The best of times, the worst of times. A renaissance in the economy and the national power, where a new, reactionary, and militant American conservatism is asserted: after two years of the vigorous Trumpian policy of "energy dominance" America had ascended to world's foremost producer of oil and natural gas, and for the first time since the glorious '50s exports more energy than it imports, to invoke just one measure of the American renaissance that is the Age of Trump.
But in the institutions and the culture whose powers-that-be don't stand for election the New Dark Age turns ever bleaker, as in the unremitting politicization of all things -- banking, professional sports and amateur, the back panels on bags of chips -- as in the infantilization of the society -- "She achieves her dreams, because she can," to cite a current ad for a pharmacy hawking adhesive bandages -- as in the repudiation of nature -- men emasculated and women cast as boxers and bodybuilders and combat forces -- as in the determined inversion of the reality -- black folks who account for a dozen Americans out of a hundred, represented in the national advertising as something closer to half the country. (And before the thought-police are called down on my head for that last illustrative point above, and my life and work and family name ruined, please do read my elaboration as follows: I adore black folks and always have, I was raised by folks who adored black folks, but objectively and statistically black folks are nothing like half the country, and to present them as anything like half the country is madness. No-one and no group is bettered by a turning upside-down of the facts.)
And on that last point of race, race, race: 2008 already is long ago and far away. In that presidential election year we were assured by the Left and the press that if only we'd elect The First Black President, the "racial divide would be bridged" for good and all, that the question of race would be resolved and retired if only America would vote black for president, never mind that this "first black president" was half-white and his ancestral association with slavery was to be found on the side of the slave-master. Even I imagined Rush Limbaugh had gone too far, all those years ago in '08, but Limbaugh alone prophesied and Limbaugh alone was borne out, that a first black president who happened also to be a Democrat president would have the effect of reducing every question in the national politics to race, to where demurring from that first black president on the capital gains tax rate might be damned as "racism".
A decade later half the political class and the whole of the elite, in the least-racist society in history in its least-racist age, are more hysterical than ever they were on the question of race. Only last week a Republican senator addressed a conservative conference with a weighty keynote applying the innocuous term "cosmopolitan" to our globalist elite, for no reason other than that it's apt, and extraordinarily he was damned from the Left for some imaginary "antisemitism" in his choice of words, never mind that it's leftists anymore who are the Jew-haters, and 21st Century American conservatism is if anything philosemitic. Race indisputably is the principal preoccupation of the elite in 2019, but it's one of a clutch of preoccupations which seize the powers-that-be and which they project with the manifold means available to them onto 330 million American consciousnesses, to indict the nation and to divide and debilitate it, and generally to make us miserable. So what's to be done, beyond winning elections which Republicans and conservatives manage miraculously to do more often than not, but which doesn't and can't penetrate the elite and their institutions.
My old joke about America's institutions -- that it's a shorter job to count the institutions in this country that aren't leftist and Democrat, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces -- never was a knee-slapper and it's less funny with the passing years, but not the less for that it's true enough, and worse than that there's precious little conservatives can do to alter the fact, inasmuch as institutions in America are of course independent of government and invariably they enforce their own prejudices and preoccupations: a leftist dean in a leftist university is most unlikely to hire a class of conservative departmental leadership who offend his impeccable sensibilities, for instance, so an institution once seized by the Left, enforces and reinforces its leftism. In that special case of the universities conservatives may find a tool in the toolbox, inasmuch as a great many universities are subsidized by the state governments, and state governments are of course elected, and it'd be no more than democratic for any Republican state government to insist that any university suckling at the taxpayer's teat abolish any campus prohibition on political expression disagreeable to the Left.
But any great undertaking to yank the culture of this country from the infinitesimal and alien class that is the elite, must necessarily be directed first and most at the press and popular culture, those twin walls which surround us and blare at us daily and nightly, to invoke the imagery of Victor Davis Hanson. Take for a case-study cable news, where the monopoly of the Democrats and the Left and the elite is smashed, with just two news channels of the three in their service: the most-watched show in cable news is not coincidentally the most take-no-prisoners conservative and Republican, namely Hannity on Fox News' primetime, where CNN's most-watched show rates 36th -- not 36th on television or in cable, but 36th in cable news. Or look over the "Popular" titles at a world-beating streaming service which will go unnamed: Old Hollywood and Westerns and war movies, apolitical movies, expressly Christian and expressly conservative movies, not to mention Red Dawn which is maybe the most militant reactionary-rightist feature film of the last four decades -- all represented disproportionately, by my unscientific but sustained survey. So it strikes me that to break the leftist press and popular culture we need only break the monopoly, that if the people of this country are given a choice they'll take it.
Do as Jeff Bezos did, I say, in buying the Washington Post and converting it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism: we needn't conceive a new medium or even to build a new business, only to buy out a newspaper here and a magazine there, a channel here and a studio there. And we needn't necessarily redirect those properties either from Left to Right: it's my sense that the people of this country are starved for a great and grand, neutral, national culture as in the Midcentury or The Last Golden Age, namely the '80s; a culture which doesn't hold its country in contempt, doesn't take sides on partisan questions, doesn't arrogate the function of politics and politicians, and forget and forfeit its art. The object is not to substitute one ideological instruction for another, so much as to liberate the people from the conditioning and hectoring into leftism which is unremitting anymore in the culture of this country.
And it strikes me too that this great undertaking may be a job for President Trump, in his retirement from the presidency which I'm confident will come in 2025 and not '21, an undertaking in its way as grand and as far-reaching as any triumph of Trump's presidency. Trump is placed quite singularly for a job of this sort and scale, with his singular comprehension of the mass media and his demonstrable mastery of it, from the hit reality show to the 160 million pairs of eyeballs on his "tweets", and with his singular capacity as an executive for producing prodigious and prompt results, and it doesn't hurt either that he's a multi-billionaire business emperor and seems to count as acquaintances half the mover-and-shaker class, or that he's inventive and indefatigable as a promoter. I'm a believer in the law of supply-and-demand, and a believer too that the unsupplied demand is there, for a great American culture, and that to smash the cultural monopoly may be to win the culture war.
But in the institutions and the culture whose powers-that-be don't stand for election the New Dark Age turns ever bleaker, as in the unremitting politicization of all things -- banking, professional sports and amateur, the back panels on bags of chips -- as in the infantilization of the society -- "She achieves her dreams, because she can," to cite a current ad for a pharmacy hawking adhesive bandages -- as in the repudiation of nature -- men emasculated and women cast as boxers and bodybuilders and combat forces -- as in the determined inversion of the reality -- black folks who account for a dozen Americans out of a hundred, represented in the national advertising as something closer to half the country. (And before the thought-police are called down on my head for that last illustrative point above, and my life and work and family name ruined, please do read my elaboration as follows: I adore black folks and always have, I was raised by folks who adored black folks, but objectively and statistically black folks are nothing like half the country, and to present them as anything like half the country is madness. No-one and no group is bettered by a turning upside-down of the facts.)
And on that last point of race, race, race: 2008 already is long ago and far away. In that presidential election year we were assured by the Left and the press that if only we'd elect The First Black President, the "racial divide would be bridged" for good and all, that the question of race would be resolved and retired if only America would vote black for president, never mind that this "first black president" was half-white and his ancestral association with slavery was to be found on the side of the slave-master. Even I imagined Rush Limbaugh had gone too far, all those years ago in '08, but Limbaugh alone prophesied and Limbaugh alone was borne out, that a first black president who happened also to be a Democrat president would have the effect of reducing every question in the national politics to race, to where demurring from that first black president on the capital gains tax rate might be damned as "racism".
A decade later half the political class and the whole of the elite, in the least-racist society in history in its least-racist age, are more hysterical than ever they were on the question of race. Only last week a Republican senator addressed a conservative conference with a weighty keynote applying the innocuous term "cosmopolitan" to our globalist elite, for no reason other than that it's apt, and extraordinarily he was damned from the Left for some imaginary "antisemitism" in his choice of words, never mind that it's leftists anymore who are the Jew-haters, and 21st Century American conservatism is if anything philosemitic. Race indisputably is the principal preoccupation of the elite in 2019, but it's one of a clutch of preoccupations which seize the powers-that-be and which they project with the manifold means available to them onto 330 million American consciousnesses, to indict the nation and to divide and debilitate it, and generally to make us miserable. So what's to be done, beyond winning elections which Republicans and conservatives manage miraculously to do more often than not, but which doesn't and can't penetrate the elite and their institutions.
My old joke about America's institutions -- that it's a shorter job to count the institutions in this country that aren't leftist and Democrat, namely the churches and the United States Armed Forces -- never was a knee-slapper and it's less funny with the passing years, but not the less for that it's true enough, and worse than that there's precious little conservatives can do to alter the fact, inasmuch as institutions in America are of course independent of government and invariably they enforce their own prejudices and preoccupations: a leftist dean in a leftist university is most unlikely to hire a class of conservative departmental leadership who offend his impeccable sensibilities, for instance, so an institution once seized by the Left, enforces and reinforces its leftism. In that special case of the universities conservatives may find a tool in the toolbox, inasmuch as a great many universities are subsidized by the state governments, and state governments are of course elected, and it'd be no more than democratic for any Republican state government to insist that any university suckling at the taxpayer's teat abolish any campus prohibition on political expression disagreeable to the Left.
But any great undertaking to yank the culture of this country from the infinitesimal and alien class that is the elite, must necessarily be directed first and most at the press and popular culture, those twin walls which surround us and blare at us daily and nightly, to invoke the imagery of Victor Davis Hanson. Take for a case-study cable news, where the monopoly of the Democrats and the Left and the elite is smashed, with just two news channels of the three in their service: the most-watched show in cable news is not coincidentally the most take-no-prisoners conservative and Republican, namely Hannity on Fox News' primetime, where CNN's most-watched show rates 36th -- not 36th on television or in cable, but 36th in cable news. Or look over the "Popular" titles at a world-beating streaming service which will go unnamed: Old Hollywood and Westerns and war movies, apolitical movies, expressly Christian and expressly conservative movies, not to mention Red Dawn which is maybe the most militant reactionary-rightist feature film of the last four decades -- all represented disproportionately, by my unscientific but sustained survey. So it strikes me that to break the leftist press and popular culture we need only break the monopoly, that if the people of this country are given a choice they'll take it.
Do as Jeff Bezos did, I say, in buying the Washington Post and converting it from Democrat Party news to Democrat Party activism: we needn't conceive a new medium or even to build a new business, only to buy out a newspaper here and a magazine there, a channel here and a studio there. And we needn't necessarily redirect those properties either from Left to Right: it's my sense that the people of this country are starved for a great and grand, neutral, national culture as in the Midcentury or The Last Golden Age, namely the '80s; a culture which doesn't hold its country in contempt, doesn't take sides on partisan questions, doesn't arrogate the function of politics and politicians, and forget and forfeit its art. The object is not to substitute one ideological instruction for another, so much as to liberate the people from the conditioning and hectoring into leftism which is unremitting anymore in the culture of this country.
And it strikes me too that this great undertaking may be a job for President Trump, in his retirement from the presidency which I'm confident will come in 2025 and not '21, an undertaking in its way as grand and as far-reaching as any triumph of Trump's presidency. Trump is placed quite singularly for a job of this sort and scale, with his singular comprehension of the mass media and his demonstrable mastery of it, from the hit reality show to the 160 million pairs of eyeballs on his "tweets", and with his singular capacity as an executive for producing prodigious and prompt results, and it doesn't hurt either that he's a multi-billionaire business emperor and seems to count as acquaintances half the mover-and-shaker class, or that he's inventive and indefatigable as a promoter. I'm a believer in the law of supply-and-demand, and a believer too that the unsupplied demand is there, for a great American culture, and that to smash the cultural monopoly may be to win the culture war.
