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?
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Notes -
Harry Potter itself was pretty effective. The books themselves weren't all that conservative, but they gave Rowling a ton of influence. I think without her Britain would be significantly more crazy than it currently is.
Tolkien's works were conservative imo on many different levels. They directly promote values like humility, courage, and mercy, rather than sassiness, dysfunction, and unabashed hedonism. Even today the new adaptation, while somewhat woke, didn't have any sex scenes, and had a much more somber tone than any comparable media.
Cathedrals, and the art within them, have been keeping people coming to church for hundreds of years.
I like the idea of fighting at the institutional level too, and don't mean to downplay it. I think the patronage method is probably best there too, or at least underutilized--we're a lot more strapped for talent than we are for money. Somewhere out there is an amazing lawyer, one with the skill to credibly challenge the Civil Rights act or Wickard v. Filburn, who is instead going into business to ensure he can feed his family. Still, probably 99% of art nowadays is produced by far leftists, and that has to have an effect on our culture.
If I had the talent--or if, in the future, I have the time and attention to build the talent--I'd start with good fiction, build a following, then slowly make my works more and more explicitly political. They'd never reach Ayn Rand levels, but maybe a book would be centered around a poor mother and the child she refused to terminate or something. Build a good story like that, build a narrative people can apply to their own lives, and you may save thousands from abortion, and make them heroes in their own minds too. It's impossible to objectively evaluate the impact of either route though.
To be clear, I meant Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which I'm led to understand had a substantial effect towards drawing people into the Rationalist community.
Frankly, it's going to be really hard to convince people on abortion when it's such a tribal issue (and judging by frequent election results, something that's less popular). Any such book would have to be something written with an intended audience that is on the right, unless it's very skillfully done.
I know.
It would be a single brick in the cultural wall. At the level I have in mind, there's not really any convincing going on, or even reading for that matter. The book becomes a movie, a teenage girl watches it, then later when contemplating abortion she feels like she knows someone who didn't get an abortion and made it work well.
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I posted the other reply before seeing this, and I think this answers some of my questions. My own community is chock full of artistically inclined people, it has way more talent than money, but especially more of both talent and money than organizational capacity.
That does not sound like a good idea. I'm on the same side of the issue, I don't even dislike all preachy novels (I liked Pollyanna, actually), and my first thought was "ugh". And unless you're absolutely brilliant, ugh is enough for nobody to ever see your work, no matter how much their pastor pushes it on them at the Christian bookstore. I would have to think longer about why I have this reaction, but it's related to reading "Christian girls novels" in my youth, and pattern matching to that.
Talent as in artistic talent? My point was that conservative artists are far more likely to turn their skills towards safe, reliable careers than progressive artists are. To be honest, unless you have some truly exceptional people in your community, the fact that they're artistically talented and poor to me means they're either not that talented or not that conservative. The people I'd want to fund are those who put their families before their passions.
As far as organizational capacity, again, that's because the good organizers went into business rather than activism (as they should).
I think you're imagining something much more extreme than what I had in mind. The story would star those two, and that would be that; it would otherwise just be a story about some other thing. I just wrote a short story along those lines (actually far more obvious imo) and nobody on Reddit caught on so I'm pretty confident this is doable. It's not rocket science, it's just stories that don't celebrate evil. Tolkien's works would more than qualify if written today.
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