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Dispatches From the Konservetkult

Well, wonder no more — welcome to the right-wing school of movie criticism! In this burgeoning genre, the sort of stuff that concerns ordinary critics — characters, dialogue, cinematography — pale in importance when compared to a film’s potential to further right-wing political goals. Much like the Proletkult of the early Soviet Union that filtered all art through the lens of Marxism, today’s Konservetkult sees ideological subtext in everything they watch.

my highlights * Take, for example, 300. Did you think its opening-weekend success was due to its dazzling comic-book violence and histrionics? Not so, says Victor Davis Hanson of National Review, who explained that its financial triumph really represented a national reaction to the moral degeneracy of our time.

* “The films politics are decidedly pro-American, pro-military, and even *gasp* pro-freedom,” says one review at Libertas. “[The director's] affection for the American military is obvious in every scene they’re in. They are uniformly portrayed as heroic, extremely competent, selfless, and even kind to Arab children. The theme of the film is spoken out loud more than once: No sacrifice, no victory.” Which film is he talking about? Why, the robot smash-’em-up Transformers, of course. Of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

* ( in reference to the movie Knocked Up) Not to be outdone, Berry College political science professor Peter Lawler extolled the film as a “piece of art that celebrates secular, sophisticated America’s pro-life awakening,” where “lovable babies are chosen over even lucrative designer careers.”

The Right’s search for a cultural and artistic identity is a head spinner. I’m not sure whether this search is due to its fevered desperation to stake out some area of modern culture where they’re still relevant or they’re just bored and thought they’d give it a shot. No one clicks the links, but this inevitably brought up the not too sad lament that conservatives, at least the species that has existed this last half century hasn’t really created much art of their own. History is important here since modern conservatism took a hard Right turn with Nixon and left actual Republicanism starved and fondly remembered as something that Dwight Eisenhower believed in. In the comments there is some mention of writers and artists past that were conservative and even avowed fascists, but the current debate wouldn’t apply. A Republican of 1928 could be an artist, but modern wingers not so much. We can only speculate that neoconservatism has a certain mind set that is not conducive to the creativity, imagination and unsparing self examination that produces great lasting art. They place an extraordinary amount of value on authority for its own sake, change doesn’t just make them a little nervous it scares them. Since authority, when carried to excess trains the mind to es cue creative thinking in exchange for rule book solutions you tend not to see anything in a new way or be able to understand something that you might not have experienced before. There have been studies of political attitudes and their psychological attributes, Researchers help define what makes a political conservative

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

* Fear and aggression
* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
* Uncertainty avoidance
* Need for cognitive closure
* Terror management

I’ve seen another study that said Conservatives tend to followers. Great artists tend to be leaders in the sense of innovators. One bumper sticker you’ll never see on a Conservative’s car is “Question Authority”. Their leaders tend so much to lead as to herd the loyal followers as they preach to the choir. Creating a rigid orthodoxy and making sure everyone carries the rhetorical water. Which might make them less afraid and feel like they’re part of something special, but it doesn’t cultivate great art or even fairly good pop art like Transformers or 300.