
“Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together,” Barney Frank once said. The sleazy former congressman was echoing Rousseau’s idea of the General Will.
To leftists, the state was the central unifying principle and the thing that brought us together.
But back when Frank said it, culture was still actually the thing we chose to do together. For three quarters of a century, our cultural industries had wielded mass media to craft a middlebrow common culture that erased the old distinctions between high and low, the opera and vaudeville, to bring us songs we could sing, jokes we could laugh at and stories that made us feel.
We were so good at it that American culture became the world’s culture. Hollywood’s movies, Broadway’s musicals, Tin Pan Alley’s songs, and Literary Row’s books spread everywhere. You can still see Coca Cola logos in far off lands and African kids wearing NBA t-shirts. Fiddler on the Roof has been playing in Japan for decades and country music is a hit in Zimbabwe.
America didn’t just become a world power by economic and military power, but culture. And when we were done, much of the world wanted to be an American, as it had once wanted to be Greek or English. We conquered the world without intending to or even realizing it.
That culture is mostly dead now except as a bunch of corporate properties being beaten to death. The machinery of mass culture is still there, but it has no soul. The $500 million comic book spectacles and the oversaturated autotuned payola music makes money, but much of it performs better around the world than it does in America. The days when it brought us together are long gone. Mass culture now reminds us of how little we have in common.
“Politics is downstream of culture,” was once true, but culture is now downstream of politics. Culture is politics and politics is culture. Politics has killed culture and what’s left is politics telling stories, singing songs and writing books about its imperatives, worldviews and agendas.
We don’t have movies, songs or novels anymore. We have propaganda, scolding, preaching, sneering, hectoring, and smirking by the elites who control the cultural machine. Politics is their life and they want it to be ours. They can’t conceive of anything important that’s apolitical.
A common culture springs from the things we agree on. What do we agree on anymore?
Motherhood, apple pie and the flag? Maybe apple pie. Maybe not.
Comedy was the first cultural casualty. All too easy to appropriate into a humorless political weapon, as Jon Stewart. Stephen Colbert and their legion of successors did. The soul of comedy is our ability to laugh at ourselves. The new comedy didn’t laugh, it sneered. It used the rhythms of comedy to hector, pontificate, scold and berate. Eventually everyone realized that there was no punchline coming. The only remaining joke was that comedy was dead. Ha ha.
But drama suffers just as much because it asks what people want and what drives them. Politicized, drama becomes agitprop, instead of exploring human nature, it offers a sham that suits its agenda. “Tar”, is hailed by the New York Times as a “great movie about cancel culture” because it validates it with a villainous protagonist who offers the familiar defenses of culture and condemnations of identity politics, and concludes triumphantly with her humiliation.
The politicization of drama, like that of comedy, takes art from an inward exploration of who we are, to an outward projection of hatred onto the political “other”. Politicized culture weaponizes art and robs it of its capacity to enrich and transform us. Instead of seeing ourselves in art, we can only see our enemies. Culture becomes just another means in a culture war with no end.
And that kills culture dead.
At the upper and lower ends, culture offers neither enrichment nor entertainment. All it offers is the vicarious pleasure of destroying stand-ins for Republican enemies to the 23% of the country that lives for nothing else. And the other 77% are starting to tune out.
There’s a reason that the customer base for entertainment products now appears virtually indistinguishable from the political base of the Democrats. Upper-class urban and suburban millennial white and black women are the targets of most television, cable and streaming programming. If you doubt that, watch a few commercials and see who appears in them.
Or just watch the shows themselves.
Theatrical releases still occasionally try to appeal to men with blockbuster comic book movies, but their targets remain narrowly confined to urban and suburban millennials of a certain bent. When a movie like Top Gun: Maverick gets released, it’s a breath of normalcy that brings in audiences while showing just how artificially claustrophobic the state of theaters has become.
The state of affairs in literature, art and music is far worse, having calculatedly left behind most of the country to wallow in their own incoherence, decadence and desperate insanity, high brow for the former two and lowbrow for the last, but riding their political obsessions all the way.
Culture hasn’t consolidated politics, instead politics has consolidated culture. Entertainment is just another adjunct of the Democratic Party. The producers, directors and actors don’t just finance the party, they make party-approved entertainment for party members. Our culture has become an echo of that of any Communist country’s agitprop entertainment. But there are no official censors or production boards, the industry took a knee and did it to itself with shareholders, advertisers and investors being taken for a ride or joining the party.
The mass propaganda power remains impressive, but so is a guy with a megaphone on a street where no one else has one. The power to project is not the same as agreement. And without some kind of consensus, there’s no culture, only volume and noise. The guy with the megaphone is shouting, but without meaningful interaction, he runs out of things to say.
Culture develops a dialogue. People build on the work of others and on the responses of audiences. Without a dynamic creative marketplace, the entertainment industry has become incapable of creating new things. Instead it endlessly reworks the old, updating its intellectual properties so that they match current political dogmas without adding anything original to them.
“Representation”, the entertainment industry vogue, reveals the underlying creative bankruptcy. Having run out of taboos by pushing everything to the edge and over it, mining nihilism, cynicism and contempt for everything they’re worth, the only thing left to do are identity politics remakes of everything from The Wonder Years to Superman with black protagonists.
What happens after the black Superman, the gay Superman, and the transgender Superman?
Totalitarian culture is boring. It has no imagination or vision. It’s stuck within the narcissistic loop of “Triumph of the Will” worship of the regime and the “Eternal Jew” demonization of the other. It’s not free to laugh, to imagine, to doubt, to believe and to become something more than it is.
Culture, at its best, low, middle and high, can touch the chords of the soul and find common ground in what it means to be human. That was the genius of American culture. Now it’s the one thing it can’t do. Americans are leaving behind mass culture for something and for anything else. Curtains are falling and lights are going out in theaters across America.
Mass culture, for all its flaws, convinced very different people that we had things in common. The politicization of mass culture has convinced us that we have nothing in common at all.
The BBC was regularly criticized for their message being the story and little else. Hollywood used to get its messages across through a good story.
Dave Chappell gets his messages across using good comedy.
Dylan got his messages across using great songwriting
But now, as Daniel so excellently points out, you have copied the worst of the BBC which has, since the 70’s drifted closer and closer to being nothing more than government propaganda.
Yeah, Dylan was a great songwriter. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” for example, one of my favorites, amongst numerous favorites of his.
I was discussing this very subject the other night with my 21 year old sons. One has gone to a new movie the night before and he could hardly remember what it was about, it was so bad. I think it was called “Smile,” and he paid $8.00 to get in. Pathetic. Our little town is so divided that few are even willing to discuss politics because the dimocrats are like ravenous dogs just waiting for someone to disagree with them. Where are all the good movies? Where has the comradery of our community gone? — It started in the 60s, got rolling under Clinton, went into overdrive under Obama, and is now flying off the cliff under Brandon. The dims don’t want to save America, they want it to go up in flames and then blame it all on Republicans. — I feel so sorry for my children’s future, though I’m inclined to believe in Kudlow’s optimism that indeed, someday, the calvary is coming.
Dave Chapelle is far from being good comedy in my humble opinion as he is a muslim convert that denigrates lovely females like Candace because she refuses to play the part of a black victim..
His whole act is racism racism racism just as many other America Negro ”Comics” like to play as they can insult their mainly white audience and they will feel so self righteous by laughing along with him when he calls them all racists.
Politics killed culture. Totalitarian culture is boring. Good points. USSR and other Communist tyrannies come to mind.
Dennis Prager pointed out how he stood out as an obvious Westerner when he visited the USSR – his clothes were clean.
I remember when a John Sand told me a Soviet doctor marveled at receiving gauze bandages. He’d never seen them before.
totalitarian politics is boring
all else follows
Yet for all its many faults, the USSR preserved and even furthered the best of Russian culture. Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were widely read and the music of Russian masters was widely played. The art of ballet reached its summit at the Vaganova Institute and at the many companies that employed its graduates. Nobody could touch Russia, whether communist or present-day whatever, in that field.
Yes, they had to.
The only new things they could create were generally soulless propaganda and junk. Once the revolution was complete, there was no longer a need to destroy art and culture, and so the regime carefully preserved and cultivated the old arts, while suppressing modernism, down to, at one point ,jazz. But it was an elaborate museum showpiece.
Popular culture is morally decadent and woke to the core.
“playwrights, screenwriters, directors, choreographers – were gay leftist socialists”
At least we now know who and what you are.
“the oversaturated autotuned payola music”
Taylor Swift. I was just thinking of this yesterday listening to Taylor Swift’s new song “Anti-Hero”. Drab, non-descript, dull, repetitive, no melody. It’s the musical equivalent of frozen pizza warmed up in a microwave oven. Or Italian food from a Chef-Boyardee can. Muzak made in a factory on an assembly line basis by robots.
Drab like Gregorian Chant and Gregorian Chant was the soulless, mindless, emotionless, muzak, of a totalitarian state.
you were listening to a Taylor Swift song
that was your first mistake
…And who can forget the overwhelming political agendas of Singing in the Rain.
But you seem incapable of parsing the nuances of some political themes finding their way into creative work and creative works existing for no other reason than to promote a political narrative.
….appreciating the back and forth conversation, gets my brain cells sparking and causes me to consider things I don’t usually occur to me.
What good discussion, debate and serious intellectual jousting should do.
Utterly exquisite display of faux intellectualism pretending to be deep thinking that has now been the sine qua non of the Left even throughout the Ph.D level within the humanities and social sciences.
Mickhorn likely thinks his smarmy ad hominem rant against Daniel is “nuanced” and that he has “unpacked” something deep and penetrating. All he has actually done is ripped out his spleen and shoved it in our faces.
Not impressive (and I’ll take a CFR (call for references) regarding his claim that most playwrights, filmmakers and novelists of the middle of the 20th century were left-wing homosexual socialists).
We’re well aware that they were gay leftists, but they produced great work and it wasn’t overtly political or anti-American. Isn’t it funny that there was more artistic freedom back in that supposedly “repressive” era than there is today? No one on the right wants to persecute gays. You are projecting your own hatred of conservatives.
Senator McCarthy warned us about these Commie scum now is the time to heed his warnings
If you dont have a sense of humor then it just aint funny.
Another insightful article by Daniel Greenfield. Culture is now downstream of politics. How true.
I’ve never been happier about having cut our cable after November 2020. In fact, I think I’ll get out my checkbook and send a nice big fat donation to The Freedom Center. Lemmings will be lemmings after all 🙂