bloom from American Conservative and Daily Caller etc. started this blog for right-wing art years ago fwiw.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As a person who also studied theatre, I can only guess at the relationship between artists and progressivism:
Art, like any human endeavour, is subject to competitive pressure, and must experience progress. Now, we're familiar with progress in technology, but as a "soft science," art has a very nebulous definition--or even no real definition--of "better." There are technical aspects that saw progress, sure, but practically all of that happened before the 21st century (though our current epoch is home to the drawing tablet, Machinima, Blender, Virtual Reality, and AI art). Thus, competition in art inevitably becomes less about who can out-draw or out-sculpt the others, and more who can out-message or out-fascinate the others.
Now, I don't mean this to say that the post-modern developments in art starting with the aftermath of WWI were some sort of grand dick-measuring contest, but more that, once the lower-hanging(?) fruit of technical skill had been picked, there was a surprising inversion towards techniques and schools of art that traded away technical craft for higher-level ideas.
The new thing is always the most fascinating thing, and those first waves of artists who happened to subscribe to newer, more progressive political ideologies rejected the old ideals in favor of new ones. These political leanings carried into their art, rejecting the old methods in favor of new and experimental things, sometimes with their political message blended in (I mentioned the aftermath of WWI because it gave us the artform of Dada, a surrealist style that rejected all sense of, well, sense in response to the irrational horrors of the Great War).
There are plenty of conservative artists, but I do suspect that something about the conservative mindset does tend to result in more flawed art, even if it's not necessarily made purely for reaction's sake (see: Thomas Kinkade, whose commercial paintings are the ur-example of schmaltzy kitsch, overwrought and out-of-place). But that being said, as an artist, I find the modern-day post-modernist anti-whatever styles and messaging to be franky exhausting. Even when progressive artists try to push a positive message, it never sits quite right with me, though that may only be because I have trouble separating the art from the artist there based solely on their politics.
Thus, I find myself confined to a similar space as many in my generation and the ones preceding it (and even following): cursed with nostalgia for the past, seeking solace in the familiar and understandable, but knowing that this fixed place in time cannot be occupied for an extended duration, let alone forever; everything that was formative to me as a child will be ruined by new sensibilities or undermined by corporate greed, and at best, I will have to let go at some point. I want to move with the art, but the art is often so flawed to me and so, so hard to agree with.
It doesn't have to be this way forever, though. Artists prize a certain freedom of expression, and while not everyone wants the freedom to make art that might hurt some group's feelings, there are going to be those who may well need to tread on some toes to make truly compelling art. I think there must be some limit somewhere, and perhaps the pendulum will swing away from bananas on walls and towards rock n' roll someday.
Tl;dr art is subjective, which incentivizes novelty and subversion. Postmodernism is a feedback loop on those conditions.
To this I would add that information access is the enemy, or at least a contributor. Amateur artists can study at the feet of all humanity’s masters. Give it five years and they can have an AI do that for them. This incentivizes commentary as a route to novelty. New paintings aren’t made in a vacuum, so instead of competing with Rembrandt, it’s more practical to engage with him. Repeat this cycle for 100 years and you get comments on treatises on comments on jokes on technical details.
That said…I’m not sure what about that is hostile to the right.
True, all of that doesn't have to be hostile to right-wingers, but I think conservatism tends to downweight weirdness generally...however, the new Dissident Right, the 4Channers, and so on definitely embrace weirdness, so perhaps that's where the future of the right does indeed lie for aesthetics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I've spent a not-insignificant amount of time around "music people", and for the most part they are much the same. I happen to be one myself, but don't feel particularly "attacked" because I don't feel it describes me well - a generalisation doesn't necessarily apply to every individual member of a group.
The first problem is that many of these people don't look at societies as large emergent entities which are governed and shaped by forces that are outside of anything we would consider as "humanistic values" (example: Scott's Moloch), rather they tend to see societies as being almost solely a product of ideology. When that is the primary lens through which you view things, you end up adopting this incredibly airy-fairy idea that you can shape society into anything you want and IF ONLY you could get enough people on board we could live on Heaven On Earth. Most "artsy people" really don't tend to develop very complex thinking about societies and why they operate the way they do, and it doesn't matter how much history or anthropology or evolutionary theory or whatever they learn, most of them in practice tend to remain stuck in this mindset.
The second problem is that their cognition is in large part governed by aesthetics (unsurprisingly so, perhaps). Their political thinking and what they like/dislike are basically determined by what resonates with them on the most aesthetic and superficial of levels, and a huge amount of their political criticisms amount to implying that their opponents' optics are bad and distasteful to them instead of actually engaging with the meat of the arguments being made. Again, knowledge doesn't seem to change this because it's a fundamental, deeper problem with their mindset and personality that's independent of how much one knows.
These two things seem to predispose them to adopting revolutionary, utopian leftist ideologies (e.g. communism) and clinging hard to these beliefs even when they observably break apart on contact with reality.
This is a critical part of whatever the full answer is here. Progressive art is unbound by the need to work, hold up to logical scrutiny, or make literally any sense at all. It's pure aesthetics. Dig into the lyrics of the average punk song, or celebratory ghetto anthem, or vaguely progressive pop hit and they are fucking retarded, Gringott's with it's fixed precious metals exchange ratios stamping on the human sense-making organ forever. It's a vibe and a glib line and never ever having to worry if the underlying mechanics will function on any level.
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting, I wonder how much this connects with something I started noticing ~8 years ago and continues to be en vogue now among many people on the left, which is calling political things they disagree with "gross" or "not a good look." Both of which are obviously subjective aesthetic judgments rather than any sort of meaningful criticism, though they're always stated as if they're supposed to be taken as meaningful criticisms. I've written about the "gross" before, but I recall being absolutely befuddled by seeing other leftists use it to describe right-wing behavior in a negative way, because much of our activism in the prior decade had been about getting society to accept gay marriage and homosexuals in general, and one of the key arguments for the case had been that someone's personal disgust reaction should have absolutely zero bearing on the ethical correctness of that thing - i.e. just because you're viscerally disgusted by the idea of 2 men kissing, it doesn't make a romantic/sexual relationship between 2 men any less beautiful or less worth tolerating, if not celebrating, than one between a man and a woman.
This then connects with one theory that I had, which is that many of the fellow "liberals" fighting for gay marriage weren't fighting for liberalism at all, but rather was using it as a vehicle by which to push forward something that they themselves didn't find disgusting - theater and the arts are well known to have a very high proportion of gay people relative to the broader population, and as such one would expect that people in those groups would tend to have less of a disgust reaction, if any, towards their friends, coworkers, and other direct peers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can empathize with large chunks of what you've written here from my own experiences--among other things, I'm looking at walking away from theater-adjacent hobbies because Republican is the New Gay and the closet fucking sucks when you're in an environment that sincerely hates the real you.
I'm also losing the last shreds of my patience with "my non-binary offspring is a they/them, and I expect you to use the right pronouns." This is not a hypothetical case. I've dodged the issue so far, but another person I know was swifty corrected when he referred to the teenage boy as "he." Apologies for misgendering ensued, and I've discovered this is a red line for me. I will not cater to the whims of a teenager in my word choices, and exerting social pressure on me to do so violates my expectations of friendly behavior.
More options
Context Copy link
The left’s monopoly over theater kids is possibly because leftist positions are the default for emotional young people who don’t know much about issues and don’t know how to do any deeper calculations. I predict any preteen without exposure to complex thinking would see homeless people and say “give them a home”, see the cost of education and say “make it free”, see a police officer doing something bad and say “no more police”, etc. Whether or not these leftist positions are true, by and large the positions happen to be the intuitive inclination of children. Women paid less on average -> pay them more. Black people were enslaved -> give compensation. Animals in pain when butchered -> vegetarian phase. Gay people can be in love -> marriage. Poor people -> pay them more. Someone has a lot -> he should share.
And so if if turns out that art kids have a highly developed emotional sensitivity (I believe this is true), but have spent fewer points in Information Acquisition and Complex Thought (perhaps this is true), then this explains why the Left would have a monopoly over theater kids. Notably, something like “I want homeless people to have home” is not just intuitive but emotionally potent, so it allows the subscriber to theatrically express their deeply-felt moral intuition about something important.
Yes, it makes intuitive sense that this would be the case (one of the left's primary Newspeak goals is, of course, making sure that "populism" doesn't make sense if paired with "leftist" for this exact reason- this is just as true when the right comes to power, but the word they use is "degeneracy"- to imply traditionalism even when it legitimately doesn't make sense isn't degenerate even though, on its face, it is).
Yes, and the reason functioning societies don't take that seriously is that badly-calibrated intuition tends to be both fickle, wrong, and inherently vulnerable to
Sarah McLachlan musicconcern trolling. Said societies tend to stop being functional ones if you give them the ability to summon guns (example: Karen calls CPS on kids playing outside).Intuition of this type is also generally limited to reaction and can't really create anything on its own, so the effects of "just pick the popular thing" tend to be amplified in that group because they just haven't developed that ability (to be liberal/have a sober second thought). Interestingly, the reaction to this reaction is traditionalism (which is kind of but not quite like conservatism), and you can see how it forms in the sibling comment to yours.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
I believe OP intended for that passage to describe Donald Trump. Upon reading it, I immediately thought of Trump, though it applies to politicians of all stripes.
More options
Context Copy link
WRT Trump, pro wrestling (as Trump once cameo'd in WWE, and Linda McMahon was on his Cabinet, IIRC) is often the comparison made, that Trump is a master of "kayfabe" and being able to sell the audience the image they want to see. Pro wrestling is arguably a right-inflected form of theatre in itself, and probably descended from carnival shows (in fact, much of wrestling terminology is descended from carny-speak), so that thread is definitely there and you aren't just seeing Jesus in toaster marks.
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, you are dead-on about Trump, and I pegged him from the second he came down that elevator as a toxic grifter to be avoided at all costs. I do think that for all the ways I’m an odd fit for the Right, the fact that at no point was I ever a run-of-the-mill normie conservative gives me a bit of insight into some of the failure modes to which the Red Tribe is vulnerable, and I knew that Trump would be able to expertly exploit those vulnerabilities while actually doing close to nothing to help the people who voted for him. He is the ur-fabulist, someone so labile and bereft of sincerity that he will say and believe literally anything he thinks he needs to in order to secure adulation and power.
I mean, what’s the point of all of it if the proles rise up and overthrow their overlords, only to institute a society where the height of artistic culture is Pawn Stars and a NASCAR race? If the destruction of the PMC means the destruction of what’s left of our high culture, I’ve got to say that siding with the elites starts to look like a more attractive prospect. Say whatever you will about the PMC and their schizophrenic relationship to traditional high culture, but like I said, when I go to a classical concert or a ballet or an opera, it’s very obvious who is keeping these traditions alive, and it sure as hell isn’t Trump voters.
Growing up, the only ballet I went to was a Christmas Pageant type, one that included this song in it. It was also sublime, and in the top 5 things I miss about moving away from my childhood home.
The Daily Wire has put out at least a couple movies that are on par with anything Hollywood has put out recently. Run, Fight, Hide was more enjoyable than any Marvel Movie since Winter Soldier.
But to make and patronize high-quality art, there needs to be a certain amount of affluence - either on the part of a wealthy art patron or on the part of a polity that can afford it. If the Red Tribe had more of that, I think they'd surprise you.
That said, I think the orchestra and ballet require a bit more of steely-eyed pragmatism, self-discipline, and respect for the past that befits the red tribe better.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not as convinced- their version of theater is wildly popular. They don't outright call it that (partially for reactionary reasons), but the term "kayfabe" comes from the way its performers act.
Yes, it's a bit more formulaic since it has to fit within its primary conceit of a sports match, but I really don't see much difference between Shakespeare and WWE- it's just that we consider one high art and the other something else, probably because Shakespeare was 400 years ago and nobody fully understands its memes any more.
Seconding @Hoffmeister25.
What this reminds me of, perhaps because of recent exposure to the china-racial-enemy thread, is reading this old Amren article:
As always, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. Art exists, and WWE ain't it. Commonality of many building blocks is of no relevance. People can be more or less equipped to notice the totality of intellectual effort and purpose directing it which separates art and pure entertainment.
No doubt WWE could be used to stage actual high art, but its incentives lead to the opposite.
Aristotle disagreed in that, according to Laetrus, he thought that most people don't act according to some internal sense of right and wrong, but according to what won't get them into trouble:
In his view, most people are what Mr. Blair calls "psychopaths".
This is indeed not so clear-cut. Plato also argued that there does not exist a man so virtuous as to abstain from crime that cannot de discovered, in a passage that I believe has inspired Tolkien (Wiki notes the parallel but says there's no proof of borrowing):
I actually agree both with Greeks and with woke anthropologists that morality does not exist and does not differ from conventional etiquette in some substantial objective sense. The belief that it does is obviously downstream from tenets of (Christian) religion, which insists on there being some supernatural authority that informs one's conscience in a way that's qualitatively superior to mere interiorization of customs. Olympians weren't moral role models or authorities. Even Yahweh isn't much of one, even his old prophets weren't. Crucially, Christianity doesn't give much of a shit for the material world that is a disposable platform for testing the character of an immortal soul, so it can get away with abnormally severe deontology, the good of the entire polity being not worth the abuse of a single child. (it's worth noting that Dost's argument in Karamazovs about «tear of a child» is often misconstued as expressing this sentiment, but it was just the old problem of evil in a world created by a good God). This was important for creating a WEIRD psychotype.
But also, clearly racists-objectivists have a point.
To be more specific, we can say that in this framework «morality» is distinct from etiquette in that it is a) premised on instinctive empathy for your fellow being with moral patienthood (this is admittedly somewhat circular), b) practically consists of general game-theoretical heuristics that are intended to maximize long-term happiness/suffering ratio for the group and its members, and c) affects emotions and behavior even in the absence of external reward.
This still allows for diversity of moral systems. When the racist author says that Kenyans wouldn't have freed Dreyfus because they fail at counterfactual reasoning, he misses this.
The Chinese, or even Japanese, are obviously capable of thinking about complex counterfactuals, but it may be that they too wouldn't have been persuaded by the deontological reasoning here: «social harmony» is for them a moral heuristic that can very well compete with «justice», and is valued for the same object-level reasons the instinct is derived from. Insults to harmony are received with indignation and outrage of the same nature as acts of abuse directed at individuals in the West. Indeed I think that a typical East Asian would appeal to a deeper counterfactual, that of the plausible uncertainty of Dreyfus' innocence, to justify the court doubling down: unrest in the name of redressing a *merely highly likely injustice is not worth it. And heuristics of Kenyans may be not too different, only baked into common metis and inaccessible to abstract reflection. In fact we could say that empathetic morality is more logically primitive than ethics of conventional behavior, because conventions can account for second-order effects which still resolve to moral benefit.
I do not always believe that what I quote or refer to is better than my own thoughts on the matter – those are just neat illustrations for the topic at hand.
I think morality does exist, and as far as I know I don’t derive it from christianity. Imagine everyone has a ring of gyges. To avoid getting stolen from and killed, we refrain from such things even in the absence of retribution. The analogy holds because people really do occasionally have the opportunity to do evil unseen. Magical, acausal thinking perhaps, but I truly believe that if I act that way, they will too. Well, some of them. But it requires them to understand the defect-defect equilibrium we are heading to without such magical thinking, and trust in an unenforceable contract. I’m sorry to say that for me the moral value of a person has an intelligence component, though obviously intelligence is no guarantee.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m going to try and indulge this argument, because I used to believe a version of it. I was a pretty diehard cultural relativist at one point, coinciding with my Marxist days, so I understand the appeal of this argument. It also happens to be the case that I have read each and every one of Shakespeare’s plays in their entirety, and have personally performed his work. During the years in which, while studying for my theatre arts degree, Shakespeare was being shoved down my throat, I actually reacted really strongly against the veneration of his plays as the zenith of the English literary tradition. Part of that is my strong natural contrarianism, but I think I was also correct to identify weaknesses in his work and the ways in which a lot of people do just worship Shakespeare because he’s Shakespeare, independently of the value of his specific works.
But like… even his worst and most lowbrow play is not comparable to a WWE event. I’m sorry, but that requires a level of “there is no difference between good things and bad things, everything is socially constructed and mediated by status signaling, beauty is in the eye of the beholder” that just doesn’t hold up to any honest analysis of the works in question.
My good buddy is a huge WWE fan, and I used to watch Wrestlemania and the occasional pay-per-view event with him, and I agree that it’s a fun time, with moments of genuine excitement, but it’s not Shakespeare.
Now that sounds like a fun remix. "Heels get stunnered many times before their pin; faces taste the folding chair but once." "Uneasy lies the waist that bears the Championship belt."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Never considered myself aligned much with lowbrow culture, but if I could have a maximally good society where the only drawback is that entertainment is simple...
More options
Context Copy link
I absolutely abhor this line of thinking. I grew up in a red tribe setting and spent most of my adult life around blue tribe people and whenever they say this sort of thing it makes them look so, so bad in my opinion. People who watch Pawn Stars and NASCAR are poor and even if they're not poor have little to no cultural power in their own country, they have been dying by the thousands in drug overdoses, the rust belt has been on a downward spiral for a century, they have a poor quality of life and then have to be degraded by.... "theater kids" who rub their suffering in their faces. Sorry for the rant but it blows my mind when I see the same tribe of people who spend every waking moment trying not to offend BIPOC people flippantly painting Trump voters as people who have chosen not to keep opera alive rather than painting them as people with the cards stacked against them who are more worried about getting their rent paid than trying to attend a ballet to feel a little superior to the people around them.
Actually, I think I've just hit at the crux of the issue of your original post. Theatre kids are, or have been for the past few decades, leftist because it's where elitism and cultural capital lie. Take away that construction and suddenly the creatives are free to switch sides, which I believe is already starting to happen as I've outlined in this post from a few months ago.
Leaving aside the fact that I personally am certainly not worried about offending “BIPOC people” - I direct you to peruse my larger body of work on this site, in which I do precisely the opposite - your larger point stands and is valuable. Progressives will contort themselves into pretzels to make excuses for every self-defeating thing a poor minority does, while not only hearing no excuses for similarly self-defeating behavior from downscale whites but actually reveling in it. The pattern you are outlining is real.
However, hypocrisy can be reconciled in two directions. One would be to see all downtrodden and marginalized communities as equally worthy of sympathy and uplift; a populist “champion of the little guy” who gives every bit as help to every unfortunate and exploited person, regardless of race or tribal loyalty or whatever. That appears to be what you’re advocating, and I understand the appeal. However, I can also resolve the hypocrisy by extending the same disdain and feeling of superiority to the “BIPOC people” as I do to the “trailer trash”; this is the elitist position that some people are better than other people, and that generally speaking power and resources are effectively distributed based on the quality, productivity, and value of individuals. This is certainly an oversimplified worldview and does not accurately describe the whole picture; however, I believe that it is directionally correct.
I have been to the dirt-poor part of Appalachia - I was in eastern Kentucky - and if I were to give one of those people a free ticket to a classical music concert - which, by the way, one can purchase for like $25 at most venues and get decent seats, so this isn’t some massive expense - that individual would probably not appreciate the experience even given the chance. I’m confident that this is the cad because even wealthy or middle-class Red Tribe people - people with no material concerns preventing them from participating in high culture - overwhelmingly do not do so, and prefer lower-brow fare. There’s a cultural/psychological/tribal element here that has nothing to with people just being too poor to afford a ticket to the ballet.
As for your contention that someone would only go to the ballet “to feel a little superior to the people around them”, I can assure you that that’s not the reason I go to the ballet. I go because so genuinely experience it as sublime and beautiful. It makes me feel connected to a larger corpus of important cultural output that represents the absolute pinnacle of what my people have been able to create, during the period when their culture was at its most powerful and dynamic and confident. I have difficulty relating to people who can’t experience the sublimity of something like that. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying lowbrow entertainment - I go to punk rock concerts all the time, which are not intellectually-stimulating or artistically refined - but I think there’s something really limited and unfortunate about someone who hasn’t even been able to cultivate a base-level appreciation for the boundless world of free and instantly-accessible high culture that’s out there at the fingertips of the people for whom you’re making excuses.
Perhaps there is something to ballet that I just don't understand. I have been to at least one, nutcracker, and... it's just people dancing to music. Difficult I'm sure, but sublime? Different people find different things sublime, I love my city, I'm in awe at what our engineers, architects and laborers have built - my culture is more powerful and dynamic today, not in some idealized past where pain stakingly perfecting choreography was the peak of human ambition. Maybe this is what you feel when you see ballet, but it is no universal experience.
For what it's worth, I also like ballet and think it's sublime. I even consider dancing and engineering to be related, because the human body is like a machine. Programming robots to be able to do what humans can do is a cutting edge field of research.
My favorite ballet is the Triadic Ballet, produced out of the Bauhaus school. The costumes worn by the dancers show different aspects of the human body's geometry. The ballet is divided into parts based on various mechanical motions of the body. It's not just a demonstration of painstakingly perfect choreography. It demonstrates ideas and principles that can be generalized to other fields of knowledge.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A miniscule sliver of society enjoys these things. I recall reading that even that sliver is loosing interest and these venues are dying.
Let's not pick political allegiance over this fringe of a past time. In fact, maybe purely entertainment activities such as movies and opera should be viewed as frivolous distractions. Good fun if you like it. But fundamentally unimportant.
More options
Context Copy link
You would switch allegiances over these trifles? You’re always applauding, I don’t see the point. Let’s all dress up and pretend recording devices haven’t been invented, it's pure signaling. Radio killed the Opera star, just let it go man.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure as hell isn't Urban Youth either, but this is probably more a function of other common causes, e.g. large urban areas happen to be places that are both highly progressive and support large symphonies, but those two things may not be directly related. I have never encountered any particular disdain for classical music among the red tribe, so much as unfamiliarity and a vague association with NPR preciousness. Symphonic movie scores, though, seem to be broadly popular.
More options
Context Copy link
There is a reason that conservative intelligentsia is increasingly dominated by people from ultra-conservative subcultures that separate themselves from mainstream American society- like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro.
are walsh or shapiro even the most popular "intelligentsia" at billionaire-backed dailywire?
do people from "ultra conservative subcultures" even dominate at dailywire?
is the reason because they're willing to burn money paying tech platforms to push their content to the front of every "conservative" feed or were you thinking of something else?
Rebecca Mercer and Matt Walsh both go to the same tradcath church, interestingly(other relevant tradcaths in very prominent positions on the right include pat buchanan, Clarence thomas, Michael Brendan Dougherty, Don Huffines, and a bevy of petty functionaries), and Ben Shapiro is (obviously) an Orthodox Jew which is also strongly over represented in the right wing media-activist complex. So are Mormons.
So yes, there’s clearly a noticeable pattern.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Why artsy people are mostly on the left is probably rooted in psychology- they’re almost by definition people who choose self expression in the face of conventionality, which is left wing nearly tautologically.
Conventionality is currently left wing. You can't express yourself in its face and be left wing, then you are expressing yourself as its face. Caitlyn Jenner bravely being applauded and fawned over.
There is room on the right for all types, but 20 years of left wing propaganda made people think the only people who belong on the right are Mormons, racists and idiots. It's definitely one of their best memes, evidenced by it being believed not only by the left, moderates and normies, but even by many right wingers - even though it does nothing but fuck the right. But it is just a meme.
Yes, and conversely, libertarianism is currently right wing. Hence the art world's complete identity crisis and breakdown over the past few years which I see as mainly a fracture between the elite old school liberal donor/patron class and the broke creatives who actually make art.
More options
Context Copy link
The enemy must be both strong and weak, huh?
Or I guess the modern version is that they’re “so controversial, yet so brave.”
This phrase seems to function as a thought-terminating cliché.
All enemies have both strengths and weaknesses, relatively speaking, and it behooves one to have a full appreciation of both if conflict seems likely. There is no assessment of relative strengths and weaknesses, in any context, on any side, that you cannot apply your criticism to. It is fully general, hence either useless or dishonest due to selective application.
Is there not a tension between portraying leftists as conventional and as dangerous radicals? Their hold on the mainstream must be treated as a serious threat—but also “just a meme.”
"Convention" as in "Consensus", "Law", "Guideline", "Policy", not "Tradition". You might argue that this is imprecision in language, but language is, unfortunately, imprecise. Note the "Currently", which states that this is a convention of the present. So no, this doesn't seem to me to be a colorable argument.
Rwandan racial grievances and the Blood Libel are other examples of mere memes that are nevertheless serious threats, and other examples (Marxism, Protestantism, Christianity, "this random guy is actually the legitimate heir to the throne", &etc) abound. Ideas are dangerous, in the strictest and most concrete sense. Memes motivate, and of the means-motive-opportunity trio, motive is the most important.
I'm aware that the cliché in question has a pedigree, but I'm struggling to actually think of a single case where its use is straightforwardly both applicable and productive. I think this is just another of those academic "insights" sustained by a complete lack of rigor in their native environment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, they are just strong. They leverage minority groups for their own gain, and then discard them when they are no longer considered weak enough to garner enough sympathy to provide cover for their power grabs. I don't consider left wingers my enemy though, the vast majority of the left are just trying to do the right thing, and we disagree about the methods but not the goal - a happy, stable, free society. I do consider them co-opted by tyrants and sociopaths however, who I do consider my enemy, and I think that the current ideology dominating the left is partly to blame, because it makes it easier for those types to get ahead.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
left-wing lawyers, journalists, and activists seem to get more hate than artsy people. It's not uncommon to see posts here and related communities extoling the virtues of The Classics, of old architecture, etc.
More options
Context Copy link
Usually, when I've seen people talk about "theater kids", I've got the feeling it's code for flamboyant homosexuality. However, Rod (who wouldn't have a problem with dissing flamboyant homosexuals directly anyway) seems to be using it as code for something else, but I can't quite catch what. Just being very expressive and dramatic?
I think it's more a reference to certain high school cliques. You had your theater kids, jocks, nerds, stoners, mean girls, goths, preppies, and so on. My vague recollection was that the kids that would go on to become politicians and leaders used to be drawn mostly from the jocks and preppies, and sometimes the nerds, whereas perhaps now the theater clique have become launched more influential people, probably via the power of performative social media, at the expense of the jocks and especially the nerds.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who was a Theatre Kid, albeit not an example of the stereotype nor quite exactly surrounded by examples thereof, the general archetype/stereotype of the Theatre Kid generally is: quirky, high-energy, might act out, enthusiastic, hungry for success, reverently addicted to pop culture, probably has a Tumblr, stuff like that.
More options
Context Copy link
I've seen Anne Hathaway called a theater kid due to her Oscar campaign and that was basically what it boiled down to - being over-dramatic and too earnest
Might have been unfair (see her acceptance speech and judge for yourself) but there you go.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Being involved in theater doesn’t make you a theater kid, and you can be a theater kid even if you are not involved at all in theater. I wouldn’t take it too personally.
Do you see yourself as better than others? And wish to impose your beliefs on others? Do you imagine over dramatized revolutions yet oppose gun ownership, and associate fitness with something negative?
It’s the kids who were in high school asking for more homework, tattling on other kids, and sneering at anybody who liked sports. If that was you, then yeah you’re a theater kid.
There are however many right wing and even far right wing artists. Anybody who doubts this should spend some time at burning man interacting with the people building the art there. They’re the most libertarian of libertarians.
I second your definition of theater kid, it didn’t just mean anyone who was in the school play but the clique of people who were extremely into it, and it carries the negative connotations you mentioned. The same way you probably wouldn’t call someone on the cross country team a jock even though they play a sport. It’s also definitely what people mean when they say things like “theater kid occupied government” even if you think theater kid just means someone who did theater.
More options
Context Copy link
Sounds like No True Theater Kid to me. Sure is convenient that Dreher was only complaining about the people you don’t like.
More options
Context Copy link
deleted
More options
Context Copy link
I will first point out that the question of whether or not libertarians are “right-wing” is a very hotly-contested topic, and that I would answer the question with a definitive “no”. Also, when was the last time that any of the art produced at Burning Man made any sort of cultural impact on the general public? I’m certainly not aware of a single example, although I admit that it’s not an area about which I’m very knowledgeable.
Let's start with: what do you consider 'right wing'?
I don't think there is really a way to address this question. In my world, burning man is a massive cultural juggernaut. It defines building/architectural styles, sculpture styles, music styles, clothing styles. It's practically inescapable.
Burning man had its own exhibit in The Smithsonian: https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/burning-man
Hmm, man I'm really at a loss as to how to address your question of what cultural impact burning man has had.
FWIW, I think that says more about your world than the larger cultural one. I'm kind of involved in that sector and burning man is barely on the radar.
We're not in the US, which perhaps plays something of a role, but BM seems more known for drugs, garage creative, and rich folk cosplaying as creative.
I agree there's a lot of creativity there, but I don't think it's made it out much into the larger world.
Really depends on how we judge what "burning man art" is. A lot of incredibly famous musicians have gone out there and play sets, as attendees. I don't know if they even pay artists to show up, i know they didn't when i was more aware of that scene but i wouldn't hazard a guess anymore. Tons of people that work on movies and videogames and esoteric AI powered VR DMT simulators go. I havent been keeping current, but i watched video of Skrillex playing at a sound camp there from before he won a grammy.
Point being, the cumulative attendees of burningman might be the most wide reaching and impactful group of artists in the world. Like, if you don't think that scene has had a notable impact on culture over the last 20 years i wonder what you would point to as being influential.
In your defense however, i will say that most notable burningman attendees don't really advertise their time there, so not being aware of how many influential people have attended is pretty easy to excuse.
(i don't know why i'm even defending burningman, its a hollowed out husk of a super cool party)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are you trying to redefine "theatre kid" to be purely pejorative? Please don't.
I have never heard this term used as anything other than a pejorative. I've only really understood this term to basically be the teenage version of the "karen" archetype.
And I've never heard it used to mean anything other than "a kid who is into theatre". I think your understanding is way off base, but I'll concede that it's anecdote vs anecdote here unless someone has something more substantial.
More options
Context Copy link
To me, it primarily means "a young person really into theatre". For example, I think the OP meant this sense of the word above when they were describing themselves.
More options
Context Copy link
There's definitely parts of the Glee fandom that are either trying to reclaim the concept or just started under the assumption is what in-group.
More options
Context Copy link
I feel like actual kids involved in theaters have used it in a more playful way, the same way band kids will joke about being "band kids."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link