Art and Revolution

The relentless drift toward propaganda

If you don’t understand this cultural reference, read Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies

Pedro Gonzalez recently published a very smart essay on art and the New Right at The Metropolitan Review, a Substack I’d never heard of but to which I have now become an unpaid subscriber. Pedro’s argument, distilled to the point of doing it a disservice, is that right-wing art sucks, and for the same reason that left-wing art sucks: because politics makes art terrible.

This isn’t a “response” to Pedro in the sense of arguing with his thesis, since I enthusiastically agree with it. But I have a lot of thoughts on this subject, as I, like Pedro, have a foot in each of these two worlds.

Before I was a journalist I was a left-wing political activist by profession. About a decade into my career I shifted from engaging in politics to writing about them instead. The reason was simple: I enjoy writing and I don’t particularly enjoy protesting and organizing.

So why was I an activist in the first place? If you had asked me that question 15 years ago I probably would have subjected you to a lengthy discourse about power and inequality, but in retrospect it really came down to two things: I believed that left-wing politics were a moral obligation, and collective action inspired me. As I got older I realized I didn’t like doing it and didn’t have any particular talent at it, either. Those are both very good reasons for changing careers, but I nevertheless felt selfish for doing so. I hadn’t found a way around that moral obligation part.

Because of this residual sense of moral obligation — and by that I mean guilt — I made the mistake a lot of journalists make: I chose to think of my new profession as a mission instead of a craft. Activism is tedious work and I didn’t want to do it anymore, but I still needed to believe I was purifying my soul by creating political change in the world. As a journalist, I could bring public attention to the things I cared about without the burden of the activist work ethic and lifestyle. I could pretend to have my cake and eat it, too.

Even at the time, I didn’t actually believe this act was real. But I wanted to believe it was, so I tried to cover topics and write stories that would expose the injustices of the world and elevate the noble work of the activist heroes who were combating them. For obvious reasons, the activists were happy to play along. It was a symbiotic relationship, like that between a bee and a flower.

It was fake adversarial journalism. It’s not that I did sloppy work — I’m still proud of a lot of that early stuff — but my self-assigned function was to write propaganda for non-profit advocacy groups I believed in. I wasn’t alone in doing this. My perception of my professional role was, I think, in the American media landscape, unremarkable. This is what most reporters were up to. Eventually I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t real journalism.

This recognition dawned on me slowly, but it was impossible to deny after Covid hit. Suddenly working in my industry felt like working for the Politburo. There was a rigid expectation of conformity from professional peers and a complete intolerance of dissent. If you entertained the lab leak theory you were racist. If you questioned the wisdom of defunding the police you were racist. If you humanized Trump voters you were racist. If you stuck to the assigned party line, and, better yet, led some witch hunts against a few heretics, your career might advance rapidly. Reporters were arguing explicitly for the kind of journalism I had practiced only with a sense of embarrassment — the kind that puts one’s political agenda first and everything else a distant second. It was self-destructive, but more than that, it was pathetic.

Journalism isn’t art, but it’s part of the same larger industrial apparatus of cultural production. It recruits from the same middle-class, urban, college-educated pool of talent. The “creators” who populate both fields share many of the same prejudices and predilections. There is the same sense of moral obligation to a certain kind of politics, the same self-confidence in one’s enlightened worldview, the same disdain for the same disfavored people.

And so politics corrupts art in the same way it corrupts journalism. Whether you’re a journalist or an artist, if you bow to its demands, your vocation becomes your moral purpose and your craft becomes propaganda. If you’re a novelist or a filmmaker, your plots become moral fables and your characters become two-dimensional stand-ins for various political constituencies. If you’re a painter or a sculptor your work becomes a mere vehicle for the lessons you wish to impart to an amorphous, less enlightened public. It becomes cynical and boring, which may not be the enemy of journalism, but it certainly is of art.

It doesn’t help that art and politics (and journalism) share the same incentive structure. If you’re a new or unknown entrant to either profession, the quickest path to attaining professional recognition is to collect some scalps. If you’re an artist, you turn your anonymity into an advantage by presenting it as a badge of your authenticity, and casting the fame and commercial success of your established incumbent rivals as evidence of their corruption. If you’re a revolutionary, you stake out positions more radical than your mainstream rivals are politically capable of embracing — the easier to condemn them as hopelessly compromised by power. The point is to attack the legitimacy of the consecrated leaders in your profession to position yourself as their more worthy successor. In both fields there is an ever-present gravitational pull upon the margins toward the avant-garde.

The two fields flow in and out of each other. Novelists, filmmakers, songwriters and conceptual artists naturally borrow from the arsenal of radical politics to establish their standing as rebels in the artistic field. Political radicals likewise have a convenient affinity for art that codes as subversive. These cultural assets are fungible. If you have a professional interest in cultivating an image that distinguishes you from the establishment, you’ll use whatever’s within reach.

We’ve become accustomed to thinking of this dynamic as a left-wing phenomenon only because we became accustomed by the experience of the twentieth century to thinking of the left as the cultural transgressors against a relatively more conservative political and cultural establishment. But that paradigm came apart years ago. Once left-wing political radicalism was embraced by every establishment figure from Kamala Harris to PepsiCo, it was no longer possible to subvert anything from the left. Suddenly it was the edgelord right, with their “ironic” swastikas and Kekistan flags, that had the prudes of the establishment clutching their pearls. Now it’s wearing a MAGA hat that confers transgressor status, and early adapters from Kanye West to Dimes Square scenesters have seized the opportunity.

But now that the right is the political establishment and billionaire tech tycoons are reinventing themselves as anti-woke, the subversive pose of the avant-garde right is as ridiculous as the Nike-endorsed revolutionary politics of police abolitionists. That’s why Babylon Bee is so unfunny and the Daily Wire has lost every shred of edginess and now just seems mean. It’s all transparently fake and nobody buys it except those who have an interest in pretending to.

Lately I’ve been trying my hand at writing a novel. I was going to write a book of commercial nonfiction but I don’t really have anything to say anymore. I don’t know exactly where a book by me would fall in the left versus right political marketplace, but wherever it ended up I suspect it would be cynical and derivative, because that’s what most books about politics and policy are now, in my jaded opinion. I find myself even reading far less about current events these days. When I read nonfiction it’s not about what’s happening now but what happened 250 or a thousand years ago. The book I just finished was about the War of Independence, which was relatively recent history for my tastes. But mostly I read fiction. I never used to read novels; now I can’t stop. I devoured three Cormac McCarthy books in a month and a half. I’m now reading my first Stephen King novel. Why did I not do this decades ago?

I actually know the answer to that question. When I read books about politics and policy it’s largely to accumulate knowledge, which can be deployed as cultural capital in the daily struggle of professional and social status competition. It’s part of the endless quest for recognition, which is at its starkest in the world of politics, where the objective is power. For a politician, that means, more or less, the raw power of state violence, which has been pacified by civilization into law. The more that journalists have become absorbed into the political field, the more they tend to seek a thinly veiled version of the same thing. Their professional objective becomes the accumulation of the symbolic power of mass opinion formation, which is another word for propaganda.

Art is different, and, in my opinion, better. We seek art — or at least I seek art — as a refuge from the Hobbesian muck of politics. At its least corrupt, art is not about power but about meaning. It’s about complicating our understanding of the world and thus enriching it, while politics is about reducing our worldview and, in the process, impoverishing it.

In his essay, Pedro discusses The Road, which is the best novel I’ve ever read. The world of The Road is Hobbesian in the extreme, but that’s not really what the story is about. It isn’t about good and evil, or about saving the world. It’s about the daily plight of human existence in a world without purpose, and it’s about the love between a father and his son. I wouldn’t want that story to be reduced to some stupid melodrama of oppressors and resisters, with a neat and tidy life lesson at the end. I don’t want art to cheapen the human experience. I want it to reflect its complexity and fullness.