maybe good fodder for weekend deep-dive thread?
from ross douthat's op-ed:
from ross douthat's op-ed:
from adam bellow's original essay:Earlier this month, Adam Bellow wrote a cover story for National Review calling on conservatives to contest the terrain of American culture more fully by investing more heavily in the arts — up to and including including “writing programs, fellowships, prizes, and so forth,” together with new ”production and publishing companies and distribution platforms for music, film, and other forms of conservative-themed entertainment.” (Bellow has founded his own imprint, Liberty Island, dedicated to publishing fiction with conservative, libertarian, and “contrarian” themes.)
Out of the many interesting responses to his argument, I was struck by the partial convergence between NR’s Jonah Goldberg and the literary critic Adam Kirsch, who both argued (albeit in different ways) that Bellow’s essay overlooked how much room there is already for conservative themes in the pop and highbrow arts. Goldberg, focusing on mass culture, pointed out that Hollywood’s movies are often less left-wing than Hollywood’s actual politics (more pro-military, pro-family, queasier about abortion, etc.), and suggested that the entertainment industry knows at some level that if its stories don’t “tap into something real about the human condition, they will fail” — which means that they have to encompass conservatives insights and ideas even when their creators are reliable liberal partisans. Kirsch, meanwhile, argued that the conservative “temperament” and attitude toward reality is ”in fact a major strain in contemporary American literature,” visible in works by authors like David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith, or Philip Roth and Bellow’s own late, famous father … and he accused Bellow fils of seeking something else, something fundamentally un-conservative — a fiction infused with “simpleminded ideological dogmas,” which are by “their very nature hostile to literature, which lives or dies by its sense of reality.”
from alyssa rosenberg:The Left has always demonized conservatives, and many of my authors have been subject to that kind of ugly treatment. Those who cannot win an argument often fall back on ad hominem attacks. In the past we could ignore such attacks — indeed, they often worked in our favor. But lately they have taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Those who dissent from the prevailing liberal dogma are quickly branded as extremists and declared to be bad people. Do you support the traditional view of marriage? You’re a homophobe who wants to deny equal rights to gay Americans. Do you question the economic benefits of raising the minimum wage? You are a selfish Scrooge who hates the working class. Do you want America to establish control over its borders? You hate hard-working immigrants who just want to enjoy the American dream. Do you believe a human fetus has legal and natural rights? You are a misogynist who wants to control women’s bodies. Do you support the death penalty in certain cases? You’re a heartless savage no better than the killers themselves, according to Charles Blow of the New York Times. Do you oppose any aspect whatsoever of Barack Obama’s transformative agenda for America? You’re a racist. Racist, racist, racist!
This is a bare-knuckled attempt to enforce an ideological orthodoxy by policing the boundaries of acceptable speech. The methods used — anonymous accusers, public shaming, forced apologies, reeducation programs — come straight out of the Stalinist playbook, and they are not only shockingly illiberal. They are shockingly effective.
from rod dreher:So in the spirit of the friendly opposition (and as a potential reader and reviewer of the books Bellow hopes to inspire), I hope Bellow will not mind if I offer a little advice to conservative writers.
Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard laid down a set of rules in the first volume of his six-part autobiographical novel “My Struggle” that might be useful for Bellow and those he hopes to inspire.
“That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form,” Knausgaard writes. “If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being.”
Bellow agrees with this, drawing a clear line between “’cause fiction,’or, more bluntly, literary propaganda. That is simply a right-wing version of socialist realism—the demand that the arts advance a particular social and political agenda,” and stories where “the authors craft dramatic situations and pick heroes and villains that serve more subtly to advance their point of view.”
from jonah goldberg:Still, if you look at the list of conservative books that Bellow recommends in his Buzzfeed article, it becomes clear that a major right-wing literary movement is not in the cards anytime soon. And the reason why can be deduced from his own essay—not so much its substance as its tone and emotional atmosphere. What drives Bellow, and seems to drive many of the authors he recommends—for instance, Kurt Schlichter, the author of Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back, 2009-2041—is the same deep-seated resentment that fuels the Tea Party movement. This brew of populism, racial grievance, wounded male pride, and generalized nostalgia excels at generating anger, which when harnessed to politics can do impressive and frightening things. The anger pulses in every line of Bellow’s essay, which begins with an anecdote of his own humiliation at the hands of a feminist speaker at a writer’s workshop (“I didn’t see why I should be called out in front of the group and angrily chastised as though I were merely an embodiment of the white male heterosexual power structure.”)
And it is this very anger that explains why a conservative literary revival, along the lines Bellow desires, is not going to happen. For anger is a not a conservative emotion. Genuine conservatism is something much broader and deeper than a political orientation; it is a temperament, one that looks to the past with reverence and the future with trepidation, and which believes that human nature is not easily changed or improved. Defined in this way, conservatism is in fact a major strain in contemporary American literature.
from adam kirsch:Adam Bellow, a storied editor of conservative books, has a similar conviction and is trying to launch a conservative revolt in the world of fiction.
I wish them great success. Still, I think there’s something missing in this ancient conversation on the right (conservatives have been making such arguments since the 1950s — if not the 1450s, with the publication of the Gutenberg Bible). Conservatives refuse to celebrate, or even notice, how much of the popular culture is on their side.
Sure, Hollywood is generally very liberal, but America isn’t.
Judging by their campaign donations, Hollywood liberals are very supportive of abortion rights. But there’s a reason why sitcoms since Maude haven’t had a lot of storylines about abortion. Indeed, nearly every pregnant TV character treats her unborn child as if it’s already a human being.
The Left may be anti-military, but such movies tend to do poorly, which is why we see more pro-military films. Similarly, it’s a safe bet that Hollywood liberals loathe guns. But you wouldn’t know that by what they produce. Not many action stars save the day by quoting a poem. Most Hollywood liberals probably oppose the death penalty, yet they make lots of movies where the bad guy meets a grisly death to the cheers of the audience. The Left rolls its eyes at “family values,” but family values are at the heart of most successful sitcoms and dramas.
It has not always been the case that imaginative writers—novelists, poets, playwrights—are liberals. Look back at the 1920s, the classic decade of modernism, and you’ll find that some of the greatest names were attracted to various kinds of reactionary and even quasi-fascist thought, from T.S. Eliot to Ezra Pound to D.H. Lawrence. For the New York Jewish intellectuals surrounding Partisan Review and Commentary in the mid-20th century, reconciling their literary admiration for such figures with their left-wing political views was the challenge that produced a generation of great critics. Lionel Trilling, in particular, was always reminding the bien-pensant liberals who read the highbrow journals that literature was more disturbing, more ideologically unruly and humanly curious, than conventional left-wing politics allowed.
But when Adam Bellow complains, in a pair of recent articles in National Review and Buzzfeed, that the literary establishment today is a liberal monolith, one has to acknowledge that he’s probably right. Surveys are always showing that something like 95 percent of professors vote Democratic, and I suppose that if a similar survey were taken of novelists, the results would be similar. As an editor, Bellow has shepherded a number of conservative bestsellers into print—books like Illiberal Education and The Bell Curve—but in his National Review essay, he notes that conservatives tend to be more successful at nonfiction argument than imaginative literature. “For years,” he writes, “conservatives have favored the rational left brain at the expense of the right. With apologies to Russell Kirk, the conservative mind is unbalanced—hyper-developed in one respect, completely undeveloped in another. It’s time to correct this imbalance and take the culture war into the field of culture proper.”
