“Politics flows downstream from culture,” my friend the late, great
Andrew Breitbart was fond of pointing out. This is an insight too many
conservatives have yet to take to heart; many are still dismissive of, or pay
lip service to, the cultural battleground as a critical front. But thankfully, a
few conservatives are getting the message out and leading the conversation.
For example, my friend Andrew Klavan, novelist/screenwriter/essayist
extraordinaire, published a must-read Freedom Center booklet earlier this year entitled
Crisis
in the Arts, in which he
discusses why the left owns the culture and how conservatives can begin to take
it back (which just happens to be the booklet’s subtitle). “There should be
more TV shows and movies and novels,” he writes, which celebrate the
conservative values and themes “currently being excised from the arts by left
wing censorship and so-called political correctness.”
There is Adam Bellow, the man behind the publishing venture Liberty
Island, a platform for conservative writers whose work might not otherwise find
a home in the left-leaning literary establishment. He recently wrote a
counterculture manifesto at National
Review in which he
called for more support for a greater conservative presence in the literary
world. Mainstream fiction writers, he says, benefit from a “well-developed
feeder system” that promotes them, including “MFA programs, residencies and
fellowships, writers’ colonies, grants and prizes, little magazines, small
presses, and a network of established writers and critics.” But nothing like
that exists for writers on the right:
This is a major oversight that must be
urgently addressed. We need our own writing programs, fellowships, prizes, and
so forth. We need to build a feeder system so that the cream can rise to the
top, and also to make an end run around the gatekeepers of the liberal
establishment.
Bellow described the sort of work he hopes to promote at Liberty Island:
“good still triumphs over evil, hope still overcomes despair, and America is
still a noble experiment and a beacon to the rest of the world.” The fact that this
is a need to be filled speaks sad volumes about the current American literary
landscape, even in genre fiction like mysteries, thrillers, sci-fi, et al.
But Tablet’s Adam Kirsch posted an objection to those values: “The problem is not that these are
conservative ideas, but that they are simpleminded ideological dogmas, and so
by their very nature hostile to literature, which lives or dies by its sense of
reality.”
Really? Goodness, hope, and America as the home of a noble spirit unique
in human history are simpleminded ideological dogmas? Are they any more
simpleminded and ideological, or less true, than the nihilism,
anti-Americanism, and moral equivalence so revered by the left? At least the conservative
literary “dogmas” are more compelling to the human spirit than an amoral void.
But Kirsch feels that they are out of sync with reality:
If you are not allowed to say that life in
America can be bad, that Americans can be guilty as well as innocent, that good
sometimes (most of the time?) loses out to evil—in short, that life in America
is like human life in any other time or place—then you cannot be a literary
writer, because you have censored your impressions of reality in advance.
Well, Bellow never said that those things are not possible or that they
would not be allowed at Liberty Island. Of course
life in America can be bad (though it’s better than anywhere else). Of course Americans can be guilty and good
sometimes loses to evil. Conservatives know this – we are realists. But Kirsch is
skeptical that you can be a “literary writer” if you choose to focus on the
positive, if you celebrate the good,
the innocent, and life in America. I believe that you can, but the literary
establishment simply won’t embrace you for it.
That doesn’t mean that conservative literature should read like the novelistic
version of a Norman Rockwell painting. In fact, as Klavan says,
The single biggest mistake conservative
cultural warriors make is this: they expect a conservative culture to look
conservative. It will not… Conservatives should not be afraid to make and
praise art that depicts the worst aspects of human nature as long as it does so
honestly — that is, in the context of the moral universe in which every choice
has its price and every action has its consequences whether internal or
external or both.
In an insightful response to both Kirsch and Bellow, Micah Mattix at The American Conservative wrote that the latter “makes some good
observations… [but] it’s the overemphasis on the political value of supporting
popular culture and the arts that sticks in my craw.” The problem with Bellow’s
approach, Mattix writes, “is that it would most likely lead to ideologically
‘pure’ but bad work.” He wants more conservatives to “write good fiction and
poetry, not in order to win the culture war, but in order to have better
fiction and poetry.”
Ultimately Mattix urges conservatives to reject Bellow’s proposal “because it is not
conservative. It inescapably treats art or culture as a tool, or weapon, in
the struggle for power. This, it seems to me, is a progressive or revolutionary
conception of art.” No one likes to be preached to, not even progressives,
which is why a heavy-handed “Bush lied” message movie like Matt Damon’s The Green Zone bombed despite
being packaged as an exciting action thriller.
The trick, then, is to put aside the ideological jackhammer, focus foremost
on the storytelling, and allow conservative values and messages to arise
organically from compelling tales grounded in an unflinching moral universe. Easier
said than done, of course, but audiences and readers must be – and want to be –
seduced, not lectured. That is the way to a powerful, effective, conservative
art that can reshape the cultural landscape.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 9/19/14)
