I think a big part of it is that the parts of the right most concerned with culture are all divided on what they want. It's several different factions of LARPers all telling each other what we need to Retvrn to.
*There's the "back to the 90s" crowd that are fine with 90s levels of sex, violence, general vulgarity, and affirmative action tokenism, which inevitably slides into what we have now. Closest to the FanDuel Americans in outlook.
*There aren't as many anymore but there's still aw shucks 1950s/1980s nostalgia people that want consumer culture and suburbs and women staying at home. Fair enough but material circumstances are never going back to the 50s/80s. Basically just 90s people with different decades.
*There's the "vitalist" LARP which thinks every man in the 21st century is somehow supposed to live in the Homeric Greek dark ages and read Nietzsche and very specific parts of Roman history. They sometimes like fantasy and science fiction, but basically only their own personal interpretation of Robert E Howard stories.
*There's the Trad Crusader brigade that want an unrealistic amount of Catholic/Orthodox cultural influence over Protestant America and a return to renaissance painting that won't happen.
*There's various types that grab bits and bobs from everything but have a kind of general 18th and 19th century aesthetic, who think that our elites need to take up fox hunting and ballroom dancing again or whatever. Also not going to happen.
*As you mentioned the much larger bulk of normie Protestant evangelicals just wants Angel Studios and typical kitsch middle of the road platitudes.
It's too much of a mess for any kind of dedicated cultural revival. I think our best bet would be to try to make something new, as difficult as that is.
Great points. Ive alluded to this in other articles. The "back to the 90s" people and the Angel Studios kitsch have the most cachet with our actual voters, unfortunately. the rest only appeal to a small niche.
I’ve said many times that the fundamental advantage of the left is that they all want the same thing. The “right” is ontologically parasitic on the left because obviously there’s a theoretically infinite number of alternatives to egalitarianism.
If every single conception of a right-wing future is an impossible fantasy or completely meaningless, then what do you recommend we aspire towards? Spencer-Hanania-Yarvin gay space fascism? Absolutely nothing at all?
I agree that everything is kind of a LARP and doesn’t seem very plausible, but we have to try for something. And “idk what it is but it’s gotta be new” isn’t a very good answer. You usually have to take inspiration from something old to make something new. The Renaissance was a bunch of medieval people LARPing as ancient Romans. The 19th century was full of people LARPing as medieval knights. Fascism was full of people LARPing as Dark Age warriors. Even communism is kind of trying to Retvrn to an imagined primordial classless utopia. Everyone is trying to Retvrn to something (probably God, from whom mankind has been estranged for ten thousand years). You kind of have to fake it till you make it.
The article and reply aren't even blackpills. They just tell people to focus on what we're good at. I don't think we're going to succeed at the kind of cultural creation people want. Focus on memes and posting instead.
Fair enough. I’m a bit of an eccentric odd duck who actually does like opera music quite a lot, although I loathe the current state of opera. If I were more musically inclined, I would probably try to compose some myself. I do like to write, and sometimes I write libretti for hypothetical operas.
I agree that people should stick to what they’re good at. Unfortunately most people are not very good at most things, and certainly not the finer things. Liberals are really no better, but they put on a more convincing show of pretending to like the finer things. Yet the cultural institutions they get their hands on are usually driven into the ground, and that’s how you get Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus to be run by a Moroccan Muslim immigrant.
The gay space fascism is one I forgot to put in but I think it fits in the BAP/"vitalist" area. That's the accelerationist/sci fi side of the coin. It's also the one I hate the most, so thanks for the reminder.
I agree you have to do something. What I mean is that I think it should be something new where possible. Like you can take inspiration from history or specific genres you like, but try not to make a direct pastiche. There are a handful of right wing authors doing well with this right now and there could be more. "The culture is stuck! It's all reboots, remakes, and sequels! Nostalgia bait!" Yeah but are you trying to write a new story, or are you demanding someone just remake (again) something further back like Shakespeare or Grimm's Fairy Tales or the Muppet Show or whatever?
Whatever kind of culture there is, it should be centered on real actions. Like instead of posting Wikipedia articles and playing Paradox game alternate universe mods where Byzantium won and talking about how based it is to go to church, actually going to church. Then you're not faking it till you're making it, you're just making it. EXIT Group and some others are good examples of real world organizing, and they aren't overly concerned with fixing the culture right this instant; more about getting the right people together for projects and seeing what comes out of it organically.
This is kind of antithetical to the right wing worldview, but I also think people could be more open to different things. Like if someone enjoys opera or dancing you don't have to call them gay. If someone is into anime or video games you don't have to call them a pedo manchild. If someone is into sports you don't have to call them a sportsball meathead. Within reason of course, but it's just very unhelpful when you have people asking what they should do for fun and the answers you get from the "just work at Panda Express" crowd are to play with sticks and mud or watch barges float by.
We could start with Anglo futurism, or just regular stories about regular White families that go through challenges but are not generally humiliated and debased and go from there. I don't understand why we must lurch when our back bench has been frozen out for 10 years straight. There are plenty of writers and actors that would be amenable to it and streaming platforms are no longer fully against it. It's affordable and achievable by those with means and any interest, no need to remake the Aenied or Pascal
I think the real problem here is the selection pressure against high minded conservatism in our current societal structures. It’s always been a silly expectation for Mr. Dixie who loves Beer and drives a shitbox pickup truck to be writing dissertations on Herodotus. Pre-Trump conservative elites regardless of their actual beliefs effectively made themselves liberals by caving in to the left’s framework constantly over time, hence “progressives minus 20
Years.” Trump isn’t an intellectual or even coherently ideological but there’s a time for pure id, and he fit the bill.
I believe the MAGA rap thing is class based among Republican voters. Republican upper middle class voters in places like Williamson County, TN, Forsyth County, GA, Montgomery County, TX, and Utah County, UT are mostly lukewarm on Forgiato Blow and Tom MacDonald. However, the working class part of the Republican base in places like Pike County, Kentucky and McDowell County, West Virginia absolutely love them. Many of the MAGA rappers like Tom MacDonald really focus on the working class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JykMn5uo9W0 . I know it is cringe for some but if it gets these extremely low propensity working class voters to identify with the Republican party then it is worth it.
60 years ago, large swaths of educated left- and right-leaning Americans could quote lines from poetry or insert French words into their sentences. They would employ literature to make their point. Now of course, educated baby boomers are the last gen who have any knowledge of something written 100 years ago or more. And even they tend to quote movies instead of Shakespeare.
"Culture" by its very definition means pop culture - a shared language and lifeway. There is no shared language or lifeway anymore, and no pop culture any more. Everyone is a "geek" for something.
Furthermore, I would say that Classical music is now the purview of Chinese and other East Asian peoples, not Europeans or grey-haired Americans. Just like Christianity is.
No need to play on the deck of the Titanic, just the practical to save the ship🇺🇲
"Art" always has to be defined by cob webbed traditional theater, horns or paint brushes? If it has to be forced, it belongs mostly to history.
America is correct to not care about traditional arts: our men invented the most sophisticated info sharing tech ever (WWW.) There's so much creation of organic art made & shared 'here' daily one couldn't consume it all if they tried ... who cares even what's at the MOVIES let alone the ah-purr-ah 🧐
Memes are better than "The Godfather" but not "Swan Lake" 🩰
I also dislike the leftist domination of American culture (especially the current Woke culture) and would like to see a return to what I consider the glories of the past, but the past I'm talking about is the mid 20th century American popular culture. The 50s, 60s, 70s and maybe a little earlier. I understand that a lot of conservatives probably consider that era to be highly leftist, but I still think it was the high point of American popular music and movies. I also like high culture, but I don't think that will ever become a big thing again.
I agree with Greer's points here, and I think he's actually underselling it. I personally could care less about high culture, and only read books related to race/intelligence, so I'm a bit of a chud myself. And I do not apologize. But even if you're some fart huffer who cares about this stuff, the Kennedy Center does very little to honor the artistic heritage of the west anyway. It's mostly just cultural engineering and hatred directed toward the man whom now controls it and his followers. Expecting him to allow for its continued operation would be like expecting Joe Biden to let a free twitter to remain so if he'd bought it from Elon Musk. This is basic friend enemy and Trump would be a schmuck to do otherwise. This also gets to my point that people who would rather watch porn, get high and listen to tunes who are white have as much right to live in a diversity free environment as the average Shakespeare enjoyer. In fact, a great deal more right because (as Greer rightly points out) the average Shakespeare enjoyer likely thinks that white genocide is a good thing. Again, using your brain some (reading ACTUAL american history, eugenics etc....I like books about racquetball lol) is good for you in small doses. But one of the west's greatest men was Henry Ford (though his repressive views on morality were insufferable) and he said history was bunk. I'd say culture's bunk for the most part too. And this isn't a new phenomenon. It always was. Mental masturbation for people incapable of altering the world around them in any meaningful tactile fashion.
The high arts are the first victim of libtardism in a decadent society. It is what it is. Best to let their relevance fade and develop a clearer sense of “who we are” in the meantime.
If we lived in the theocracy that these anons claim to want then Elijah Shaffer would be fucking executed he is a horrible person but all the big right wing ecelebs were supporting him.
If we can't even sacrifice Elijah Shaffer for our principles then what good are they Seriously Elijah Shaffer ? What good has this mongoloid done for anyone ?
I find all of this extremely frustrating. I'm an unrepentant lefty myself, but I've made common cause with right-leaning friends in the past over the need for cultivation. And so I miss the Buckleys and Blooms and Strausses – such a cut above today's right wing, which is more likely to forbid professors from teaching Plato because he's too gay. https://loveofallwisdom.substack.com/p/legalize-plato
I think in our mostly postliterate society theres big potential for oral history, or long epics that are simple poem structures or could be set to music, or audiobooks. Rap is already a poor version of this, but make something thats more like odes, ballads, and epics that convey a conservative American worldview and virtues
We literally had the Kennedy Center to impose our culture on the capital--and it didn't succeed lol. It's not punching down when we have neither the artists nor the audience for these endeavors, as the article notes.
I think a big part of it is that the parts of the right most concerned with culture are all divided on what they want. It's several different factions of LARPers all telling each other what we need to Retvrn to.
*There's the "back to the 90s" crowd that are fine with 90s levels of sex, violence, general vulgarity, and affirmative action tokenism, which inevitably slides into what we have now. Closest to the FanDuel Americans in outlook.
*There aren't as many anymore but there's still aw shucks 1950s/1980s nostalgia people that want consumer culture and suburbs and women staying at home. Fair enough but material circumstances are never going back to the 50s/80s. Basically just 90s people with different decades.
*There's the "vitalist" LARP which thinks every man in the 21st century is somehow supposed to live in the Homeric Greek dark ages and read Nietzsche and very specific parts of Roman history. They sometimes like fantasy and science fiction, but basically only their own personal interpretation of Robert E Howard stories.
*There's the Trad Crusader brigade that want an unrealistic amount of Catholic/Orthodox cultural influence over Protestant America and a return to renaissance painting that won't happen.
*There's various types that grab bits and bobs from everything but have a kind of general 18th and 19th century aesthetic, who think that our elites need to take up fox hunting and ballroom dancing again or whatever. Also not going to happen.
*As you mentioned the much larger bulk of normie Protestant evangelicals just wants Angel Studios and typical kitsch middle of the road platitudes.
It's too much of a mess for any kind of dedicated cultural revival. I think our best bet would be to try to make something new, as difficult as that is.
Great points. Ive alluded to this in other articles. The "back to the 90s" people and the Angel Studios kitsch have the most cachet with our actual voters, unfortunately. the rest only appeal to a small niche.
I’ve said many times that the fundamental advantage of the left is that they all want the same thing. The “right” is ontologically parasitic on the left because obviously there’s a theoretically infinite number of alternatives to egalitarianism.
If every single conception of a right-wing future is an impossible fantasy or completely meaningless, then what do you recommend we aspire towards? Spencer-Hanania-Yarvin gay space fascism? Absolutely nothing at all?
I agree that everything is kind of a LARP and doesn’t seem very plausible, but we have to try for something. And “idk what it is but it’s gotta be new” isn’t a very good answer. You usually have to take inspiration from something old to make something new. The Renaissance was a bunch of medieval people LARPing as ancient Romans. The 19th century was full of people LARPing as medieval knights. Fascism was full of people LARPing as Dark Age warriors. Even communism is kind of trying to Retvrn to an imagined primordial classless utopia. Everyone is trying to Retvrn to something (probably God, from whom mankind has been estranged for ten thousand years). You kind of have to fake it till you make it.
The article and reply aren't even blackpills. They just tell people to focus on what we're good at. I don't think we're going to succeed at the kind of cultural creation people want. Focus on memes and posting instead.
Fair enough. I’m a bit of an eccentric odd duck who actually does like opera music quite a lot, although I loathe the current state of opera. If I were more musically inclined, I would probably try to compose some myself. I do like to write, and sometimes I write libretti for hypothetical operas.
I agree that people should stick to what they’re good at. Unfortunately most people are not very good at most things, and certainly not the finer things. Liberals are really no better, but they put on a more convincing show of pretending to like the finer things. Yet the cultural institutions they get their hands on are usually driven into the ground, and that’s how you get Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth Festspielhaus to be run by a Moroccan Muslim immigrant.
The gay space fascism is one I forgot to put in but I think it fits in the BAP/"vitalist" area. That's the accelerationist/sci fi side of the coin. It's also the one I hate the most, so thanks for the reminder.
I agree you have to do something. What I mean is that I think it should be something new where possible. Like you can take inspiration from history or specific genres you like, but try not to make a direct pastiche. There are a handful of right wing authors doing well with this right now and there could be more. "The culture is stuck! It's all reboots, remakes, and sequels! Nostalgia bait!" Yeah but are you trying to write a new story, or are you demanding someone just remake (again) something further back like Shakespeare or Grimm's Fairy Tales or the Muppet Show or whatever?
Whatever kind of culture there is, it should be centered on real actions. Like instead of posting Wikipedia articles and playing Paradox game alternate universe mods where Byzantium won and talking about how based it is to go to church, actually going to church. Then you're not faking it till you're making it, you're just making it. EXIT Group and some others are good examples of real world organizing, and they aren't overly concerned with fixing the culture right this instant; more about getting the right people together for projects and seeing what comes out of it organically.
This is kind of antithetical to the right wing worldview, but I also think people could be more open to different things. Like if someone enjoys opera or dancing you don't have to call them gay. If someone is into anime or video games you don't have to call them a pedo manchild. If someone is into sports you don't have to call them a sportsball meathead. Within reason of course, but it's just very unhelpful when you have people asking what they should do for fun and the answers you get from the "just work at Panda Express" crowd are to play with sticks and mud or watch barges float by.
We could start with Anglo futurism, or just regular stories about regular White families that go through challenges but are not generally humiliated and debased and go from there. I don't understand why we must lurch when our back bench has been frozen out for 10 years straight. There are plenty of writers and actors that would be amenable to it and streaming platforms are no longer fully against it. It's affordable and achievable by those with means and any interest, no need to remake the Aenied or Pascal
I think the real problem here is the selection pressure against high minded conservatism in our current societal structures. It’s always been a silly expectation for Mr. Dixie who loves Beer and drives a shitbox pickup truck to be writing dissertations on Herodotus. Pre-Trump conservative elites regardless of their actual beliefs effectively made themselves liberals by caving in to the left’s framework constantly over time, hence “progressives minus 20
Years.” Trump isn’t an intellectual or even coherently ideological but there’s a time for pure id, and he fit the bill.
I believe the MAGA rap thing is class based among Republican voters. Republican upper middle class voters in places like Williamson County, TN, Forsyth County, GA, Montgomery County, TX, and Utah County, UT are mostly lukewarm on Forgiato Blow and Tom MacDonald. However, the working class part of the Republican base in places like Pike County, Kentucky and McDowell County, West Virginia absolutely love them. Many of the MAGA rappers like Tom MacDonald really focus on the working class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JykMn5uo9W0 . I know it is cringe for some but if it gets these extremely low propensity working class voters to identify with the Republican party then it is worth it.
isn't it also generational?
60 years ago, large swaths of educated left- and right-leaning Americans could quote lines from poetry or insert French words into their sentences. They would employ literature to make their point. Now of course, educated baby boomers are the last gen who have any knowledge of something written 100 years ago or more. And even they tend to quote movies instead of Shakespeare.
"Culture" by its very definition means pop culture - a shared language and lifeway. There is no shared language or lifeway anymore, and no pop culture any more. Everyone is a "geek" for something.
Furthermore, I would say that Classical music is now the purview of Chinese and other East Asian peoples, not Europeans or grey-haired Americans. Just like Christianity is.
If you attend any classical music performances in large urban areas the predominate audience is still white Americans.
The mind must be trained to appreciate high culture. Good job mandatory public education!
No need to play on the deck of the Titanic, just the practical to save the ship🇺🇲
"Art" always has to be defined by cob webbed traditional theater, horns or paint brushes? If it has to be forced, it belongs mostly to history.
America is correct to not care about traditional arts: our men invented the most sophisticated info sharing tech ever (WWW.) There's so much creation of organic art made & shared 'here' daily one couldn't consume it all if they tried ... who cares even what's at the MOVIES let alone the ah-purr-ah 🧐
Memes are better than "The Godfather" but not "Swan Lake" 🩰
I also dislike the leftist domination of American culture (especially the current Woke culture) and would like to see a return to what I consider the glories of the past, but the past I'm talking about is the mid 20th century American popular culture. The 50s, 60s, 70s and maybe a little earlier. I understand that a lot of conservatives probably consider that era to be highly leftist, but I still think it was the high point of American popular music and movies. I also like high culture, but I don't think that will ever become a big thing again.
I agree with Greer's points here, and I think he's actually underselling it. I personally could care less about high culture, and only read books related to race/intelligence, so I'm a bit of a chud myself. And I do not apologize. But even if you're some fart huffer who cares about this stuff, the Kennedy Center does very little to honor the artistic heritage of the west anyway. It's mostly just cultural engineering and hatred directed toward the man whom now controls it and his followers. Expecting him to allow for its continued operation would be like expecting Joe Biden to let a free twitter to remain so if he'd bought it from Elon Musk. This is basic friend enemy and Trump would be a schmuck to do otherwise. This also gets to my point that people who would rather watch porn, get high and listen to tunes who are white have as much right to live in a diversity free environment as the average Shakespeare enjoyer. In fact, a great deal more right because (as Greer rightly points out) the average Shakespeare enjoyer likely thinks that white genocide is a good thing. Again, using your brain some (reading ACTUAL american history, eugenics etc....I like books about racquetball lol) is good for you in small doses. But one of the west's greatest men was Henry Ford (though his repressive views on morality were insufferable) and he said history was bunk. I'd say culture's bunk for the most part too. And this isn't a new phenomenon. It always was. Mental masturbation for people incapable of altering the world around them in any meaningful tactile fashion.
The high arts are the first victim of libtardism in a decadent society. It is what it is. Best to let their relevance fade and develop a clearer sense of “who we are” in the meantime.
The recent Elijah Shaffer drama shows it,
If we lived in the theocracy that these anons claim to want then Elijah Shaffer would be fucking executed he is a horrible person but all the big right wing ecelebs were supporting him.
If we can't even sacrifice Elijah Shaffer for our principles then what good are they Seriously Elijah Shaffer ? What good has this mongoloid done for anyone ?
I find all of this extremely frustrating. I'm an unrepentant lefty myself, but I've made common cause with right-leaning friends in the past over the need for cultivation. And so I miss the Buckleys and Blooms and Strausses – such a cut above today's right wing, which is more likely to forbid professors from teaching Plato because he's too gay. https://loveofallwisdom.substack.com/p/legalize-plato
The Super Bowl this Sunday will probably get the usual 100 million viewers or more. I
Think that is still where the average voter will go. Super Bowl Sunday and NASCAR . Maybe a Kid Rock concert.
I think in our mostly postliterate society theres big potential for oral history, or long epics that are simple poem structures or could be set to music, or audiobooks. Rap is already a poor version of this, but make something thats more like odes, ballads, and epics that convey a conservative American worldview and virtues
Hamilton is not the most significant piece of 21st century American culture.
We literally had the Kennedy Center to impose our culture on the capital--and it didn't succeed lol. It's not punching down when we have neither the artists nor the audience for these endeavors, as the article notes.