The short clip from The New Norm Show that’s been circulating almost seems perfectly timed to prove Spencer Klavan’s point: the Right’s approach to culture is an abysmal failure. Nearly universally panned, the “anti-woke sitcom” is everything wrong with the Right’s typical incursions into the aesthetic realm. Pedro Gonzalez pointed out at Chronicles that “There’s nothing subversive or witty going on; it’s just hammering you on the nose with ham-fisted politics, accomplishing little more than tickling an already beaten-down audience of the converted.”

For the same crowd that likes to talk ad nauseam about the good, true, and beautiful, the Right never seems to produce anything with those attributes. We ask the Right to keep the embers of Western civilization glowing for future generations, but in return we get an endless stream of Left Behind-quality content and personalities like Lilly Gaddis, who has been dubbed the “Viral N-Word Girl.”

All told, the Right’s cultural offerings are a cringeworthy mirror image of the Left’s intersectional dreck—but, as Spencer rightly notes, they even lack the latter’s occasional ability to create something worthy of close study and emulation.

In the Right’s desperate attempts to mount a challenge to the regime, they rush to pin their hopes on perceived champions who will do the hard labor that’s needed. Remember Anthony Oliver and his one-hit wonder “Rich Men North of Richmond”? Though Oliver captured some political truths in his now-forgotten hit, the song itself is an unremarkable piece of music featuring lyrics that mostly promote whining and despair. Like “constitutional conservatives” who beg for the table scraps of religious exemptions, Oliver’s ode to the working man is in fact a virtual concession to the Left’s hegemony.

I’d rather have Oliver over the usual D-listers riding the conservative celebrity circuit like Scott Baio, Kevin Sorbo, and Randy Quaid. However, pinning our political fortunes on such advocates has clearly failed to move the needle politically. And it will never succeed in building a culture that can produce even mediocrity, much less greatness.

This fact exposes the contradiction at the heart of the Right’s ventures into culture and the arts: for decades they’ve been frantically searching everywhere for political solutions—that is, everywhere but within politics itself. Like Congress delegating its power to the administrative state, the Right has mostly farmed out its main objective—attaining and using political power for the common good—to hoped-for cultural changers, which has resulted in predictable disaster. Apart from Donald Trump, himself an outsider, the Right has simultaneously gotten crushed in national elections and has created nothing of lasting artistic value.

As Spencer rightly contends, the fault for the current state of things, dear conservatives, clearly lies with us. If the Right does not stop churning out the same politicized, low-rent garbage of recent decades, it will never achieve the hegemony it’s looking for—especially with Gen Zers. You can’t beat schlock with yet more schlock. For too long, conservative political commentators have been the sole source of influence driving nearly every aspect of the Right. This needs to end.

The Right’s feeble attempts to mimic the Left’s politicized culture must be rethought on a fundamental level. Like the phenomenon of evangelicals wanting a Christian politics instead of elevating Christians who understand politics well, Spencer points out that the Right has the same issue: “We want Conservative Art™, not art by conservatives.” Thomas Kinkade-esque January 6-themed paintings or depictions of Jesus directing Trump’s hand as he adds the God Amendment to the Constitution is what you get with the former. We must instead reorient ourselves to the latter pole.

One aspect of the solution is for the Right to have separate cultural and political silos. Though necessarily having a symbiotic relationship, these are fundamentally distinct projects that require people with different talents and skills. The political Right needs to jump headlong into the sometimes nasty business of politics. Meanwhile, the cultural Right should devote their talents to creating sitcoms, podcasts, music, artwork, films, and other quality content (the political Right, of course, can help with distribution efforts).

The cultural Right needs to develop conservative artists in every field who can create works that are worthy of the legacy of Western civilization. We need our Houellebecq who can narrate the reality of American life with penetrating insights and our Robert Eggers who can make a docuseries or even a film that will be studied for decades to come.

The ability to recognize, appreciate, and make quality art must precede its creation. As Anthony Esolen has pointed out, if you want to build a table, you should know something about carpentry. Better yet, you should apprentice with a master and learn everything that goes into turning nature’s bounty into beautiful pieces that can be kept in your family for generations.

When this does not happen, you get an utter catastrophe like “Come, All Ye Unfaithful,” the bowdlerized modern version of the classic Christmas hymn. It is evident that the writer was toying with things that were far beyond her understanding. Yet, it is telling that no one stopped her from making a mess of a wonderful carol. We are conditioned today to ensure that our comfortable cocoon of ignorance remains intact, while demoting taste and discrimination to the single-A squad. Sound aesthetic judgment has given way to the tribalism of the sub-mediocre.

Long-term, creating space for a healthy cultural Right may eventually make it easier to rack up political victories. But that should not be the cultural Right’s focus. Instead, they should produce things that will help Americans be better human beings and citizens, an important prerequisite to reestablishing a citizenry that’s capable of self-government. Just consider the class of men who used to become president: Calvin Coolidge presented his bride, Grace, with his own translation of Dante’s Inferno as a wedding gift. This was a man of culture and taste.

From Licentiousness to Liberty

Renewing the Right’s focus on culture also means granting artists liberties that might make some uncomfortable. “If we’re serious about a revival,” Spencer contends, “we are going to have to accept the inherent risk and unpredictability that comes from letting artists see the world before they judge it.” This cuts against the tendency on the Right, and among human beings in general, to pine for “morality tales in recognizable and safe formats that lead us to exactly the conclusions we already held.” And he cheekily adds: “And no swearing, please.”

One’s aesthetic sense must necessarily go through a process of refinement, because one is not born with discriminating taste by nature. With a nod to Edmund Burke, himself an ardent foe of aesthetic relativism, Spencer notes that “beauty is a thing that exists, like light, and that we have faculties for perceiving both.” Beauty pre-exists our ability to see and judge it—you could say it’s self-evident. In fact, the reason we may only later come to see the beauty inherent in a work of art is because our dull faculties have been sharpened, not because beauty is subjective.

But I want to emphasize something that Spencer acknowledges in jest but needs to be taken more seriously: our increasingly vulgar pop culture. What if top streaming shows and movies featured less swearing—or even none at all? After all, Rule 49 of George Washington’s “Rules for Civility” cautions his readers to “Use no Reproachfull Language against any one neither Curse nor Revile.” The proliferation of f-bombs and lewd language, not to mention a smorgasbord of far more appalling content, in just one episode of Amazon Prime’s The Boys—which those on the Right seem to watch just as much as the Left—would make most Americans prior to 50 years ago turn a dark shade of crimson (and would then work to ban it by every means at their disposal). You needn’t be living in Puritan Massachusetts to be revolted by the moral sludge that is regularly churned out today.

This may give a false impression that this is a new problem in America. But it is assuredly not. The X-rated Midnight Cowboy—a film that graphically portrays gang rape, sadomasochism, and prostitution—won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1969 (only two years after A Man for All Seasons won the same award). And this happened only a little more than ten years after Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Hymns was the second bestselling album of the year, spending an astonishing 270 weeks as the top album on the Billboard 200, breaking many records in the process.

And the rot since has extended to pop music. Simply compare the complexity of Sergio Mendes’s hit “Never Gonna Let You Go” or the mature musicianship of Sting’s “Fortress Around Your Heart” to the simplistic chords of Artemas’s “i like the way you kiss me” or the bite-sized vulgarity of Billie Eilish’s “Lunch”—a perfect vehicle for normalizing bisexuality among teen girls. The cultural downgrade is real.

Though the reasons for this post-World War II decline in American culture are surely complex, there is no question it has helped teach us out of the habits and virtues that mark a free people. And this has only accelerated with shows like Netflix’s Bridgerton, which features sex acts in warm, bright, feminine tones and race fantasies that even the Guardian thinks are ludicrous. The question isn’t how much sex is appropriate to show but why we should be showing it at all. The burden of proof should be squarely on those who want to depict in public what should be happening in the privacy of the marriage bed. In North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s famous cut to a train going into a tunnel after Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint embrace used to be all the signal audiences needed (and even that was controversial at the time). What we have been producing reflects who we are, which then in turn has further driven our tastes into the cultural gutter.

All told, much of the Right’s causal acceptance of what amounts to ingesting acid that eats away at our minds and souls, night after night, is at odds with self-government, much less being consistent with the Christian foundations that the American Founders, orthodox and unorthodox alike, thought were necessary to maintain the republic.

Per Matthew Peterson, the Founders would have viewed the present state of our culture as owing to a deep confusion between liberty and licentiousness, which Noah Webster aptly defined as “contempt of just restraint.” As Peterson importantly emphasizes, they would have seen this “not just a personal problem, but a political one” that, if not dealt with properly, will pave the way to tyranny.

James Wilson ended his 1788 “Oration on the Fourth of July” by teaching his listeners that “LIBERTY, VIRTUE and RELIGION go hand in hand harmoniously, protecting, enlivening, and exalting all!” May our wish for an enlivened aesthetic sense on the Right fall in line with Wilson’s advice.