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Why Conservatives Have Zero Cultural Power
Writing in the pages of the The New York Times, conservative commentator David Brooks closes out a column with this striking kicker:
Conservatives have zero cultural power, but they have immense political power. Even today, voters trust Republicans on the gun issue more than Democrats. If you exile 40 percent of the country from respectable society they will mount a political backlash that will make Donald Trump look like Adlai Stevenson.
It’s audacious, really. I mean sure, non-leftists have been steadily filtered out of education, academia, journalism, publishing, Hollywood, and the arts for so long that most people can’t even imagine it being any different. But zero? Really?
It takes a special sort of ignorance to embrace such a position. Even the residual power of Tarzan, Cthulhu, Middle Earth, and Conan remains a potent force, even in a marketplace flooded with both bastardized derivatives and hostile critiques. Smarmy elites dismissed the staunchly Catholic Tolkien in his lifetime and declared heroic fantasy bad for us from every platform they could manage to subdue. And yet he outlasted all of his detractors to become Author of the Century. And right at this very moment, Jordan Peterson’s number one international bestselling book is a sensation precisely because it is making the timeless wisdom that infuses the Bible accessible to a generation that is starving for answers and common sense.
You can’t make this stuff up. Conservative ideas are powerful, muscular, inspiring, useful, and attractive. And yet somehow… Conservative Inc. seems to have not gotten the memo. How is that?
Well, conservative commentators like David Brooks can of course nab a seat at the round-table discussions in the mass media venues, it’s true. But the price of entry is that they have to help perpetuate the lie that non-leftists have no significant contributions in culture and the arts. That includes not just erasing history, but also unpersoning anyone that threatens that particular narrative. And of course pretending that there are no significant cultural forces emanating from anywhere other than the Left.
It’s absurd. And it highlights just why people like Brooks are pretty well useless to just about everyone. But like the man said, it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. He is where is now only because he cannot imagine anything other than the Left’s perpetual cultural hegemony.
Unfortunately for him and people like him, that position is set to get increasingly untenable as changes in technology cause the old mass media status quo to evaporate.
Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog 
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien has been dead for four and a half decades, Edgar Rice Burroughs has been gone for nearly seven, and it’s been over eight since Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Robert Ervin Howard met their untimely demises.
Their works survived the inept attempts at besmirchment of the resentful and creatively sterile subversives, but in response they have changed tract and co-opted the stories, made gross, irreverent, black-washed parodies of their work on the silver screen to present these men as the face of their cultural hegemony and progressive messages.
Young people today are not reading LotR for Christian allegory or Tarzan for the ideal Man of Nature, they watch glitzy Hollywood “reimaginings” of them that is stripped of nuance and with a pro-diversity tagline slapped on.
And for all your glorification of the insular and self-aggrandizing indie-literature circuit, you have no minds of comparable skill or prestige, and will not for years and years if ever.
A say this not as a black-pill but a reality check. A soil-bed for unconscious Conservative dreaming might still remain, but don’t stand on the graves of men long dead, point to their fully-converged and corporatized estates, and claim that Right-Wing art in the modern day is anything other than a cast-out desiccated sham. It reeks of delusion.
For Hell’s pity, seriously hold up Jordan Peterson as an equal to those old greats!? The agnostic Canadian Libertarian whose singular political stance is resistance to constructed pronouns (side-stepping or acquiescing to Feminism and Multi-Culturalism whenever he can get away with it), whose “literary masterpiece” is an incredible shallow self-help book marketed to fatherless boys? If he’s the best we have, how can you unironically claim we haven’t hit rock bottom.
Hell, even some of these last-century figures don’t really deserve to be called Right-Wing Icons; Tolkien was a simpering Jew-lover, and most of the Inklings wound up heartily aligning with Second-Wave Feminist Activists.
“that position is set to get increasingly untenable as changes in technology cause the old mass media status quo to evaporate.”
Speed the day.
Brooks writes for what he wishes his world was. Leftist control of the bastions of culture over the past decades has led only to declines in these areas. Movies, literature, music, and related scholarship are crippled thanks to removal of the Right and the Left’s inability to create. As independent sources from the Right intrude on these Fortress Europas of Leftist Cultural Domination, I won’t be surprised to see them crumble as people demand what the indies bring, not only to those who remember the past, but to those who see it for the first time in new forms.
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Excellent article.
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