The "Right-Wing Art" Question

On what "right-wing art" actually means, and the need for a right-wing infrastructure of reception

Every now and then, a debate breaks out in which right-wingers ask, “Why is the cultural world controlled by left-liberals? How come we on the right can’t take control over it?” and then they proceed to consider all the ways in which the tide could possibly turn. In these discussions, they’re seeking the magic formula that will make creativity and inventiveness popularly associated with being right-wing rather than left. They’re trying to figure out how to become the seducers and sirens of the cultivated man during the age of information excess. They’re strategizing to determine how to lodge the dreams into people’s minds that will steer the course of the future. And this debate has been happening for decades now. I first caught wind of it around 2010 in the nascent days of the alt-right, before “alt-right” was an explicitly white nationalist term, and it has sporadically resurfaced again and again for the past fifteen years. It simply won’t go away.

It isn’t hard to understand why right-wingers have been so concerned with the topic. Since the 1920s, Marxists have recognized and discussed the importance of culture in establishing the contours and limitations of what’s thinkable. The respectable “center” position is determined in part by the horizons of the imagination, and it’s the artists and thinkers who play a prominent role in establishing those horizons for the average person. So right-wingers, observing the sheer amount of artistic products understood as left-wing, want to get in on the action. They want to use their art to advertise their dreams, to make their aspirations digestible. And all of this makes sense, so I don’t want to accuse them of starting from an incorrect framework. But I do think it would be worth qualifying a few things before we can properly address the question concerning “right-wing” art in particular.

I. The Asymmetry of the Right and Left

The first thing to be aware of here is that “left-wing” and “right-wing” are not inherently symmetrical concepts. The people who strongly identify with these labels merely want them to be symmetrical, and their behavior betrays an instinctive desire to make it so. “Oh, did this leftist do that? Well, I’m a right-winger, so I’ll do the opposite.” “Oh, so that fascist did this? Well, I’m a Marxist, so I’ll show him by doing the reverse.” As humans, we like symmetry; we’re probably hard-wired for it. But as much as we might want it to be the case, “left-wing” and “right-wing” are not mirror reversals of one another.

The reason for this asymmetry is largely historical. Pretty much everyone agrees that the “left” has been the driving force of history, while the “right” has only represented periodic deviations from it, or feckless attempts to stop it in its tracks. It’s tiresome to hear social justice left-wingers say, “We are on the right side of history!” but then again, much of right-wing intellectualism is spent on pinpointing the exact moment in which the decline of civilization began (maybe it was the student protests of 1968! Maybe it was when William of Ockham invented nominalism!) That right-wingers feel the need to do this indicates that most of them agree that history has not been in their favor. Sometimes you’ll hear leftists say negative things about “history,” but they’re typically criticizing how history is taught to young people. Yes, the march toward the ultimate left-wing utopia has occurred throughout history, but history itself is still something horrible and violent, something from which man must escape, and leftism is the solution to escaping it. With this sensibility, the force of leftism gets to be the winner in all historical narratives, even while leftists themselves protest all the while, demanding that history should never be glorified, and those who teach it should add that nothing short of a total end state of perfection can be considered acceptable. It’s a pretty cushy situation, when you think about it.

So, how exactly have leftists created this situation in which they get to star as the protagonist in the grand narrative of history while right-wingers have consistently played the villain? It’s because leftists essentially stand for something simple and coherent. “Left-wing,” in its original usage, was quite specific and provincial. It meant that you supported the French Revolution, and so you sat on the left side of the president during the assemblies. But as its usage grew, one could eventually read such terms back into medieval and even ancient history. It’s difficult to distill any vague concept into a simple principle, and “left-wing” is no exception, but if you had to do it, you’d argue that the left’s main characteristic is that they believe in equality. Left-wing morality is abstract and conceptual — it’s motivated by airy-fairy ideals concerning how people ought to be treated, and equality almost always acts as the invisible guidepost that determines justice. The desire to tear down hoary old categories like sex, race, class, nations, borders, etc. is done in the name of creating equality. And even when leftists seem to privilege one group over another (like when they overlook anti-Boer violence in South Africa, or celebrate women academically outperforming men in the US), they will ultimately justify themselves in the name of ultimate equality, with these little inequalities presented as mere temporary compensations.¹

The right, by contrast, does not hold equality as its highest ideal. Right-wingers are always observing situations in which there is no objective, natural equality, and thus there should be no equal treatment. But it would be a mistake to conclude that the right holds inequality, the precise antonym of equality, as its highest ideal. The truth is that right-wingers believe in something closer to Nietzsche’s maxim from Twilight of the Idols, “Equality to the equal, inequality to the unequal,” which is a far more exacting principle to uphold. And even then, it would still be a mistake to call that their most closely held value across the board. Because the left-wing has been allowed to act as the force that has continually driven history forward, right-wingers wind up opposing the left for all sorts of different reasons, and many factions within the right will freely acknowledge that they would be considered left-wing twenty or even two-hundred years ago. This lack of a distinct role throughout history means that “the right,” taken as a whole, lacks a distinct and coherent meta-narrative for itself.

Of course, there are plenty of little narratives for the factions among the right, and some are indeed quite potent. Among right-wingers, you have traditionalist Catholics, conservative Protestants, secular civil libertarians, technological accelerationists, anti-Semitic White Nationalists, non-anti-Semitic White Nationalists, Neo-Nazi Satanists, Jewish Zionists, Evangelical Christian Zionists, neo-pagans, eco-fascists, Kaczynskian luddites, conspiracy theorists, QAnon, and so on. And even various groups nominally treated as leftist, such as Salafi Islam or basically anything black people are heavily involved with, would be recast as enemies (i.e., right-wing) if leftists no longer saw them as useful for furthering their own cause. Right-wingers, hypnotized by the appeal of political symmetry, play along with the game and say, “Yes, the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known as Hamas, belongs to a left-wing discourse. This makes sense.”

But on the whole, right-wing thought lacks a coherent meta-narrative. It’s an array of different mini-narratives, with different goals and values treated as the most essential from each faction’s distinct perspective. Right-wing thought, if I can put it simply, is much more diverse than left-wing thought.

Leftists, however, don’t see it this way. When you look at left-wing commentary, you’ll notice that it often portrays exactly the opposite situation. Left-wingers feel that they are constantly in-fighting, quarreling among themselves, and utterly incapable of establishing their own priorities and picking up victories. This isn’t altogether off-base, but then, when they look at right-wingers, they see remarkable unity and coherence, and that is where their confusion reaches its boiling point.

That perception sometimes leads outsiders to conclude that both groups are actually equally diverse but blinded to that fact by their own partisanship. But such conclusions are entirely mistaken. For most left-wingers, leftism is all that they know. They often have a hard time understanding right-wing arguments, most have never engaged seriously with right-wing thought, and for them, “right-wing intellectual” is an oxymoron. Right-wingers are actually much better at summarizing left-wing ideas neutrally and disinterestedly, and some of the most prominent right-wing thinkers are themselves former leftists. By contrast, I cannot think of a single major left-wing intellectual who was previously right-wing for a sustained period of time.² Because leftists have dominated the cultural landscape for decades, they have become victims of their own success, and their own little world is the only thing that they’re familiar with. Right-wingers are much better at understanding leftists than the other way around. Sometimes, they understand leftists better than leftists understand themselves. And if you understand both the left and the right, there is no doubt whatsoever that right-wing thought is more diverse.

This means that being left-wing is essentially being a Christian during the waning days of ancient Rome, while being right-wing is being pagan. It’s the difference between having a clear doctrine and merely opposing that doctrine. It’s not that you lack a doctrine entirely, but if you’re merely “right-wing,” then your own, positively-articulated beliefs must play a subordinate role beneath the mere fact of your opposition to the left. Within the mainstream “Whig” account of history, all the battles haven’t been fought between the left and right, but rather the left and what’s simply left over.

II. What “Right Wing” Art Thus Means

Because of this basic dynamic, it would seem that right-wingers are in a position to say, “Well, whatever happens to be good art is right-wing art. Any art that tells the truth is right-wing. Right-wing art is the art that I like.” After all, the only thing you need to do to be a right-winger is simply not be a left-winger. And if something isn’t overtly left, then it’s right. Right?

That, anyway, is the assumption that came to the surface in a recent friendly debate between Ross Douthat from the NY Times and Jonathan Keeperman (AKA Lomez, the founder of Passage Press) on Douthat’s podcast. Keeperman argued that conservative art is often bad because it’s moralistic, didactic, and excessively sentimental. Douthat asked him for a recent example of what he’d call good right-wing art, and Keeperman responded with No Country For Old Men (2007), qualifying that it wasn’t self-consciously right-wing but was essentially right-wing all the same. His reasoning was that right-wing art simply tells deeper truths about life, and that’s what makes it right-wing. After the interview was released, Curtis Yarvin threw his hat into the discussion on Twitter, agreed with Keeperman, and added that the recent movie Anora (2024) is right-wing simply because right is the absence of left, and the film isn’t leftist. Keeperman then reiterated the claims he made to Douthat in a recent piece.

Douthat isn’t having any of this, however. In the interview, he responded to Keeperman’s definition and accused him of using circular logic. He further explained that some of the streaming TV shows that he likes, such as Star Wars: Andor (2022), are essentially left-wing, while other shows, like HBO’s Girls (2012), are right-wing, even though Douthat clearly knows that Lena Dunham, the show’s creator, is on the left. His reasoning is pretty simple: if something seems to have a message associated with the left, then it’s left-wing art. If something seems to have a message commonly associated with the right, then it’s right-wing art. Douthat’s understanding of how to use these labels is pretty conventional and intuitive.

Now, to be sure, I respect Keeperman’s aims, and I especially appreciate that he doesn’t want “right-wing art” to be didactic and obnoxious agitprop. He’s not naming names, but he’s clearly talking about nonsense like the feature films funded by the Daily Wire, the 2011 adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, and Christian dramas like God’s Not Dead. Moreover, the success of Passage Press would be encouraging for anyone who would like to see more interesting right-wing writing and visual narrative published in English. In the world of alternative publishing, a rising tide can lift all the ships. But I have to confess: Douthat’s reasoning strikes me as far more convincing. It’s still wrong, but it’s at least convincingly wrong. In Douthat’s view, every artistic product is a homunculus — a little guy who shows up in your life to give you one simple message. If the message is “aspiring liberal writers who move to New York are vapid and shallow,” then it’s right-wing, because that happens to coincide with what right-wingers are currently saying. If the message is “authoritarianism is bad because it oppresses innocent people,” then it’s left-wing, because that’s what left-wingers say. And because the artwork is a living being (in this model), we can attribute qualities to it that would typically be reserved only for people; qualities such as “right-wing,” “left-wing,” “patriotic,” “globalist,” “racist,” “anti-racist,” etc. An artwork can be any of these things. And whether you agree with it or not, Douthat’s perspective is much closer to that of the average person than Keeperman’s.

If we are to take Keeperman’s position seriously, then it isn’t even altogether clear what he wants. If he simply wants right-wing art, then I’ve got some excellent news for him: according to his own definition, there’s a ton of incredible right-wing art being made right now! And not only that, but there’s also a ton of incredible right-wing art all over world history! And thus, there really is no problem at all! Good art is de facto right-wing, and there’s a ton of it. Cool. But having established that, I gotta admit: I don’t think that’s what he wants. I think what he really wants is for the media environment to be such where a good artist can say, “Yes, I also happen to be right wing,” and have everyone go, “Oh, OK,” and not really see this as a problem. He doesn’t want right-wing art per se; he wants artists to feel comfortable being right-wing. That’s a laudable goal, and that makes sense. But if all right-wing art needs to do is “tell the truth,” then there’s no need for self-consciously right-wing artists.

If you really think about it, a work of art can be neither left-wing nor right-wing in the strictest sense, because works of art are not people. They aren’t sentient beings, and thus they can’t believe in anything. Whether a work of art is “right-wing” or “left-wing” is therefore only determined in part by the work’s content. The much bigger part of it is the manner in which the work is received, and this reception amounts to a complex process of negotiation between various audiences, critics, essayists, journalists, maybe state-funded entities, other artists, and even the creators themselves. We can call it the “infrastructure of reception,” and it’s important because it’s what ultimately has the final say. And if you’re a right-winger and you want more right-wing artists, then I’ve got some bad news: right-wingers are nowhere near this infrastructure of reception. Since they’re nowhere near it, they can’t explain to people that good art can be (and often is) right-wing, and without their presence in artistic discourse, no right-wing artist who wants to be taken seriously can comfortably announce his politics, whether he’s a neo-Nazi Satanist, a Ben Shapiro-supporting Zionist, or whatever.

Let me give you an example of how this infrastructure of reception might work. Let’s say you’ve got an author who doesn’t explicitly announce his politics, but he seems like he might be right-wing based on some interviews he’s given and perhaps some eyebrow-raising social media activity, and he writes a novel about a girl with anorexia nervosa. And let’s say further that it’s a psychologically realistic novel. Perhaps it contains some psychedelic “body horror” type moments, but it also contains a logical explanation of how she got that way, psychological hardships she’s had to endure, the effects of both the internet and mass media on her disposition, and let’s say the novel even suggests the truth about the serious flaws in her own personality that prevent her from fixing the problem. Yet all the same, the reader gets the sense that it’s a tragic story with a sympathetic protagonist. It’s a novel that tells the truth.

Now: is this novel “right-wing” art? The answer is, it could be — that is, if right-wingers were willing to go to bat for it and make the right-wing case for its legitimacy. But in reality, that probably wouldn’t happen. They’d be too put off by the subject matter. On the contrary, if this novel were well-written and well-received, then right-wingers would mostly complain about it on the internet, if they bothered to acknowledge it at all. Then, leftists would debate among themselves about it, they’d scratch their heads over the author’s spicy comments in his interviews, and some would not hesitate to scramble it up and declare it a “problematic fav.” Some among the left would simply marginalize the author while accepting his work, at least if they decide that it’s really worth preserving. They might say to each other, “Hey, this novel is great, but don’t support the creator, ‘cause he is a fascist bigot,” or whatever, but they would at least have the sense to engage with it. If the author ever had any right-wing message buried within the work, then counterintuitive as it is, it would go unheeded.

But what if we flip the situation? Let’s say you’ve got an avowed left-wing filmmaker who makes a movie about a husband and father who goes on vacation with his family. While eating breakfast with them outside one morning, he believes that they are all about to be killed in a natural disaster, and so, rather than assuming leadership and guiding his family to safety (as his role of family patriarch would dictate), he frantically runs away instead, ostensibly leaving his wife and children to die. Then, when the natural disaster turns out to be a false alarm, he sheepishly walks back and pretends that nothing bad has happened. The rest of the film is spent exploring the wife’s disgust with not only him but herself as well, all due to the fact that she has married a pathetic, lily-livered coward. It is a black comedy, and whatever message it might convey to its audience, it is certainly not a left-wing one.

So, then, same question: is this “right wing” art? Again, it could be. If right-wingers wanted to claim it as such, then it most definitely would. And if left-wingers completely disavowed it, then all the better. But the problem is that the movie I’m describing is a real movie,³ and I’ve only encountered a grand total of two right-wingers who have endorsed it. It occurred on an episode of the relatively obscure Guide to Kulchur podcast. To be fair, other self-styled right-wingers may have discussed the same film without me knowing, but it really hasn’t made much difference. The overall sense that typical independent filmgoers have about Östlund is that he’s a rough-hewn leftist who enjoys satirizing liberal “social justice” pretense, similar to a figure like Slavoj Žižek, and thus his films in no way conflict with his leftism. So, is Force Majeure a right-wing film? Ross Douthat would probably say yes, and Keeperman might agree, but in actual practice, it really isn’t.

The problem is as simple as this: what if you made a right-wing movie, and no one noticed?

Then it isn’t a right-wing movie.

III. Building an Infrastructure of Reception

I’ll start this section with some bad news for artists.

Given that right-wing politics lacks an organized infrastructure to either formally welcome, fund, or even defend the careers of artists who consider themselves right-wing and will assuredly face persecution, I see no reason for any right-wing artist to announce his politics publicly, and I don’t see any promise of that changing in the foreseeable future. In fact, if you are an aspiring right-wing artist and you are reading this, I would specifically advise you not to expose yourself. Just keep your head down. If you’ve got something going on that you really feel can speak to people and touch them on a deeper level, why on earth would you blow that opportunity by limiting your audience to a bunch of back-biting philistines who will respond to your courageous declaration of political allegiance by endlessly judging you, demanding nothing less than 100% flawless obsequiousness, and holding your work to their own ever-increasingly erratic and preciously non-aesthetic standards? Why would you do this? What is the matter with you? You’re a serious person, and you have something valuable to contribute. Think.

Now, for everyone else on the right, I’d like you to be honest with yourselves. Do you actually want “right-wing art”? Really? Because there’s plenty of it out there that’s already right-wing according to Douthat’s standards, and even more (far more) according to Keeperman’s. But it’s not enough merely to have it out there if it’s not actually recognized as such. If you can’t rub your opponents’ faces in it, then what’s the point? You need to make sure they know that, yes, you and friends are stylin’ on ‘em. And the only way to do that is by building up what I’ve been calling a right-wing infrastructure of reception. Without putting yourselves into the conversation and becoming a conduit through which regular, apolitical, and even open-minded left-wing audiences can discover (or rethink) an array of cultural products that you’re interpreting as right-wing, you have conceded all artistic exegesis to the left. And while the art itself does matter most of all, the way it’s interpreted is still incredibly important. “Hermeneutics” is admittedly a big, annoying word, but it shouldn’t ward away right-wingers like arsenic — at least, that is, if they actually want their cultural input to be taken seriously.

Before I conclude with ten pieces of advice to help right-wingers (of all varieties) reach what I think would be a more useful mentality regarding the cultural world, I’ll make a quick disclaimer. Building a right-wing infrastructure of reception requires lots of things I don’t understand, money being the biggest of all. But I’m also a believer in the idea that if you start with the right mentality, then all the pieces of the puzzle will eventually fall into place. So take these as guidelines to help engender the correct attitude regarding the world of culture, since it doesn’t work the same way as with other nuts-and-bolts political matters. But that’s all they are — just guidelines! Simple and innocent.

1. Actually be into artistic creation

Take an art form (try starting with just one), and appreciate what it does aesthetically first and foremost. Does it create some sort of visceral response inside of you? Does it elicit emotions from you that are hard to explain, or otherwise hard to experience? Does it make you feel something? If so, then you’ve picked a good one. Do what you can to understand it technically; don’t simply let it be “magic.” Understand what the artists do to make it. Understand the media through which the art is conveyed. Understand its history. Understand the little details that others miss. Before you get into abstract questions of the work’s political or social implications, try to figure it out chiefly as a material substance and appreciate it primarily on that level. Get into it, develop an attachment to it, let it wash over you, and respect it for what it fundamentally is. Stop paying attention to the news and instead engage with the art, the news that stays new. If you aren’t actually into this stuff enough to gain some serious knowledge about it, then you won’t have much to contribute to any real discussion (although if you are one of these people and simply cannot help it, I do have some advice for you at the very end). This is actually the most important point on the list, and if you take heed, pretty much everything else will follow from it naturally. Art should not function as a surrogate for religion, but you should at least find something spiritually invigorating about it, something that gives you a deeply rooted attachment to it that verges on obsession.

2. Write about art and culture, if you can

Admittedly, not everyone can write, and no one really reads anymore. But the question you’re dealing with here is not how many will read you, but who. Despite the many people going around repeating various microwaved McLuhanisms about how we no longer live in a “literate” era, writing is still the most important medium through which any longstanding contributions can occur. Writing is what provides the skeletal structure for other forms of analysis; it supplies the theoretical vantage point and sets the “script” that other media forms will follow, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Someone will say, “But the left has monopolized this sort of thing through academia,” and this is partly true, since virtually all humanities scholarship is left-wing. But there’s just one problem for them: almost all of it has become depressing and boring. Right-wing analysis, even when horribly wrong, cannot help but be interesting. Right-wingers have the natural advantage.

Now, again, I understand that not everyone can write. Let’s say you have a very nice voice and can’t write to save your life. OK, well, then start a podcast. You will get more attention that way, and you can play a vital role in building up a subculture of some kind. But podcasts are a lot like those Tibetan sand mandalas. They’re quite impermanent; very few people, for instance, listen to old episodes. Though not as impermanent as Tweets or TikTok videos, they generally blow away with the wind. Right-wingers of various groups need more and better writers to represent their own nuanced points-of-view. If you have multiple right-wing books of cultural analysis that engage with each other, and even debate with each other in a mature fashion, then you’re creating a deep, longstanding “conversation” that others will feel compelled to get in on. That is more valuable than flash-in-the-pan success.

3. Don’t worry about if a work of art is “right-wing”

I’ve spent some time criticizing Keeperman’s vague definition of “right-wing art,” but I’ll give him credit for the ultimate point he was trying to leave everyone with, because it was absolutely right. If you’re trying to champion a work of art, whatever you do, do not do so primarily because it is “right-wing.” The whole reason I began this piece with an extended explanation of what it means to be right-wing was to show that “right-wing” cannot be a coherent position outside of its opposition to the left. It’s basically an umbrella term we use for pragmatic reasons, and so if you’re going to embrace an artistic work, it needs to be because it does something deeper than not be left-wing. Keeperman sums it up well:

The moment you begin with the assumption that art must serve politics, even yours, you’ve already forfeited its power. Stop worrying about that. Make it honest. Make it good. The rest will sort itself out.

To be sure: throughout history, art has often served a political function, and some of the greatest masterpieces in world history have been conceived as blatant agitprop. But in this day and age, he’s right.

When you encounter an artist, do not pay too much attention to what the artist says of his own politics. Good artists possess a spark of vitality within them, and they will be inclined to conform outwardly to whatever political orientation promises to nourish that spark. Since the left has been slowly moving toward an attitude of puritanism (and likely will not stop, despite having slowed it down to a jog in the past year), it is your duty as a right-winger to guard that sacred spark and allow it illumine the path forward.

4. Don’t allow the left to determine your preferences for you

This point follows straightforwardly from the previous one, but it’s worth meditating on for just a bit. As I tried to explain earlier, the instinct to create symmetry (even where there is none) often means that right-wingers will see left-wingers attack something, and this will make them say, “Duh, gee, that means I should like it!” even if it’s the dumbest thing ever. The reverse is true as well. If left-wingers enjoy something and give all kinds of left-wing-sounding reasons for it, right-wingers will say, “Duh, gee, that means that this is left-wing and bad!” even if what the left promotes isn’t inherently left-wing at all.

I would say that jazz music is probably the best example of this, because ever since the end of World War II, the critical establishment and the state have both put forth a concerted effort to make it “about” things like liberalism and democracy, and right-wingers have often mindlessly accepted whatever jazz music’s left-wing handlers have had to say about it (Kerouac being a strong exception). But the same could be said for postmodern concert music, brutalist architecture, or abstract expressionism. I personally enjoy some of these things and dislike others, but the truth is, my opinion doesn’t really matter that much. The more relevant question is: are you actually capable of discussing these things intelligently at the object level, or are you simply playing the role of the embittered right-winger, history’s great antagonist, the disgruntled loser who can only say “no” yet has no capacity to say “yes” to anything of substance? This is a matter serious enough to where I would say that if your “right-wing” identity, i.e. your opposition to the left, is all you really know about yourself, maybe you should forget about it entirely and go in search of something deeper.

5. Do not worry about immediate gratification in what you do

We live in the age of the algorithm, and so the pressure is high to treat your engagement numbers as flawlessly objective metrics of success. For this reason, people usually just discuss cultural products made by massive corporations — things likely to attract the largest amount of listens or views. “If I talk about the big important Hollywood movie,” you might think to yourself, “then I will get more attention, and this will prove that I’m doing good.”

But I would urge you to think about this issue differently, and I’ll do my best to briefly explain why. I believe that there are two things in this world that exert an occult influence on world affairs. One is the erotic, which is impossible to assess objectively by any metric (even the responses to anonymous surveys are lies, you know, because people lie to themselves first and foremost). And the other is art, because it is often the most obscure works that pack the hardest punch. Art has a subliminal effect on people. It lies beneath the surface, and it produces consequences both unpredictable and unrecordable. You must understand that an obscure piece of work can create the next Alexander the Great, the next Napoleon, or the next Hitler, and it is your job to extend that work’s reach in whatever minor way you can. It doesn’t matter if the average moron “gets it” or not. If you’re obsessed with engagement numbers, you will lose sight of that fact. Being ignorant of your “success” can only make you more powerful.

6. Experiment with different theoretical vantage points.

If you paid attention to Part I of this discussion, you’ll remember that what’s “left-wing” often changes its meaning based on current circumstances, and therefore, what was left-wing twenty years ago is right-wing today. So, then, how is it that leftists will look back on artworks from the past and claim them as their own? The answer is through various critical theories. During the 1980s, when leftists had fully and completely taken over the humanities, they would mostly produce scholarship that looked back on past works, and they’d whine about them. They’d just whine about how this and that work of art or literature are examples of the colonialist mentality, pernicious class exploitation, or The Patriarchy. But then they eventually realized that they need to get a little bit hipper. Nowadays, most left-wingers recognize that it’s generally wiser to simply declare as much cultural output as possible for themselves. This is exactly what “media literacy” has come to mean.

Now, I think it’s generally a waste of time to be someone who’s “into theory,” and I’m not asking anyone to become a “theory” dork. But it’s good to get into the habit of approaching works in a variety of ways, remaining open to various questions about what informs a work’s meaning, how we might assess it, and so on. You don’t even need to read any literary theory produced in the 20th century at all to do this. People have been theorizing about literature for quite a while. Boccaccio did so in his Geneology of the Gentile Gods. Dante incorporated literary theory into his actual poetry, namely the Purgatorio. Sir Philip Sidney “did theory.” Henry Fielding wrote literary theory into the opening chapters for each book of Tom Jones. Literary and aesthetic theoretical arguments took place between Herder and Hamann. It is generally good to get some sense of these things, since they can help you refine and strengthen your appreciation of great works of art.

7. Recognize the value of satire and irony

One of the most baffling trends I’ve seen lately on right-wing social media is a growing hostility towards satire. This is so bizarre and backwards that I honestly have no idea where it is coming from. If I had to speculate — and I do hate having to get psychological, but here I must — I would say that right-wingers are sensitive to the dynamic I outlined in Part I. They sense that to be merely “right-wing” means to not believe in anything positively articulated, and thus they see satire as a confirmation of this deep-seated anxiety they have about themselves. I have no idea if that’s correct or not, but it’s the best explanation I can come up with.

Look. Pointing out the faults of a corrupt or broken society is certainly not the highest use of a man’s intellectual faculties, but it is a good thing to do nevertheless. The one thing that all right-wingers can agree on is their opposition to the left, and there is no better vehicle through which to express opposition than satire. Mockery, irony, insults, and perverted jokes have been a part of the western tradition from the very beginning, right-wingers are better suited to do it now than anyone, and to reject it off-hand is just mind-bogglingly dumb. Rejecting satire is a worse act of self-mutilation than a thirteen-year-old trans-boy getting government-funded double mastectomy surgery.

8. Recognize the value of the ugly and unpleasant

Another commonplace I see in right-wing discourse is an offhand rejection of any grotesque or upsetting artwork. Many right-wingers seem to be exclusively into the aesthetic of victory and glory. This is all fine, of course, but it also quickly devolves into embarrassing nonsense (I’ll be nice and refrain from giving examples). In reality, one must go through the Inferno before one reaches Paradise. You can’t have Sun and Steel without Confessions of a Mask. I could go on, but this point should be obvious.

9. Read against the grain when the occasion arises, but be mindful of when too much is too much

One good trend I’ve seen among right-wingers over the past decade or so is the ironic appropriation of mainstream cultural figures from left-wing media products, the best example being Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. Although left-wingers lose their minds about how such behavior indicates poor “media literacy,” their own universities have actually created a very nifty label for this technique. It’s called resistant reading, and it involves making a distinction between what a text says and what its author intended, something that much of twentieth century literary theory, going from the New Critics to the poststructuralists, has strongly endorsed. It is a good thing to do. In fact, recently, the blogger garfieldbot did something like this in his review for the Minecraft movie (2025). More of this kind of thing would be welcome.

However, it is important to be mindful not to take this form of reading too far. Often times, because right-wingers want their engagement numbers to remain high, they will try to “read against the grain” in a way that proves too absurd to take seriously. There were people who actually tried to do this with the recent Barbie movie, a pretty straightforwardly left-liberal feminist film with very little room for subversive readings. In a word, it looked foolish. So always proceed with caution and make sure that you are not merely lying to yourself.

10. If you simply don’t “get” culture, make yourself useful in other ways

“Wokeness is dead!” everyone seems to have been crying for the past year or so, ever since Donald Trump won his second election. But I am not convinced that this is true at all. Time does not stop, political activists come and go, and a once-demoralized group can, uhhh, “re-moralize” themselves. When leftists regain power (and they will at some point), I fully expect them to be more aggressive than before, and they won’t direct their aggression towards big corporations and other enterprises “too big to fail.” They stopped pretending to do that decades ago. They will instead be going after vulnerable targets like independent artists, writers, podcasters, and bloggers.

Because people in the world of culture are often terrible at defending themselves, they will need people who have little understanding of culture yet still recognize its importance and want to help. Artists and even art critics will need legal defense funds. They will need angel donors. They will need lawyers. They will need software programmers. They will need people with other forms of technical expertise, and so if that is you, consider lending your services in that way. Though I haven’t touched upon this subject much, it remains true that creating even something as minor as a right-wing infrastructure of cultural reception requires organization skills.

And that’s all I’ll say on the topic for today.

1. To be clear, there are some old-school authoritarian communists (Tankies) and leftists of other sorts who disagree with this characterization, but it’s worth noting that those people are largely rejected by the majority of left-wingers and even considered crypto-reactionaries (to which they will respond by accusing their critics of the same thing). Rather than declare the debate a wash, I’m more inclined to let the common usage of a word dictate its meaning, and so I think “equality” is the best approximation one can realistically make when determining the main principle that the left stands for.

2. I asked an AI-powered search engine for some help, and it came up with two examples: Bayard Rustin and Daniel Guérin. As far as I can tell, the first suggestion is completely wrong, while the second example I’d only label half-true at best. Guérin started his career as an anarchist who endorsed the work of Max Stirner, and Stirner is often considered reactionary, but he was an anarchist nevertheless.

3. If you didn’t recognize it, it’s Force Majeure AKA Turist by Ruben Östlund, and it was even remade into a bad Hollywood movie starting Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus