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The Pyrrhic Culture War Victory Of The Left

Alyssa Rosenberg, a liberal, acknowledges that the right has lost the culture war, but she doesn’t feel like a winner: Yes, many of the people who make popular entertainment are prominent Democrats. But pulling a lever or writing a check to advance a policy outcome is not the same thing as creating a liberal, or even […]

Alyssa Rosenberg, a liberal, acknowledges that the right has lost the culture war, but she doesn’t feel like a winner:

Yes, many of the people who make popular entertainment are prominent Democrats. But pulling a lever or writing a check to advance a policy outcome is not the same thing as creating a liberal, or even forward-looking view of the world. Capitalism has something to do with this, and the assumptions about markets that guide Hollywood, which include the ideas that any woman over 35 might as well be dead, and that international audiences hate black actors who are not Will Smith. And narrative conservatism may be an even greater limitation than the pressures to be profitable. Superhero franchises need to keep us invested, so they can only critique their Übermenschen so much. Romantic comedies still hew to their Elizabethan conventions in structuring their payoffs: Marriage, or at least a boyfriend, remains the end goal. A well-landed punch or an artfully-arranged explosion that takes out a bad guy is more pleasurable to watch than a trial, whatever our convictions might be outside the cinema. In culture, the most powerful orientation is neither left nor right, but rather, towards what kinds of story arcs and character beats are satisfying.

That hardly makes culture apolitical or unimportant. Rather, it suggests that we need very different terms to understand what actually winning the culture war would look like, for either side. Conservative culture has receded into joke status not simply because the country has shifted on issues like equal marriage rights or vigilante justice, but because conservative filmmakers, documentarians, and television producers often expect values and ideas to carry the day even in projects where production quality is low, dialogue is clunky, and characters exist only to mouth talking points. Similarly, liberal creators have done a good job of advancing progressive ideas that can be easily expressed in ways that audiences will find pleasurable. But they have been less successful when advancing their principles might require them to train their audiences to approach familiar archetypes, like anti-hero dramas, in new ways.

Could it be that American popular culture represents the worst of liberalism and the worst of conservatism? Yes, it could. But liberals who say, “How were we to know?” don’t get a pass. If human nature doesn’t make you a natural pessimist about these things, you aren’t paying attention.

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