Why Can’t Conservatives Create Art?
By Dave Greene, March 11, 2026Link: https://firstthings.com/why-cant-conservatives-create-art/ (Archive)
Modern conservatives recognize their duty to reverse the devastation wrought by nearly a century of progressive cultural hegemony. And yet, even as they intuit the superiority of older, premodern forms of social organization and art, their attempts at culture-making all too often amount to imitating the patterns of the least progressive time they understand. Predictably, progressivism rolls on unperturbed.
This futile pattern is exemplified by conservatives’ repeated failures to create serious art. Take, for example, TPUSA’s alternative to the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show, featuring ’90s nu-metal sensation Kid Rock. On the face of things, the dueling halftime shows were a battle of cultural lightweights. But, as many non-leftists noted, it was obvious which show represented “the cool kids’ table.” Bad Bunny’s spectacle was confusing, disorganized, unmusical, and pushed a tired globalist message. Nevertheless, the TPUSA event came off worse, parading a culturally eclipsed conservative lineup, obsessed with petty nostalgia, and desperate for approval.
No matter how much effort conservatives put into cultural production, no matter how far the progressive mainstream declines, conservatives never come out on top. Nothing they produce ever feels good, refreshing, or genuinely life-giving.
The problem lies with the general conservative understanding of art and culture. Most ordinary non-progressive people agree that culture was good until very recently. Even if it was all produced by liberals with questionable values, the mainstream once delivered good things that felt fun, and sometimes even uplifting. Now they don’t. Thus, to the conservative mind, the solution is to recreate the kind of products that were popular in the years when things were better.
This backward-looking approach to culture fits the business model of media companies like Daily Wire and Angel Studios. As they see it, there is a large consumer demographic underserved by the mainstream. Therefore, the production of new targeted media will naturally procure profit and prestige.
In 2026, conservatives’ target demographics are obvious: boomers who watch cable news, evangelical Christians with staid cultural tastes, and middle-class millennials alienated by the post-2012 culture shift. Therefore, conservative production companies create content targeted at what these groups already consume: safe retreads of popular entertainment with on-the-nose political messages, bland renditions of Bible stories with the edges sanded off, and carbon copies of Hollywood genre films from the early 2000s.
Unsurprisingly, the media produced (financially successful or not) is over-optimized slop. The products hit the key metrics and are, in some direct way, “what the audience wanted.” But no one cares when they debut, and conservative audiences are rarely happy with what they get.
What holds conservatives back is a mindset that prefers the familiar over the good. They chase the tail of the zeitgeist while the culture slips through their fingers.
For media to be good, it must make people love it, not just mildly satisfied with it. It must point them toward higher aspirations that they don’t encounter in their ordinary lives. Art is not a demand-driven consumer product. Quality media does not give audiences what they say they want; it shows them what they should want. It is aspirational. In fact, the use of beauty to make people love higher things is probably as good a working definition of “art” as any.
When we regard art and entertainment from previous eras, whether progressive or reactionary, popular or avant-garde, they all follow the same form. Regardless of how they are financed, they are not intended to appease an audience’s preexisting desire but rather to direct that desire toward something the artist believes is good.
Belief in a higher vision gives a piece of media its freshness and force. It shows you something you should want: a future you could be a part of. That’s why people love such products long after their initial run and even organize their lives around them. Not all consumer and investor dollars are equal. The dollars that follow aspirational ideas sponsor works that capture people’s imaginations. The dollars that chase median consumer demand sponsor work that is forgotten soon after it’s consumed. Instead of looking backward, creators must look forward. Instead of giving people what they remember enjoying, new artists need to offer new dreams.
Creating visions like this might involve reaching for deeper truths contained in older traditions or going further to express primal human emotions that the modern world considers dangerous. Perhaps the feelings that these modes elicit are impractical or confusing, but that is all the better for the purposes of art.
Non-progressive creators have an incredible opportunity to forge a new vision for the future. For however forward-looking progressivism remains, its aesthetic vision is dead, and its understanding of the good is manifestly opposed to human flourishing. The mainstream media is receding and, more than ever, people want to believe in something.
Regardless of what pundits say about “stuck culture,” the possibilities for new directions are infinite. One could start with reviving the challenging classics that conservatives so often profess to love on their podcasts. There is no shortage of great stories, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy to Flannery O’Connor, that remain relevant precisely because they cut against our self-conception as moderns.
Or one could take a more radical approach. Find people who are willing to break the mold and snub all modern sensibilities. If you hate modernity, create a vicious indictment of its failures. If you detest the world’s idols, smash them in the most irreverent way imaginable. Create paeans to the lost spirit of the world, love letters to human heroism. Write stories as unrealistic and absurd as possible, or as gritty and harrowing as necessary.
But whatever you do, do not interrogate your art for whether it will make money, much less whether your audience wants it. Audiences do not know what they want. Contemporary man sits in a state of spiritual stupefaction, waiting to be told what is good and what is worth fighting for. As such, those of us who are out of sync with the modern world have the chance to show people what they should desire, the things of ultimate value.
Art is a war of belief, and if you aren’t showing people what is worthy of love and aspiration, you aren’t fighting it. Create bold, unapologetic visions of the truths you believe, and the world will recognize them as art, politics be damned. If you subordinate your vision to safe, consumer-driven demands, you will only show the world that you don’t believe in much of anything at all.
. Afterward, he returned to the United States with his wife, where Outer Dark was published to generally favorable reviews.[27]