How many Commentary writers can claim they got 400 twenty-year-olds to think about the moral consequences of abortion in a single day—to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands who watched the show on YouTube?
When liberals come over to the Dark Side, they become friends with me and reluctant admirers of Donald Trump. They don’t become Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg devotees. You can see the sense of mischief and joy in classical liberals who leave the Left, like chat show host Dave Rubin.152 And when unexpected cultural figures like Azealia Banks announce their support for Republican candidates, it’s Trump they go for, not Ted Cruz.
Conservatives could learn a thing or two about how to beat the Left from web culture. Godfrey Elfwick is the pseudonym of a brilliant British troll who portrays an exaggerated satire of a social justice warrior on Twitter, complete with a bio that describes him as a “genderqueer Muslim atheist.” For nearly three years now, he has almost never broken character, and his persona has fooled many an onlooker, including the incredibly annoying Chelsea Clinton, and the BBC, who invited him on the radio to explain why Star Wars is racist and sexist.153 Acts of high-impact trolling like Elfwick’s, which expose the Left through ridicule, are more likely to turn heads and change minds than the most brilliant column in a conservative weekly.
While consistently missing opportunities to beat the Left in winnable fights, conservatives have also done virtually nothing to lay down deeper roots in high culture. Besides a few investments from David Koch and The Spectator’s arts section, what is there really? It’s no match for the myriad of leftist and government-supported entities that fund concerts, film festivals, art shows, and other wellsprings of culture. A search for “race,” “gender,” or “diversity” on the website of Grantmakers in the Arts, the umbrella group for private arts funding organizations in the U.S., returns opportunities that look like Salon articles.154 (Are you aware that members of the theater community experience “injury every day from being marginalized?” Do you want a “Radical guide to fighting discrimination in the arts?” Grantmakers in the Arts has you covered.155)
The kids and teens who idolize left-wing pop stars, watch movies made by left-wing film directors, and laugh at the jokes of left-wing comedians, grow up to be—surprise!—left-wing voters. This cannot continue.
I’m suddenly aware this may come across as an argument for obsessive representation of all kinds on screen. It is not. Black kids and lesbian kids and disabled kids don’t need to see themselves on screen so much as they need to be exposed to a wide variety of ideas. Diversity of skin color is nothing compared to diversity of opinion, and the idea that people can’t identify with movie or video game characters because they don’t have the same race or gender is a ludicrous invention of the progressive Left. When I was a kid I identified with the vulnerability and gravitas of Buffy Summers and Captain Janeway, despite the fact that I have a wonderful penis. Come off it.
Conservatives need to realize they will continue to be beaten by the Left if they keep ignoring the importance of culture. They need to spend less time obsessing over the marginal tax rates, and more time on the National Endowment for the Arts. Only then will the left-wing stranglehold on culture be beaten.
The NEA should not be disbanded completely, as some conservatives, including Daddy, have suggested. During World War II, allied forces set up a unit of 400 service members and civilians to find and safeguard European art as their enemies fought their way across the continent. Victory would be meaningless if the very heritage of western civilization was lost. Ronald Reagan said, “The arts and humanities teach us who we are and what we can be. They lie at the very core of the culture of which we’re a part.” He also said, “Where there’s liberty, art succeeds.” The NEA should focus on supporting great American artists, not meeting diversity quotas and pandering to progressives. And if that can’t realistically be done given the political biases of the art world, then yeah, Daddy’s right. Just get rid of it for a while.
Over the past decade, political correctness in culture has grown to the point where even left-wing creatives are feeling its stifling effect on free expression. Liberal comedians like Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld now refuse to perform for college audiences, who they say have become too sensitive for their comedy routines, even though they aren’t remotely right-wing. If conservatives make a serious effort to get back into the culture wars, they will find no shortage of grateful artists and creators eager to throw off the chains of political correctness.
On the other hand, political correctness isn’t just confined to the Left.
THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS OF THE RIGHT
I’m an ardent Zionist, and it isn’t just because I have a thing for tanned, muscular IDF men with big guns. I’m ethnically Jewish on my mother’s side, and in my younger days I could be spotted on BBC appearances sporting a full-on Jewfro.
Another thing I ardently support is free speech and the freedom to tell jokes. Alas, some of my peers on the conservative Right don’t feel the same way.
I was baffled when, in 2016, conservative commentators suddenly became preoccupied with the threat to Jewish communities from internet nobodies posting offensive memes on social media. Many of these people identify as the alt-right—or at least, the alt-right’s shitposting, memester battalions. To them, breaking taboos isn’t about advancing white nationalist ideology; it’s about gleefully watching outraged reactions from their elders.
Jewish advocacy organizations, ginned up by the likes of National Review, Daily Beast and, eventually, the Clinton campaign, went so far as to declare war on memes. I’m not joking. Two months before the election, the Anti-Defamation League, a venerable, respected name in the fight against anti-Semitism, nearly torpedoed their credibility by declaring Pepe the Frog a “hate symbol.”