Will Conservatives Make Great Art Again?

A Meditation on the New Right

Salvador Dalí, The Enigma of Hitler, 1939, Oil on canvas

Theodoric abruptly drew his broadsword and struck Odoacer with such ferocity that it cleaved him from shoulder to thigh in a single slice. “The wretch cannot have had a bone in his body,” he joked, standing over the barbarian King of Italy, the man who put to bed the Western Roman Empire. Carved to a gory stump.

Odoacer had joined Theodoric that evening for a banquet intended to celebrate a truce between the two Germanic warlords. It was a trap, and after Odoacer was dispatched, Theodoric slaughtered his family and friends in ways that would make Machiavelli blush. Yet what followed this bloodletting might surprise you. Theodoric did not raze Italy. Though violence and perfidy bookended his reign, he oversaw a period of prosperity and stability from his court at Ravenna that was unequaled until the time of Charlemagne. He launched an ambitious infrastructure program, constructing new road networks, refurbishing hospitals, and building public squares and churches, his crown jewel being the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, which still stands today. He did all this while encouraging comity between Romans and Germans.

But perhaps the most fascinating part of Theodoric’s rule was that, as he rejuvenated the cities he conquered, he also provided generous support to historians and philosophers and encouraged the revival of classical learning. Theodoric is generally considered to have been illiterate. He didn’t sign his own name without using a stencil. So why would a barbarian who never learned to read or write enjoy hearing poetry read?

Theodoric popped into my head when I was considering writing about art and, more specifically, “right-wing art” — and the new right’s claim to the status of the cultural elite. Something about a barbarian amid the ruins of an empire, who felt in his bones that cities with walls but without culture are not cities at all, felt relevant. It certainly seems like we’re living through a period of starting over, one that raises a lot of questions about the relationship between art and politics. There has always been, and always will be, a connection between the two, but in a very different sense than “left” or “right.” Seeing that requires revisiting terms that we take for granted.

This is a question that I’ve grappled with as someone who searched for meaning in politics — yes, you may laugh — before taking the “forest passage,” which, for Ernst Jünger, was the avenue that empowers individuals to resist spiritual compromise. Engaging with art is essential to the success of the gamble against the Leviathan because art is fundamentally an expression of the soul, which is why there are persistent archetypes of the good and beautiful that appear throughout history in our myths. “Myth is not pre-history,” as Jünger put it, “it is timeless reality which repeats itself in history” and bubbles to the surface in art. The poet — the artist — “helps people find the way back to themselves,” by revealing to us through the muses what ideology and technology would attempt to conceal and distort.

It is only in this sense that art is inherently political, insofar that man, as Aristotle said, is a political animal whose telos is the polis and whose ultimate goal, eudaimonia, is truly attainable within a city — the human community. Art, like the city, is rooted in our nature because only humans are endowed with the generative power to create using our imagination. Aristotle pinpoints the source of poetry — as well as other forms of art — in our instinct for imitation. For humans, mimesis is not only a means of acquiring knowledge but a source of intense pleasure that comes from the exercise of intellect. Art provides us with representations of people as “better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are,” and it is through contemplating these representations that we learn and infer and come to experience those sublime moments of epiphany, the realization that what we are witnessing, hearing, or reading reflects some fundamental truth about being.

Divorced from these things, art fails or becomes something else, like ideology or propaganda. There is not a single political camp in America that has avoided falling into that punji pit, least of all the radicals.

Camille Paglia is right that, “Marxism reflexively reduces art to ideology, as if the art object has no other purpose of meaning beyond the economic or political” in the basest sense. She’s also correct that the fine arts today have been marginalized, in part, because “artists are too often addressing other artists and the in-group of hip cognoscenti,” while harboring a disgust of the general public. In the hands of the hyperpolitical left, organs of taste-making have become vehicles for channeling grievances and agendas against a vast and ever-expanding demonology. Art is turned into a thumbed nose and a cudgel against the mores of the vast middle swath of Americans. As a seminal example of hubris and strategic error, Paglia cites Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ of 1987: a photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in a beaker of Serrano’s urine. It won an award from an art gallery that was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. The public felt that it had effectively subsidized the degradation of its own values, and the art world rushed to defend Serrano amid the outrage out of partisan loyalty. The endowment’s budget suffered cuts in the aftermath.

Other high-profile incidents would cement a tarnished view of the arts in the minds of Americans, as the institutions intended to steward them darkened and ossified into detached sinecures.

The right is not faultless in this story. Paglia asserts that, “American Puritanism lingers in conservative suspicions about the sorcery of beauty.” That tendency recently expressed itself in a school district that censored the Virginia flag and seal due to its depiction of a partially nude Virtus, the Roman deity of virtue and bravery. Of course, the left has its own puritanical preoccupations, its own form of prudery, though stemming from different concerns and fixations. Nevertheless, though they often extol the preservation of fire, conservative paeans to the grand cultural inheritance of the West are all too often contradicted by their actions, which have evinced indifference or outright hostility toward art. And when the right does try its hand, it almost always makes the same error as the left in attempting to create explicitly political works that come off as gauche and are as subtle as steel wool. See The New Norm, a brutally unfunny, anti-woke animated sitcom whose pilot featured a cringeworthy Elon Musk cameo. Every scene in the roughly three-and-a-half-minute pilot consisted of force-fed gags seemingly gleaned from the memes that swirl around boomer Republican Facebook, and the result is a sensation akin to being subjected to the Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange.

So what are we to make of the new right in contrast to the others? It may be useful to begin by defining terms.

Whereas the Old Right arose in reaction to the New Deal, the “new” right took shape in the 1970s in response to what Paul Gottfried characterized in The Conservative Movement as “a betrayal of purpose.” The villains — the true villains — were the “moderate Republicans who betrayed the interest and principles of the great majority of ordinary Americans.” Just how well it delivers for ordinary Americans is an entirely different matter. But it is for this reason that the new right, in all its forms, has always been more populist than conservative, driven by fear and resentment of the “establishment” (even when it is in power and, therefore, the establishment), and marked by a perennial sense of paranoia. It has also excelled at promotion and politics as a petty spectacle, verging on self-destructive.

It is easy to see, then, how Donald Trump is a fitting figurehead.

The earlier phase of the movement leveraged religious broadcasting and populist radio to spread its message; the current variant primarily relies on social media and the internet, with which it is inextricably intertwined, for better or worse, and increasingly worse. While its membership is still largely Christian, there is a notable non-Christian or even anti-Christian contingent at the head of the movement, which views religion as in fatal decline or an obstacle to achieving its goals, which require a ruthless application of power and will. For all its anticommunism, it also often resembles, to quote James Burnham, an “inverted, cut-rate Bolshevism,” and, indeed, some of its members self-identify as Leninists.

Today’s strain runs up against and occasionally overlaps with the alt-right in its rhetoric and ideas, but prominent figures associated with the alt-right are notably critical of it, viewing the new right as essentially unoriginal, intellectually compromised, or incoherent. The latter point is warranted, given that the new right, in its current form, is based not on principles or convictions but on the personality of one man.

Now, the new right claims to offer an alternative to the hyperpolitical left and an older, uninspired conservatism that suffers from philistinism. In an essay on the topic, Jonathan Keeperman, the head of Passage Press and a key figure on this wing, leaves little to disagree with on the surface. He writes that “politics and art are NOT the same thing,” and that “to apply ideological labels to art is a fundamental category error.” That’s true, and he adds:

We don’t want to make the same mistake the left did by insisting that art satisfy our political priors. This will distort our creative undertakings in all sorts of ways that will reduce the quality of art and therefore reduce its cultural power (and therefore its political power). Instead, all a new cultural right has to do is tell the truth.

By “truth,” Keeperman means essentially artistic integrity. That is, if the work is true to itself, if the artist makes authentic choices, then it is good and, therefore, the kind of thing the right can get behind. Again, it’s hard to disagree with this ringleader of the new right. The problem is with the rest of the circus, which does not really share his view and is, in many ways, the mirror image of the left while also guilty of the same faults it finds in the conservatives it accuses of philistinism. Take, for example, Zero HP Lovecraft, another key member of this camp who provided his own supplement to Keeperman’s ground rules:

[Keeperman] talks about how conservative art is bad in part because it always tries to smuggle in ham-handed prescriptive moral preaching, and this almost necessarily destroys art.

Art must tell the truth, yes, but there is so much low hanging fruit right now. The culture yearns for apolitical stories that meet a few simple criteria.

No gays
No minorities
No liberated women or girl power
No mawkish self pity from male protagonists
Implicit and expected heterosexuality from all characters

Art, according to Zero, must tell the truth about human experience and avoid politics by excluding whole categories of human experience for political reasons.

This thinking is no different from the ideological checklists used to exclude and vilify straight white men. Adhering to it would require tossing out some crowd favorites of the right, such as Starship Troopers with its Tagalog-speaking Filipino lead Juan “Johnny” Rico. Robert A. Heinlein, a staunch anti-communist, would have failed Zero’s purity test. So would Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian, for the sin of strong female characters and for encouraging the writer C. L. Moore. That should come as no surprise, considering Howard was primarily raised and intellectually nurtured by his strong-willed schoolteacher mother. Not even Keeperman could be forgiven under the Zero rubric, considering that Man’s World, a magazine published by Passage, once featured a racy centerfold with a formerly transgender model.

Would we even have satire anymore? Could we still have writers like Houellebecq? It is profoundly ironic that the new right has struggled so mightily against the left just to become an inverted facsimile of it and driven by a similar kind of stultifying resentment that, left unchecked, will lead it into the same traps. Maybe that’s inevitable.

Then there is Curtis Yarvin, another light in this camp, who chimed in on the discussion Keeperman started by insisting that Anora is a “right-wing movie” because it is devoid of “sentimentality.” Setting aside the assertion that Anora is a “right-wing movie,” the claim about sentimentality is so strange that it seems affected, a put-on to impress the denizens of Based World who demand a steady drip of nothing but the hottest takes, even and especially if they’re divorced from reality, for reality has a habit of defying the kind of lazy categorization that elicits plaudits from herds of right-wing individualists who need to be told what and how to think about art, unlike left-wing collectivists.

If we were to download the anti-sentimentalist programming, we’d be forced to toss out novels like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a work that took shape after the author had a son, John Francis McCarthy, late in life. The idea for the book came to him one night as John slept and McCarthy looked out of his hotel at a city and imagined it in ruins, the world ending in flames. It possessed him so much that he got to work right away, drawing inspiration for the conversations between the man and the boy in the book from his own discussions with John. It is a profoundly tender story of survival in the face of hopelessness; not only is the planet dying and ravaged by marauding cannibal rapists, but it is unclear whether things will ever return to normal. It is Byron’s poem “Darkness” in the form of a novel, a story about surviving when there is nothing left to live for — except for the love between a father and a son, a father who, like Sophocles’ Antigone, forgoes the animal instinct of self-preservation in the service of a higher law. “If he is not the word of God God never spoke,” says the father. Now, that is sentimental.

A proper Based World telling would have had the father eat the son with all the resolve of a Nietzschean vitalist to consume the weak and join the packs of cannibals or, if he couldn’t make the cut, their eunuchs, if only for the lulz. And that is generally the rebuttal to any criticism: we are just thinking aloud, we’re not being totally serious, it’s just a joke. That is to be expected, given the relationship between the new right and trolling, and I’ve been guilty of it myself. But at a certain point, the endless provocation for the sake of provocation, the inane chaos, the snobbery paired with purity tests that meet criticism with hands raised (“it’s a joke”) becomes tiresome and unoriginal. Indeed, its attempts at being avant-garde often seem like mere piggybacking and territorialization. McCarthy is one of the authors favored by the new right, who sees their views reflected in his work — when it suits them.

Another example can be found in their use of Jünger. The new right’s interest in the German veteran and aesthete is largely relegated to his earliest nationalist phase. Jünger becomes the model of the “sensitive young man,” born before he could use a smartphone (though he anticipated it) to tweet sonnenrad edits and Hitler memes. What’s missing from this portrait is the fact that Jünger despised the Nazis as low and vulgar and would likely have hated much of the new right for the same reasons. He published his earliest, albeit indirect, criticisms of Hitler’s regime in The Adventurous Heart. Jünger’s son, Ernstel, was arrested a few years after its release for openly criticizing the regime and assigned to a penal battalion that took him to the Italian front, where he was shot and killed. “Ever since childhood, he strove to emulate his father,” Jünger wrote in his diary. “Now he has done so on his first try, and truly surpassed him.” He went to his grave blaming himself for Ernstel’s death, believing that his son had inherited his defiant character.

Much of Jünger’s life would be dedicated to non-political, literary, and philosophical pursuits, which I believe the new right would call “cucking.” A hero of the Great War, yes. A luminary who dissented from power when it could have cost him everything, yes. But he was not in possession of the supposed vision the new right avant-garde attributes him. To truly please them, he should have been loyal to Hitler, his son’s death, and the unpleasantness of Nazism being merely the price of admission to Agartha. Jünger didn’t trust the plan. He was too sentimental. He should have kept posting, like Costin Alamariu, a new right podcaster and writer sometimes known as “Bronze Age Pervert,” did on January 6, 2021, when he encouraged Trump to overthrow the United States government. When Trump stayed his hand, Alamariu declared that the once and future president deserved all the wrath of his enemies for failing to change history, only to later come crawling back to the Donald as his most loyal aesthete. If only Jünger had the intellectual courage and intestinal fortitude of our avant-garde.

I’m kidding, of course. The point here is that a movement that is willing to selectively borrow from a creative like Jünger for political purposes cannot be said to be truly concerned with authenticity and artistic integrity. Goebbels also took a great interest in Jünger the Nationalist but dismissed Jünger the Artist as producing “just ink, literature.” Politics, from the right or left, has no use for the numinous, little regard for Jüngerian “small models of another way of seeing things.” Goebbels did not need the war hero’s powers of crystalline perception or his diaphanous dream-visions when they were not in the service of his cause. Then, it was all mere art, “just ink.” What he wanted from Jünger was a patina, a brilliant veneer of symbols that validated the political project, which is the function that art for the new right serves today.

I’m not arguing the new right is “literally Nazis,” but rather that it suffers the same boring problem that most movements do: myopia. Even radical politics become banal, perhaps more so than regular old politics, given that it is impossible to keep up the novelty of transgression. Some might argue that this is a kind of lamentable but necessary hygiene. However, it just looks like an old man yelling at the TV to everyone else.

Like the institutional left it rails against, the new right believes it is more important to be perceived as the cultural elite than to create culture, which is why it values the notion of ideological hygiene, keeping people in line through constant hectoring and petty litmus tests. Yet there is an obvious contradiction here — the Jünger problem. It was an issue for the left; now it’s a problem for the new right, which owes much of its success to the mistakes made by the left, mistakes that it seems intent on replicating.

This may be the part where I’m supposed to say that it’s not all bad, and it’s not. The zeitgeist now is more open than it has been in a long time, but that arguably has more to do with the overreach of the hyperpolitical left, its imposition on fellow travelers and liberals as much as conservatives, than the genius of the new right, whose most visible cultural products are “MAGA rap,” crypto scams, and memes. Passage has commendably published handsome reprints of Howard (I own a set, and I am not prepared to strike it from my library over his transgressions of the rubric) and a handful of original works, but it seems less focused on those things than its political mission. Any publishing outfit affiliated with this movement would struggle to strike the right balance. The difficulty is worsened by the fact that Trump seems more intent on gutting the arts than reforming them, even as the new right begs for patronage. It is worth noting here that Paglia, who enjoys credibility on the new right, has said that “no genuinely avant-garde artist should be asking the government for support” at any rate.

Many of these problems indeed have less to do with individuals than the nature of the movement itself. If there is an art form the new right mastered, it is shock — the shattering of taboos and iconoclasm of idols, and not just those of the left.

This makes sense for a movement that has such an intimate connection to the internet and aims to appear youthfully rebellious and irreverent. But it comes with a serious drawback: you eventually run out of sacred cows to slaughter, idols to smash, and offense loses its sting. There are also limits to performance art and shock value. Would Alamariu actually put down the microphone and join a rebellion? Would he live up to the image of the militant artist that he projects? The Japanese poet Yukio Mishima did. He committed to the bit. But he didn’t have a radical podcast to maintain and therefore had less to lose.

Even the worst slurs lose their potency with enough use and go limp in the hands of the poster. Nothing that people like Alamariu or Zero could say would ever top Kanye West releasing “Heil Hitler” to the masses, which itself seemed strikingly trite upon its debut, at least to those of us whose souls have already been poisoned by the internet. Open Twitter and it will not take you long to find a video with Nazi symbolism slipped into clips from Star Wars movies, anime, and random TikToks, overlayed with electronic music surging against female vocals. The effect was startling in 2015. Not so anymore, especially with the knowledge that it’s coming from older Millennials and Gen Xers who want to strike a chord with Gen Z.

Pay attention to online dynamics long enough, and you will notice younger radicals attacking prominent new right figures, accusing them of being subversive, controlled opposition, effectively turning the movement’s rhetorical weapons against it. For example, it is not uncommon for people on the new right who post Hitlerlian content to be accused of being secretly Jewish by the next generation of the hard right or demeaned in some other way for being “old” and “washed” by people who are just a hair under thirty. That’s the trouble with shock and youthful rebelliousness: someone will always upstage you, be more unhinged, and age comes for us all.

The medium in which the new right thrives is, if anything, counterproductive in this sense. The speed that virality affords is undoubtedly a political asset. However, the internet isn’t known for having a salutary effect on attention spans, and there is also the outsourcing of judgment to the virtual hive mind, in which individuals surrender their own faculties of perception to approved nodes of authority. Its relationship with technology is Faustian in more ways than one; see its alignment with billionaires like Elon Musk, who advocates for the destruction of all intellectual property law and has incentivized the promulgation of brain-destroying content on his platform, the hub of new right activity. Such a move would decimate creatives and allow tech overlords to drain the collective psyche of the human race at no cost or consequence. No serious creative movement could countenance such an existential threat. And yet all Musk has to do to placate the new right, for now, is let them post the n-word and toss out a few morsels of attention, which usually translates into boosting the worst forms of political slop. Yesterday’s stale shock content. How any of this is good for art is a mystery, but it highlights both the lack of independence of the new right and its potentially fatal overreliance on digital mediums.

The good news is that there are creators out there who are singularly dedicated to rebuilding from the rubble of the empire. They’re taking seriously their charge and aren’t waiting around for approval or political marching orders.

On my desk is a copy of Heavy Metal, an illustrated magazine founded in 1977 that raised the comic to high art. It was recently relaunched on Kickstarter after a hiatus, smashing through its pledge goal of $5,000 and raising $782,989 on that platform and a total of $901,491, which I take to be a good indicator of interest in compelling storytelling. At its zenith, it printed illustrations from creators such as H. R. Giger (Aliens) and Frank Frazetta (Conan). Mine has Frazetta’s “Swordsman of Mars” on the cover, inspired by John Carter. It includes a series called El Mercenario by Spanish artist Vicente Segrelles that follows a nameless hero on his adventures. Segrelles paints every panel in oil, a grueling and time-consuming process that most would not dare undertake. The results are stunning scenes of fantasy that offer whole new worlds beyond dialogue.

The magazine became an institution due to its willingness to experiment with style and subject matter, and it did that because it was concerned, above all, with the craft of story — with mythmaking. That is why the ripples of its influence shaped science fiction cinema as we know it today. It’s also why publications like it will endure, providing the foundations of other works, and its stories will continue to inspire long after people have grown weary of discussions of “right-wing art” and the demands of a cultural elite that does not create culture.

What will the new right leave behind before it loses, as all political movements must? Will it produce its own McCarthys and Ezra Pounds? Will it even leave ruins for people to recognize?

There’s never been a better time to engage with the arts — to patronize creators and create something yourself if you’re so inclined. There is no cultured warlord on our side, but we can all play a part in laying the foundations for something new without obsessing over purity tests that miss the point and onanistic put-ons by people who insist on being treated as the new cultural elite because, well, they say so. In reality, if there is such a thing, it is decentralized, not just geographically but across the political spectrum. What the new right seems to have in mind is consolidation and the subordination of art to political imperatives. Power for the sake of power, and art for the sake of an agenda just as threatening to individual sovereignty as the hyperpolitical left.

There is a passage between the two extremes, a place where flourishing happens in contact with the numinous and sublime. The challenge of our time is holding the way open for ourselves and others by avoiding the siren songs of partisans for whom art is merely a battering ram.

Pedro Gonzalez is a writer. You can find his work at readcontra.com.