Superman is an alien conservatives should protect.
I’m talking IP and icons here, so if James Gunn’s newest installment of the Superman franchise deserved critique, conservatives should not be shy. But because the Man of Steel properly understood soars higher than anything as a symbol for what America means, conservatives should use this moment to reorient the culture toward the essential American art: film.
Conservatives regained their political advantage this year but appear to be lacking a plan for our culture. Luckily for us, progressives left a blueprint for culture-building. Conservatives need only work up the courage to use it.
The Left overthrew and then ruled the strategic cultural hot spot of the 20th century: Hollywood. Conservatives must do the same.
As things currently stand, retaking Tinsel Town might require more of a campaign than a coup, but it is the same promised land. Conservatives may recoil at the idea, but unless California slides into the Pacific, the studios aren’t leaving. So neither must conservatives abandon Los Angeles.
And while Hollywood no longer dominates culture as it once did—with strategic outposts in Nashville, Atlanta, and other emerging entertainment meccas—the fact remains: The establishment resides by the sea.
Culture runs downstream from politics. It is a truism characteristic of the 2010s and 2020s in America. As an example, the same-sex marriage weed that has purveyed the culture for a decade germinated in the years of President Barack Obama’s first term, but sprouted to normalcy and beyond with the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges a decade ago.
Those leftist trends intensified under the Biden regime. But regimes change and conservatives now have a chance to reorient culture in the right direction thanks to recent political wins.
American films need not, and should not, be explicit right-wing propaganda pieces nor anti-progressive zinger flicks bent on avenging the past century. But conservatives should not fear the cultural power that politics has given them. Donald Trump won the popular vote, which seems to indicate that conservative principles are the norm. We should ride the wave of normalcy to an American cultural renaissance.
To reclaim film is to reclaim the first, and so far the only, genuinely American art form. Combine the European stage, oral, and poetic tradition with New World innovation and you have pure Americana in technicolor. Rather than attack the thoroughly American art, conservatives should lean in, commit time, money, resources and talent to the silver screen.
Because the right has so long neglected the culture and because it has so long cast “the arts” onto the same heap as other leftist garbage, few talented conservatives are left to preserve tradition in film, let alone in literature or on stage. As a result, what little it has produced is probably best forgotten.
Here, the Left gives us a handguide: appeal to pathos. For all the logicism of the right, the fact remains that people prefer stories to statistics. Conservatives in America who want to revitalize a culture, and artists who want their work to reflect good things, should not browbeat with morality. Most people prefer challenging stories to moral lectures.
In December 2024, Warner Bros.’“Wicked”put on a master class of subtlety. The film tells the story of how the Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz”is a misunderstood victim of bullying. Lost in dazzling worlds and catchy tunes, audiences may have forgotten that the film, at its heart, aims to recut the darling of the Hollywood’s golden age as a staunchly anti-American narrative.
That’s why I suggest conservatives retain the subtlety and ditch the sinister agenda. Whereas the Left spends creative energy working against the tide, anyone engaged in a pursuit of honest storytelling will spend their creativity on the truth.
The work I propose requires effort, for certain, skill and subtlety, no doubt, but not the mental gymnastics for which the Left spent a century training.
The virtues conservatives hold will allow the right to work in accordance with tradition rather than wielding the pen as a sword to cut off tradition. Honest filmmakers need only bear in mind Truth, Justice, and the American way!
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