What is successful right-wing art? I posed that question to Jonathan Keeperman, who runs the far-right publisher Passage Press, on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, and you can tell that it’s a tricky question because he took two separate bites at answering it, offering one response in our conversation and a revised one in a subsequent post on his Substack.
In the first answer he suggested that we should understand “right-wing art” as any art that tells the whole truth about the world, free from the ideological strictures and sensitivity reads imposed by contemporary progressivism. To me that seemed conveniently circular — reality has a well-known conservative bias, therefore any truthtelling art is inherently right-wing — and he tacitly acknowledged as much in his follow-up; there he suggested that the very concept of “right-wing art” might be a category error, since art can’t be circumscribed by politics and the artist’s job is to be a truthteller and let the political implications take care of themselves.
The second answer is the more attractive one for creators and critics, but I don’t find it quite satisfying either. Certainly it doesn’t resolve the tension inherent in Keeperman’s own publishing project, which is trying to break away from the agitprop that often defines right-wing culture in modern America (think Dinesh D’Souza documentaries and Christian message movies), while also trading on the idea that there is special aesthetic value in the forbidden territory of far-right prose, among writers (from H.P. Lovecraft down to Curtis Yarvin) deemed dangerous because of their racism or sexism or authoritarianism.
The same tension shows up in more mainstream quests to fix conservatism’s broken relationship to the higher forms of culture. In his new book, “13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read),” Christopher Scalia is self-consciously trying to educate conservative readers into a deeper appreciation of literary culture — to add more literary fiction to the works of political theory and history that many right-wing readers favor, and to expand the familiar list of novelists beloved by conservatives beyond “Lord of the Rings,” “Atlas Shrugged” and maybe “Brideshead Revisited.”
In doing this he’s aware of the risk of instrumentalizing the works he’s celebrating, and so he cautions that “any artist who elevates his political point above the techniques and elements of his craft is creating propaganda, not art.” But he’s still urging people to read Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott and P.D. James because they illuminate a particular philosophical or ideological perspective on the world, not for the sake of their artfulness alone. Which leaves open the question of whether conscious philosophical or ideological motivations can themselves create particular artistic value, rather than yielding inevitably to propaganda.
I think the answer has to be yes — that the concepts of “successful right-wing art” and “successful left-wing art” are both meaningful descriptions, not just category errors or excuses for agitprop, insofar as both “right” and “left” perspectives on the world capture aspects of reality that can be non-propagandistically portrayed.
So when we talk about successful right-wing art, we’re talking about art that conveys some aspect of reality that is recognizably conservative and yet also recognizable even to a left-wing reader as true to life.
To borrow one example from Scalia’s book, I think V.S. Naipaul’s novels and essays about post-colonial societies clearly pass this test: Their fundamental attitudes are reactionary but the realities they depict are undeniably part of the truth about the world, and the serious left-wing reader can deny the completeness of the portrait while still conceding that something real is being conveyed.
And the same goes for the conservative engaging with successful left-wing art. In my conversation with Keeperman, I briefly mentioned “Andor,” the Disney+ “Star Wars” series about the beginning of the rebellion against the Empire, as an example of pop culture that’s explicitly leftist in its analysis of systems of oppression and its antifascist vision, and also very successful — especially relative to almost every other recent “Star Wars” product — in making its science-fiction world seem realized, persuasive, true. (Not coincidentally the creator, Tony Gilroy, is also responsible for one of the best left-wing movies of the 21st century, “Michael Clayton.”)
Part of this truthfulness reflects the show’s willingness to complicate its ideological message by portraying the potential excesses of radicalism as well as the evils of imperial oppression. You can’t make a case for the Empire out of the material in “Andor,” exactly, but you can see the ways that a revolutionary impulse might come to grief.
In a similar way, a great conservative work like “The Lord of the Rings” also sometimes complicates or subverts its own reactionary themes, allowing its left-wing admirers to find points of engagement. As Gerry Canavan writes in a recent essay for Dissent, for Tolkien’s left-leaning fans “there is always another loose thread to pull on, another unexpected possibility to consider.” Even when a straightforward reading of the story seems traditionalist or patriarchal or otherwise right-wing, he suggests, the framing of the books as a retrospective history written by the victors means that you can read them as a left-wing historiographer would — as “a deeply contested historical narrative based on extremely incomplete records and a long and polarized debate.”
But with that said, the reader or viewer who loves a work in spite of disagreeing with its politics shouldn’t just be looking for opportunities to pull the story back toward his own way of looking at the world.
Instead the left-wingers who love Tolkien should also recognize, in their powerful reaction to a tale of ancient monarchy restored and supernatural evil defeated, the possible existence of truths outside their favored system. And likewise for the conservative who appreciates “Andor” or any other left-coded work of art: That appreciation need not yield ideological conversion, but it should kindle an unexpected sympathy for the left-wing perspective on the world.
That kindling is the test of politically themed art. It fails if its vision looks like just so much cardboard to anyone who differs with its worldview. It succeeds, not through conversion, but through unsettlement: the sense that the author or filmmaker is telling you something you didn’t expect to hear, that you don’t necessarily want to accept, but that still somehow has the bell-like ring of truth.
Breviary
Ben Lindbergh on what “Andor” isn’t missing
Serre Verweij on what we know about Pope Leo XIV
Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit on the age of A.I.
Ed West on the thrill of anti-fascism
Scott Alexander, Curtis Yarvin and Richard Hanania on reaction and populism
Michael Ledger-Lomas on William Morris
Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times With Ross Douthat.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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