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Americana Posting And The War For Culture

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Left can’t meme, but can only scold the Right for memeing well.

This dynamic was once confined to esoteric feuds among terminally online partisans. Now, it’s playing out in the open — between government agencies and what remains of the legacy media — and the stakes are increasingly tangible.

The Trump administration’s social media accounts have spent their summer appropriating classic images of Americana, notably J.M. Flagg’s famous 1917 Uncle Sam poster. But things really hit a fever pitch when the Department of Homeland Security shared three seemingly innocuous images: John Gast’s 1872 “American Progress,” with the caption “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.” Thomas Kinkade’s “Morning Pledge” with the caption “Protect the Homeland,” and Morgan Weistling’s “A Prayer for a New Life” captioned “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.”

According to the Washington Post, “the art world is not happy” with these posts because they are “part of an effort to rewrite the past with an exclusionary view of American history,” one in which there are clear standards of good and evil.

The Post doesn’t attempt to show why ordinary Americans should care about this. But while the Post’s freakout may be amusing to behold, it also gets at something important. Liberals are right to panic about these posts — and conservatives should pay attention.

The second Trump administration is staffed with right-wing Zoomers. These staffers are digital natives: born in the memeworld, molded by it, and in many cases more radically opposed to the leftwing hegemony that reached its apogee during their formative years than those of us who remember the days when cable news still dictated the terms of national conversation.

Those days are gone. Millennials like JD Vance and Stephen Miller hold high office. The aesthetic sensibilities of the Zoomers on their staff are shaping the administration’s narrative warfare, providing unprecedented air cover to the administration’s ground operations. Their social media habits are a visible sign of just how far the Left has fallen from its media and, thus, meaning-making monopoly.

The recent dustup about Homeland Security posting Americana paintings is just a minor skirmish in the larger war that is being waged for the sensibilities of the American people. Liberals have long realized that he who controls the production, distribution, and regulation of images controls the hearts, minds, and imaginations of the population.

Despite their confusion over other fundamental truths such as the difference between a man and a woman, liberals grasp this reality — and in it, something essential to the human condition.

We are imaginative as well as rational creatures, embodied as well as capable of abstract thought. Our reasoning about right and wrong, true and false, never gets very far without referring to something particular we’ve experienced, either directly in our own lives or vicariously through the testimony of others — including stories and history. “Music,” in the classical and comprehensive sense of “the arts of the Muses,” matters.

In ancient Greece, the nine Muses were the daughters of “Memory” and presided over the arts. Mythology and biography, parable and narrative, have always been the primary means of moral and political education, and they remain so today. Americans in general still recognize the power of the “Muse-ical arts,” mainly in the potency of historical narratives such as the Civil War, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement.

We would do well to recover the sense of power contained in other forms of “Music,” especially the storytelling power of films. Newer ventures on the Right are beginning to do this.

But we still have a long way to go. Even the artists whose work the Trump administration is now using aren’t safe from the Left’s appropriation.

The Kinkade Family Foundation, scandalized by the Trump administration’s use of his work, declared it was “deeply troubled to see this image used to promote division and xenophobia associated with the ideals of DHS” and pledged solidarity with “our communities who have been threatened and targeted by DHS, especially our immigrant, BIPOC, undocumented, LGBTQ+, and disabled relatives and neighbors.” Weistling, the only artist of the three still alive, took to his website to distance himself from the politics of the moment: “The recent DHS post on social media using a painting of mine that I painted a few years ago was used without my permission.”

Still, there is a virtually inexhaustible store of classic works of mythology, literature, and history, ancient as well as American, waiting to be adapted by artists who love rather than revile our inheritance.

There is a lesson here for older conservatives. Liberal donors have long appreciated the political utility of culture. As a class, they have lavished funds on all manner of artistic ventures, sowing seeds broadly in the expectation that just a few of their investments will blossom into captivating cultural products. As a result, they have dominated the culture for generations — not because young people are naturally more liberal (Zoomer men are currently disproving this myth) — but because their cold, hard cash has helped drag the next generation leftward.

Conservative donors are more comfortable running a business than patronizing the arts. They tend to focus their charitable giving on well-defined causes with short-term returns on investment. They have thereby won discrete battles — winning this election, pushing that policy through Congress — while losing the broader war for the soul of the nation.

That the unembarrassed Americanism of artists like Kinkade and Weistling has enjoyed commercial success while swimming against the tide of liberal cultural hegemony is a sign of just how high a demand remains in the American public for non-leftist cultural products. Liberal hegemony is cracking up, and as the Trump administration gets serious about winding down its taxpayer-funded power bases, from NPR and PBS to elite universities, the crack-up is bound to continue.

The emergence of an energetic and effective American Right has far more to do with digital disruption than with a strategic change in the conservative donor class. Conservatives who are serious about reclaiming American culture, and consigning the most anti-American elements of the Left to the dustbin of history, should put a shoulder to the wheel — not just in lobbying and campaign donations, but in directly patronizing the artists, educators, and other culture creators who celebrate rather than denigrate our civilizational heritage.

Pavlos Papadopoulos is Associate Professor of Humanities at Wyoming Catholic College.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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