The Virtues of Ideological Art

Opinion|The Virtues of Ideological Art

What is successful right-wing art? I posed that question to Jonathan Keeperman, who runs the far-right publisher Passage Press, on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, and you can tell that it’s a tricky question because he took two separate bites at answering it, offering one response in our conversation and a revised one in a subsequent post on his Substack.

In the first answer he suggested that we should understand “right-wing art” as any art that tells the whole truth about the world, free from the ideological strictures and sensitivity reads imposed by contemporary progressivism. To me that seemed conveniently circular — reality has a well-known conservative bias, therefore any truthtelling art is inherently right-wing — and he tacitly acknowledged as much in his follow-up; there he suggested that the very concept of “right-wing art” might be a category error, since art can’t be circumscribed by politics and the artist’s job is to be a truthteller and let the political implications take care of themselves.

The second answer is the more attractive one for creators and critics, but I don’t find it quite satisfying either. Certainly it doesn’t resolve the tension inherent in Keeperman’s own publishing project, which is trying to break away from the agitprop that often defines right-wing culture in modern America (think Dinesh D’Souza documentaries and Christian message movies), while also trading on the idea that there is special aesthetic value in the forbidden territory of far-right prose, among writers (from H.P. Lovecraft down to Curtis Yarvin) deemed dangerous because of their racism or sexism or authoritarianism.

The same tension shows up in more mainstream quests to fix conservatism’s broken relationship to the higher forms of culture. In his new book, “13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (but Probably Haven’t Read),” Christopher Scalia is self-consciously trying to educate conservative readers into a deeper appreciation of literary culture — to add more literary fiction to the works of political theory and history that many right-wing readers favor, and to expand the familiar list of novelists beloved by conservatives beyond “Lord of the Rings,” “Atlas Shrugged” and maybe “Brideshead Revisited.”

In doing this he’s aware of the risk of instrumentalizing the works he’s celebrating, and so he cautions that “any artist who elevates his political point above the techniques and elements of his craft is creating propaganda, not art.” But he’s still urging people to read Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott and P.D. James because they illuminate a particular philosophical or ideological perspective on the world, not for the sake of their artfulness alone. Which leaves open the question of whether conscious philosophical or ideological motivations can themselves create particular artistic value, rather than yielding inevitably to propaganda.

I think the answer has to be yes — that the concepts of “successful right-wing art” and “successful left-wing art” are both meaningful descriptions, not just category errors or excuses for agitprop, insofar as both “right” and “left” perspectives on the world capture aspects of reality that can be non-propagandistically portrayed.