Why conservatives lose the culture wars

It's because they make everything conservative

I had never heard of the Conservateur before reading about it in the New York Post this week, which is not a good sign for the former—this is a publication that is over two years old, so it clearly hasn’t generated much word of mouth over that time, or it seems like—given my line of work—it would’ve crossed my desk at some point.

I don’t mean to be mean about it, but that’s sort of the point. In case you hadn’t gathered, the Conservateur is a conservative magazine; specifically it’s a conservative fashion magazine, what one of its founders calls “the new frontier of the conservative movement.” Which is a depressing contention, because this does not look like a particularly good publication, and in a way that dovetails with so much of modern conservative media. Consider just a few of the articles up on the site’s homepage:

The Trump White House Style Guide

Conservative Clean Girl Beauty

Dear College Girls, Dropping Your Liberal Sorority Is Okay

Shopping on the #BidenBudget

Where’s Melania’s Vogue Feature?

The Confusion of Self-Identification 

This is rough stuff. Not necessarily because every idea here is bad, but because it’s all just so incredibly conservative, and this is supposed to be a fashion magazine. Fashion magazines are—and we’re making a pretty bold contention here, so stick with me—supposed to be about fashion, not “#BidenBudgets” and criticism of transgender ideology and sniper shots at woke sororities.

This is the problem with so much of modern conservative culture: It makes everything about conservatism, at the expense of culture, to the detriment of both. Many if not most conservative media brands are obsessed with the same half-dozen shticks—liberal colleges are crazy, woke mobs are crazy, Trump Good, Democrats Bad, woke corporations are crazy, whatever—to the point that it’s all becoming indistinguishable. I mean, the Conservateur is nominally a fashion magazine created by a couple of San Franciscan ladies, yet it looks like pretty much every other conservative startup commentary site. That’s a problem.

This is why conservatives are so consistently losing the culture war: Because we don’t really know how to interact with the culture itself beyond one narrow set of scripted presumptions. This is a tremendous waste, because at present the broader culture is almost completely broken and awful, and there is an absolutely golden opportunity for a young generation of artists and creators to remake it into something good again. And yet that opportunity is so often being squandered on stuff like the “Trump White House Style Guide.”

The problem with so much of our movies, TV shows, books, music and writing, of course, is that it’s all been completely overtaken by hardline left-wing ideology: It’s a safe bet that in any popular work of fiction—a movie or a Netflix series or a new book or a mainstream magazine or whatever—there’s going to be some gay stuff, some transgender stuff, some progressive racial screeds, some yes-queen academic feminist tripe, some bitter complaining over something Trump did in 2018; it’s a roll of the dice every time you tune into something and the dice very often come up woke. And guess what: People generally hate this stuff. Conservatives obviously hate it. Middle-of-the-road folks are starting to realize they really hate it too. Liberals think they’re supposed to like it, but they also recognize it sucks, so they’re feeling all confused about it but ultimately they know deep down inside they hate it like everyone else.

The ambitious conservative artist or producer or writer can do a lot in this environment—he can make a lot of money, make good product, and help move the needle of culture all in one fell swoop. The only thing he needs to do is make good television shows/magazines/movies/music, whatever. That’s it. It doesn’t need to be “conservative,” it doesn’t need to own the libs or obsess over wokery or anything. Just make good stuff. That’s all, that’s the beginning and the end.

Conservatives might object: “Well, how are we supposed to counteract the avalanche of woke ideology in popular culture if we can’t utilize conservative culture in turn?” Folks, you’re missing the iron point: Woke culture sucks. If you’re just trying to make a conservative version of woke culture, it’s going to suck too. Every time you substitute something ideological for something interesting in this way, it’s going to blow chunks, inevitably.

That’s the lesson here for conservatives: Don’t make conservative stuff. Just make normal stuff. Just give good fashion advice. Make an interesting movie with interesting characters and an interesting plot. Write a book with an exciting premise where thrilling stuff happens and characters talk like normal people. Make a cooking brand where you develop good recipes and have fun cooking good food. In all of these endeavors, recruit the best talent—it doesn’t matter if they’re liberal or conservative or whatever, just so long as they’re willing to work hard at making good product that people want to buy. If you do this, you will make a lot of money, and as a happy by-product you’ll be helping to counter the tide of pervasive, awful, dreary progressive culture simply because you’re creating successful stuff that is not progressive. It’s a win-win.

Just to be clear, it’s not as if you can’t advance conservative values while making good art. Make a movie that features a large, happily fecund, well-adjusted religious family; make a TV show in which the crisis pregnancy center is the good place; publish a women’s magazine where all the marriage advice is directed at heterosexual couples; write a book in which a character’s titanic, overwhelming struggle with his own faith ends in his redemption as he chooses Jesus Christ (yes, I just described Blatty’s The Exorcist and William Friedkin’s adaptation—get the point?).

You can do all of these things so long as you make your product interesting, fun, captivating, useful, beautiful, whatever. You just have to start with the presumption that your audience isn’t made up of idiots, that they instinctively understand decent creations, that they want those things, and that they’ll reject your product if you fail to deliver. That’s what’s increasingly happening with trash woke creations these days, and it’s what will happen with the lame conservative attempts to counteract them, unless and until we figure out how to get it right.