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Stephen King Vs. Totalitarian Kitsch

He's too big to be cancelled, but the Social Justice Left sure did try
Obama Presents National Medal Of Arts And National Humanities Medal At White House

Did you see that the Social Justice Warriors tried to cancel Stephen King last week? It was over these two tweets he sent out after the Oscar nominations were announced, and he failed to join the ritual gnashing of teeth over the claim that an insufficient number of minorities were nominated:

Biiiiiiiiiiii-goooooooot! they shrieked. The writer Roxane Gay, for example:

But they got nowhere, because as Justin Lee writes, Stephen King is too big to be cancelled. More:

Anyone who knows anything about Stephen King, especially his Twitter presence, knows he is a rather conventional liberal, a faithful Democrat, and a veritable geyser of anti-Trump and anti-GOP venom. One might expect he’d be given the benefit of the doubt. But King’s progressivism is not totalizing. He believes in equality of opportunity rather than in equity of outcome, at least in the realm of art. And this is radically at odds with the regnant progressive understanding of what art is for.

Roxane Gay could lob her criticism even after King had clarified his position because her worldview prioritizes art’s utility as an instrument of power. This progressive orthodoxy descends from a venerable tradition at least as old as Marx. If one believes that art is a purely immanent phenomenon, that it does not offer a gateway into the transcendent, then it is perfectly rational to prioritize identity and political expedience. (It is possible, of course, that I’ve misjudged Gay’s worldview; perhaps she does allow for genuine metaphysical transcendence in art. But her criticism of King is tenable only within a presumed metaphysic of immanence.) If a work of art is merely immanent, then it is only an expression of the material conditions in which it was produced, and thus reifies the power of whatever regime administers those conditions. To hold that “diversity and quality are synonymous” is to argue that a different regime be installed, one controlled by “the diverse” and implementing their political agenda. It is refreshing that progressives so readily recognize the power of art to order collective experience; too often Americans dismiss the arts as mere divertissement. But such instrumentalism is, at the last, a very low view of art.

Read it all.  Lee goes on to praise King for standing firm behind an older, classical view of art that sees particular works of art as gateways into universal, transcendent experience. It’s a great short essay, and an important one.

You see this in the world of opinion journalism, or at least I did when I was involved more intimately with that world. Some editors held the view that “diversity is a component of quality” — I remember that phrase. This was how they advocated publishing second-rate op-ed pieces from women and writers of color without feeling that they were compromising quality. It’s just not true, though. Talent doesn’t distribute itself according to a quota scheme. If “diversity” is a component of quality, it must be true that the lack of diversity — which is to say whiteness and/or maleness — diminishes the quality of the work. Do we really want to say that? Yes, I think some of these progressives do.

Roxane Gay’s criticism, as Lee avers, is a good example of the totalitarianism of identity-politics progressivism. This contretemps with Stephen King reveals the dangers within that worldview to art and artistic freedom. Roxane Gay, it would seem, would endorse a vision of art that produces what the novelist Milan Kundera called “totalitarian kitsch”:

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance, and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions.

Three cheers for Stephen King, liberal Democrat and true opponent of totalitarian kitsch.

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