Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
It seems like lots of artists and creatives are going right wing lately. I suspect it's due to their (or our, speaking as one of them) predisposition to stand against mainstream culture, as it's impossible to miss the mainstream/capitalist adoption of left wing ideology lately. There's just no excitement or energy in trying to champion leftwing causes when every leftwing cause has been coopted by mass media and tech giants (which are also criminally censorious to creatives currently) and wall street corporations. The artists and creatives who continue to work within the spaces of leftism are increasingly boring and uninteresting and creating work that parrots the capital line more than any genuine transgressive feelings within the artists' vision.
Anyway, my point in making this post is to ask if there has ever been a situation like this in the past? I am interested in history but it's not my strongest subject. It feels like perhaps there are parallels with the French Revolution: wherein the masses were increasingly disgusted with the nobles and quickly defected. I remember reading that even Louis XVI was criticized as being out of touch by vaccinating his family against smallpox, as an aside.
Looking at figures like the Red Scare girls and their whole scene, (which has spiraled out to include Kanye and tons of other millennial thinkers from MIA to David Rudnick) it looks like the disillusionment with leftism is huge. I wonder how much of this is actually an interesting signal that 20th century leftism is dead, or if millennials are simply getting too old for the naivety of that ideology and we're seeing a generation go more conservative which happens with every generation.
I fully empathize with people who are sick of the leftist chokehold on discourse and culture over the past few decades (culminating in the Trump presidency) but I wonder what it leads to. Optimistically, it seems like a "back to basics" situation where people are seeing the contradictions of the recent past and trying to correct them for a new, more coherent ideology, but I also feel like it's a bit of a bizarre situation when a class of people who basically banked their entire social capital for decades on progressive ideology and LGBT/racial inclusivity are starting to tear it down. I applaud it but when has this happened before? In a way it reminds me of the shift in European art from being purely religious in nature, funded by the church, to suddenly having wealthy private clients in the Dutch merchants of the late 1500s.
Sorry for the rambling tone of my post, I just like to read the things posted here and I wanted to kind of post this as a prompt to have some discussion to expand on some thoughts I've been having lately. As an aside, no one in the artist or creative scenes I frequent seem to be able to articulate this shift, as most are still afraid of cancelation or being put out of work or shunned by social media or deplatformed or the many other situations one can get into when defecting from mainstream opinion. Or alternatively creative people are not as invested in the specifics of politics as much as people here are and would rather not engage with the situation from a political lens but rather from their personal/creative artistic angle.
I’m wary of social hypotheses that start with “it seems...”
Right-wing creators, black antisemitism, effective altruism. That’s just this week. A month ago it seemed like woke advertising was hitting a peak; a year ago, maybe it was Democrats, or election deniers, or lockdownists.
This isn’t a dig at your post, because I think discussing the possibility is worthwhile. I’m trying to keep in mind that “it seems” does not imply “it is.” Maybe it’s the filter/algorithm/Current Thing. Seeming is a natural hedge when we aren’t actually sure, and I’d like to skip to the part where people ask for and provide sources.
The third paragraph in my post was an attempt at pointing to some of the evidence I have seen of the rightward shift in art and culture. Others would be the podcast The Perfume Nationalist, countless tumblrs I've seen lately that glorify poor white underdog Trump's America type imagery and identity, and so on. Also the Barragan Spring 2023 fashion show, and the fashion brand called Praying. Brandy Melville. Recent Prada.
As I said in my last paragraph, most of the people in the scene are sort of doing this shift covertly and hiding behind a mirage of ambiguity as to what they are doing (for example, the Red Scare subreddits are filled with people who have no apparent awareness of the rightwing nature of most of the talking points presented on the show.) So it makes evidence difficult to point at. Indeed, much of art and fashion is based on "seeming" rather than anything overt. For example, I can look at Nicholas Ghesquiere's recent collections from Louis Vuitton and see his weird ugly belle epoque-meets-18th century panniers as a kind of rightwing trolling misogynistic hostility against modern women, while the same modern and progressive feminist women can look at the same garments and imagine them as empowering pieces to help them be single mothers with, or whatever.
I don't think that art and fashion, or the politics of people who participate in creating culture, is the sort of thing that you can study, so I don't know how I could provide sources other than by relating my personal anecdotal observations. I'm not going to dox myself but I can tell you that in the least, I'm very interested and personally invested in the creative industries and read themotte enough to be able to identify newly emerging rightwing patterns when 5 years ago you would have gotten you canceled to the ends of the earth for the same thing.
As an aside, I posted in the small scale thread because I didn't really want to attract the hostility and pedantry of the main thread but it seems I've attracted it anyway. I enjoy themotte because I think most of the posters are smart and have unique points of view but the aggression can really be a lot to take when I'm just looking for a more friendly conversation sometimes. I wish there was another thread that was more low stakes than this one, but the friday fun thread says it's not for culture war content so I don't know what to do.
Post as a standalone text post. It doesn't get nearly the engagement typically, only the interested people are clicking.
On your thesis, I think the problem with the evidence for "The Creatives are turning to the Right!" is that it's very "The Boy who cried wolf!" if you've hung around the dissident right wing internet for a minute. It's the Right wing equivalent to "Goldbugs have accurately predicted 14 out of the last 4 recessions" or (if you're familiar with fashion blogs) the way between 2010 and 2020 I read post after post calling that the skinny silhouette was over and it was all about loose pants now. The same articles that are written about the stylish RedScare girls were written in 2015-2016 about how Richard Spencer and Milo represented a new, well read, funny and good natured, nattily dressed and undercutted white nationalism. That wave didn't happen.
Now, in the year of our Lord MMXXII both the goldbugs and the loose pants posts have become right, we are seeing ruinous inflation and skinny jeans are "off trend." So maybe they're just ahead of their time, but when it comes to fashion how do you distinguish "ahead of your time" from "just plain ol' wrong?" I'm not sure. And how do you time it? I'm really not sure, or I'd be richer. Fwiw, I'm still not sure inflation is even a valid concept when so many goods are so much cheaper (or higher quality) than they once were, at the same time that other goods are vastly more expensive; I'm not sure we're seeing inflation as much as price divergence, and the internal mechanics of calculating the CPI are going to have bigger effects than ever, so even then the goldbugs aren't really right.
In this case I find the evidence of the shift to the right among creatives to be weak. The redscare girls are cute, but the "big break" their fans are panting over is a secondary character's love interest on one premium cable TV show; not even a starring role off Broadway or something. Righties are dreaming on Kanye and Kyrie as "big gets" for their team. Kanye's best years are behind him, kids conceived when their parents hooked up at a party listening to "Gold Digger" are 17 now; for us oldies it's equivalent to, when I was 17 in 2009, the right wing celebrating getting Eddie Van Halen to shift Right wing. Kyrie's politics just imploded a high priced superteam that was already selling finals tickets. Whatever your thoughts on the vaccine, Shaq had the best line on it from an NBA perspective: "I played with Kobe, I played against Michael; if Kyrie tried that shit on them they would have pinned him down in the locker room and injected him themselves."
Now maybe Dasha gets the Oscar in a big film next year, Kanye comes out with his Blood on the Tracks coming off the wreckage of his marriage like Dylan before him, and Kyrie and Ben Simmons lead some team to the finals and win co-MVP next year. But I'm not sure I see it.
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Which artists? And 'right wing' how? Ten artists on your twitter timeline going RW is different than, say, half all existing elite artists 'going RW' / a new cross-societal group of elite talented RW artists. Is there a RW riefenstahl today? Leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking? And how right-wing - is not being a brain dead liberal and reading Sowell enough?
Red Scare and their 'scene' did not cause Kanye to be antisemtic, or anti-left. MIA is barely a "thinkier". Idk who runick is, the first google result was ... ballotpedia?
Where's the New Right Eighth Edition celine, or pound?
To answer the question directly - artists have 'moved from left to right' a lot historically, and the mainstream RW artistic presence was, for most of history, way more prominent than it is now, and the movement you see is very small.
Artists/creatives ranging from the people I mentioned in my post to friends of mine who are not famous but are artists.
I don't know, as right wing as losing a billion dollars for antisemitism and talking about race science openly on a podcast, which in the grand scheme of /r/themotte isn't probably very rightwing but in the grand scheme of like, NYU grads, is basically literally hitler compared to ten years ago
Yeah, I see the mainstream elite talented artists as still being deeply left aligned, but the people with less exposure and fame diverging from that. I don't care if Yayoi Kusama or Jeff Koons goes right wing tomorrow because I don't care about their work. I care about people who have always made interesting work to me veering away from liberal ideology because I care about interesting work and seeing where it fits in the political spectrum.
There aren't even leftwing directors leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking today so I think asking for a rightwing one is pretty out of the question for now
Everyone in the NYC/LA fashion/art scene basically knows each other, Kanye is definitely getting exposed to these people and I've heard his rants where he explains that he thinks leftists/BLM are coercing the Kardashians into believing/saying whatever they want. If Patrik Sandberg/DIS Magazine people/Ryder Ripps/Azalea Banks/Red Scare girls/Walter Pearce/a handful of other people in the scene weren't all collectively looking into vaguely alt right ideology Kanye West wouldn't have any idea about it either.
She has a platform and a creative oeuvre and is daring to say something other than the democrat party line so I feel she's relevant to the discussion at hand
He's a talented graphic designer making interesting work, you spelled his name wrong
I don't know, I'm not claiming there is such a person
What are some examples of artists moving left to right en masse? Historical precedences for this, specifically? That's what I was curious to know about.
You may characterize the movement I see as small but I don't see the movement ending where it is today. It's gaining enough traction with enough tastemakers and cultural producers that are young enough that it could be the genesis of some broader right wing thing moving forward and that's what interests me, not really in just the small shift that's happened already.
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One possible understated trigger for such developments: COVID lockdowns, and their effects on artists. At least in Finland, whenever there were COVID measures (while other measures were usually pretty light touch, the government often resorted to closing bars, or limiting the bar opening hours heavily, during COVID waves), the artists were one of the biggest constituencies to protest this, organizing several demonstrations against the bar closing hours. Of course the reasons are obvious, bars are where presenting artists perform, and the novelty of "online gigs" and such wore off at warp speed.
While this issue was not as heavily tribalized as in United States, there was still a lot of anger from the artists specifically channeled at left-wing parties for "their parties" betraying them, and I'd imagine that in more tribalized countries there might be even more similar reactions? OTOH many artists were quite happy when the COVID passports were introduced, hoping that they'd at least allow the bars to function, even if they'd lose some part of the clientele (often stereotyped as the most rowdy and problematic part anyway).
I do think the political shitshow behind COVID had a radicalizing effect on creatives but I don't know that it was the lockdowns specifically. I'm sure it screwed over a lot of performers and musicians and people who rely on art shows and in person events but lots of people also simply took a few months off or switched to their side gigs or sold online or got unemployment or did something else to make ends meet, at least in the US. Everyone is going to have a different take on this but from where I was, the thing that irritated me the most about the pandemic wasn't the governments restrictions, which were somewhat minimal where I was, but instead the peer pressure/social politicization and having to navigate the newly emerging social realities of the pandemic. Most creatives tend to be socially awkward or isolated to begin with so I can see how dealing with that would have a triggering effect on many of us. On the other hand I do have more resources than most people in the creative class so I could be isolated from the material concerns that many of my peers faced but I think the ideological implications are more galling and degrading than having to find new ways to make money imo
I did not see much of this but I also have most of this type of person unfollowed or muted at this point, so perhaps I missed it- though anger from the left toward the left is nothing new
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