Can RW Art Stop Being Cringe?

It’s a meme on the Left that the Right cannot create good art. When asked why, Leftists will usually say that it’s a temperament. They might even go so far as to claim it’s genetic. Conservatives aren’t creative, and for some reason, that seems to be one of the few immutable characteristics Leftists will happily espouse. You can change your sex, but apparently becoming more creative is too far of a stretch.

I won’t beat around the bush here. It’s a stupid meme. Are you really going to posit that all of history produced bad art prior to the 1960s (or wherever you want to draw that line)? Because rolling back the clock a century or two, you’ll find that artists were universally Rightwing. They held views that are simply intolerable to the modern man. Of course, Leftists might say their favored historical figures were secretly gay or liberal or hiding from oppression or whatnot. It’s their way of easing their consciences and coping with the fact that history is decidedly Rightwing.

But the meme that “the Right cannot create good art” sticks because it does in some sense ring true. Just take a look at mainstream Conservative entertainment. Aside from a few shining examples, it’s been a sea of mediocrity and cringe.

Now, I don’t want to single out Mr. Birchum and The Daily Wire too specifically here. It’s not a particularly outrageous thing of itself. I’m sure there will at least be a few gags that can make me chuckle. If I bothered to watch it, I’m sure it would be… tolerable. But this show is emblematic of a larger trend, and it is a good example of everything wrong with the approach mainstream Conservatives have to media and art production.

Indies like to cry out that the problem with Conservative art is funding, and that’s partially true. There are a lot of good artists who deserve the money to make their visions come to life. But there’s also a spiritual predilection that runs through mainstream Conservative media. And that is Conservatives badly want to be Hollywood 2.0.

Was I too harsh in my wording? Perhaps. But this attitude that “we can do a Hollywood except we’re the cool guys” is cringe. It’s cringe because it’s an abuse of what art should be. You’re not trying to be entertaining for entertainment’s sake. You’re not trying to reach for the transcendent or some higher meaning. You made a series long meme where you’re the chad and the other guy is the soyjack.

These Conservatives aren’t making plot lines or characters or art. They’re making essays on why the Left is stupid and passing it off as avant-garde.

And perhaps this would be tolerable still if these essays weren’t filled with Boomer talking points or appeals to a liberalism that everyone knows is dead. The worldview is not commensurate with the situation on the ground. They’re not connecting with tradition or reality. They’re just doing what Hollywood did fifteen to twenty years ago. Trying to create a Family Guy or The Simpsons but Rightwing is a fool’s errand because the America that spawned those franchises is dead.

Both shows’ antics are not cute in an environment where the family unit has all been but destroyed. What does Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson look like in a world that is suffering a serious masculinity crisis? And it’s a meme at this point that many people today cannot afford the house of the squalid yet somehow still middle-class Homer Simpson.

These shows are appealing to a world that no longer exists. There’s no familial, economic, or religious stability anymore. You cannot pretend that everything is going to be same tomorrow, like the next episode of a sitcom. America is in a serious spiritual crisis, and to paper over that is to deny the reality we live in.

Conservative art, if it is to be art at all, has to stare into these realities sincerely. And the first thing to do is to realize that the problem of creating RW art is that it is not a rebuke of the Left. Leave your political grievances for substack essays and journal articles. Hollywood gets away with stamping their boot on their enemies because there’s no alternative, and they have the funding to dress it up.

But we don’t have the time to waste on such nonsense. We’re already fighting an uphill battle for attention, and no one wants to hear your lecture about how you’re the smartest guy in the room. Even if you could put together a perfect formulation of your politics, you still shouldn’t do it because that’s not what art is for. It’s about connecting with transcendent truths and those go beyond the political. This isn’t to say that politics shouldn’t be incorporated into art, only that they should never overwhelm your artistic sensibilities. Scoring points over your enemies is petty. Your gaze should always be fixed on what will make your art better, not your political agenda.

And this is not to say that people need to be writing Cormac McCarthy novels or filming movies so existentialist they’ll make Dostoevsky blush. The spiritual depth of a work is not in its complexity, as so many on the Right fail to understand. John Carter and Conan the Barbarian are simple, but they are also deep in their spirit. They speak to the masculine hero in men, and that’s why they are remembered nearly a century later.

This is not an exhortation to make a thousand clones of Breaking Bad, all uniquely miserable in their own way. This is an exhortation for all art that can speak to the human experience, no matter how childish or silly it may seem. What I want is a scene that produces all kinds. I want another Dostoevsky, yes, but I also want the next Robert Howard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. I want artists of all stripes and colors. I want every genre, and I want artists to invent new ones. It is only then that we’ll have a culture again.

Perhaps it is too easy to cry for these things. And there are certainly many Conservatives who call for better art who do not have skin in the game. With all the time and effort that goes into something so seemingly simple as writing a book or creating a painting or composing music, it’s not just the funding or the long hours or the lack of attention which artists have to brave.

It’s also every one star review or negative comment or even insult to your work. You can’t spend hundreds—if not thousands—of hours on something and not have some piece of your heart in it. And then you have to put it out into the public, and sooner or later, watch someone rip it to shreds.

Now this is not a complaint, this is simply the territory. This is the way things are. I’m not going to ask anyone to be less honest on my account nor anyone else’s. It is only through honesty that your art can improve, and you’ll still need that tough skin for the trolls and the people who’ll hate your work no matter what you do.

While I have many reservations with Mr. Birchum, I will acknowledge the effort and passion it takes to create an animated show. I do not wish to appear as a hypocritical voice, complaining about everything from the sidelines and doing nothing. In this spirit, I will offer up my own methods and strategies for scrutiny. Perhaps this might come across as shilling, but I genuinely do want to have this conversation. I know many authors feel like they’re stepping on eggshells when they try to depict Rightwing or Christian themes. It’s always a balancing act, never being too overt as to turn people away or being so subtle that you might end up compromising your own story.

Think of this section as a spit-balling of ideas rather than advice from someone who’s got it all worked out—because I don’t have it all worked out. I’m dredging in the same mud as any other indie author, just trying to make sense of things in this strange digital landscape we find ourselves in. And if I am cringe, well, I’ll own up to that.

I’ll use Gigaheroes as it’s the more contemporary of my two fiction serials. The premise behind the story was a world where the woke won—reducing all the West to the same third world ruin. There was a brief nuclear war, but by that point the incompetency crisis of the West and the general corruption across the globe meant most bombs malfunctioned. What remains of America is a post-apocalyptic failed state that is utterly broken in spirit. And there’s also Superheroes.

The thrust of the story is not Conservatives making a final last stand, nor about anyone trying to resurrect America as a constitutional republic. It’s about very desperate people living in a shambling corpse of a world that just won’t seem to end. There are explicit jabs and references to the broke welfare state, but I try to keep it nothing beyond a paragraph at a time.

—Adam Mason Ch. 3

I try to place the political in the background as much as possible. Whenever I need to use language to describe Leftist policy, I change it up with new terms so not to anachronistically take the reader out of the experience. For example, racial and sex quotas are referred to only as “high and low” priority. I find modern jargon such as “woke” to not be very helpful. It brings to mind too much of the crude discourse of the internet and the personalities therein.

Characters complain, but I try to the focus on more concrete problems. Adam Mason makes his comments, but he doesn’t have a laundry list of a policy recommendations or even a thesis on how the world got to where it did. He’s a starving hobo, and he sells his phone for a cheeseburger.

—Seattle Vance Ch.5

I wanted to include a plot point about the lying nature of mass media and how quickly it cycles through topics so fast that people can’t remember what happened last week. I think it’s important to always keep in mind that you never want to give off the impression that you yourself, the author, is the one making the complaints. To that end, I made Seattle Vance largely apolitical. He’s not on my side, or anyone’s side really. He’s more interested in completing his job than anything else. It just so happens that he is a criminal.

You can always tell a story is compromised when characters act or say things you know wouldn’t be true to the setting. Ideally, the reader/viewer should never feel the hand of the author. Anything that takes them out of the work should be trimmed down or removed outright.

—Adam Mason Ch. 15

I think that the heart of every story is the exploration of a spiritual question. You’re trying to get at a moment, a piece of reality captured by ink on a page or a picture on a screen. And it’s in pursuit of that catharsis that I write my fiction. I’ll let my audience decide whether or not I succeed, but that’s what I aim for. It’s those questions of finding meaning and virtue that underlie my goals as an author. Every scene I write I try to either capture that, or build the necessary framework in order to capture that.

Having an audience totally enraptured, their full attention on every little detail, I think that’s what artists should strive for. And anything that gets in the way of that purpose ought to be removed. Whatever is Good, whatever is True, whatever is Beautiful, that is the objective. And I think sacrificing that for politics is a terrible, awful mistake.