Promoting a Conservative Culture

Hollywood is grumbling about the slump in summer ticket sales, with movie executives perplexed about why Americans aren’t flocking to the movies in the same way to see Forty-year Old Virgin, Wedding Crashers, or the purposely foul-mouthed The Aristocrats. While the first-two movies are definitely hits, they pale in comparison to movies such as last year’s The Passion of the Christ, which raked in a box office of over $370 million, and an equally impressive $270 million in DVD/Video sales.

Chalking up the remarkable ticket sales for The Passion of the Christ as “anomalous,” the Village Voice and the Tinseltown elite – despite assertions to the contrary – failed to understand that Gibson’s tour de force is exactly the type of picture Red America will flock to see. Sadly, rather than produce better movies about more substantive topics like the life of Christ, or other religious figures such as Moses, King David, or even Mohammed, Hollywood reaps what it sows by producing big-budget movies that nobody wants to see.

But of course, most moviemakers are not the types who believe or much less understand the market forces of supply and demand. Because of their innate selfishness and inability to live in the world, many moviemakers would rather produce schlock that nobody cares about and blame the public when it fails for not appreciating their “artistic vision.”

Some of America’s greatest exports are products of its culture: from television to movies to music no other country in the world singularly dominates the arts. Yet, despite the success of conservatives in gaining electoral offices at the federal, state, and local level through the creation of educational and training organizations such as the Young America’s Foundation or the Federalist Society, there are no organizations financed by the likes of the Harry and Lynde Bradley Foundation for the purpose of training young conservatives in how to be filmmakers, music producers, or novelists – all of these fields are dominated by the Left.

This is why I find puzzling and misplaced the call by my friend Austin Bramwell in the August 29 issue of The American Conservative for the formation of an “elitist” group of conservative writers who “do not expect that their ideas will be popular.” Austin continues:

This elitism, perhaps an electoral handicap, is an intellectual strength. Original thinking often flourishes under conditions of intellectual marginality. Unfortunately, the conservative movement, having discovered a mass audience, risks squandering the intellectual marginality that once made it so interesting and daring.

Indeed it’s true that conservatism’s inherent rationality and honesty drew the masses to it. But the winning ideas of the likes of Buckley and the old National Review crowd were also at the core and in the hearts of the American people. The United States has always been a conservative country as was manifested by the election of Eisenhower in the 1950s, and the House Un-American Activities hearings, and much earlier in the writings of Tocqueville. Yet, the era of television, phones in every home, and mass circulation magazines made Americans aware of the dangers associated with liberalism. Liberalism’s ill effects were masqueraded by the concentration of the Left in the East, whereas most Americans lived on the family farm during Roosevelt’s presidency.

However, when our countrymen learned about the destructiveness of the New Deal because of magazines like National Review, or through television programs such as The Firing Line, or the publication and wide distribution of books like The Conscience of a Conservative, they weren’t pleased with what they heard and they demanded change.

Certainly, the current state of conservatism leaves much to be desired, particularly as magazines such as National Review are frankly less interesting, and the policies of the Republican Party are focused less on reducing the size and burden of government. However, what a new elite of conservatives, particularly “techno-skeptic” ones, will add to solving these problems beats me.

As Austin mentions in his article, there are already niche publications galore such as Critical Review, or the less-elite The American Conservative, which no doubt speaks to the so-called elite of representative elements of the conservative movement, i.e. paleo-cons. In his article he also laments the uniformity of ideas found among conservatives:

[C]onservatives lost interest in internal debate 30 years ago, when the nature of American conservatism remained an open question. Since then, the possibility of a “crack-up” has grown more remote, not less. Fresh debates among right-wingers still occur, but rarely at the highest theoretical level. Gone are the days when [Wilmoore] Kendall could accuse [Richard] Weaver of “ill-tempered name-calling” or [James] Burnham could call [Frank] Meyer “the perfect ideologue.”

No, now the Editor Emeritus of The American Conservative, Patrick J. Buchanan, just makes a complete ass of himself. How’s that for spirited debate? While conservatives during the post-War period certainly disagreed with each other, few were ever so stupid to assert that the Soviet Union was not a fundamental threat to American survival. Things have definitely changed. Now, there are a group of conservatives such as Buchanan, and some of his paleo-conservative brethren, who are bold enough to assert that after September 11, we should do nothing but retreat into ourselves.

Most Americans could careless about names such as Kendall, Weaver, or Burnham, but they do enjoy music, movies, and television. If conservatives are to win the war of ideas, we must take the path less-traveled and infiltrate pop culture, just as we did, however imperfectly, politics. This means investing similarly in the creation of highly trained young people who are steeped in conservatism’s fundamentals, but also are up to the challenge of weaving conservative themes into cultural arts - a new Hollywood "elite", if you will.

Instead of asking where our modern-day Burnham’s or Weaver’s are, the better question might be where are the 21st Century’s Ayn Rand, Robert Penn Warren, or Walker Percy?

Update: Bruce informed me of a piece in Monday's Washington Post by Boston college's Martha Bayles diagnosing the illnesses that result from American pop-culture exports that don't necessarily represent the people's values: Middle Eastern backlash of the United States.