The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto Against Logic, Facts, and Reason

by Chapo Trap House

On the other side, for the culture warriors of the Right, a death grip on power maintained through gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc., will never be enough to give them what they truly crave: popularity, celebrity, and the admiration of the same cultural elite they despise. Despite witnessing a rich pedigree of reactionary artists in the early twentieth century (Céline, Ezra Pound, Leni Riefenstahl, Hanna-Barbera), the contemporary American right-winger is congenitally incapable of being funny, entertaining, or interesting in any of the ways art demands, relying instead on ham-fisted sentimentality and self-abasing ressentiment. The paradox is that the further their liberal enemies get from holding real power—the more they rely on the symbolic and pop-cultural—the worse they get at the very things that built liberal cultural hegemony in the first place. Libs find themselves aping the shittiest habits of their right-wing culture-war opponents. As this war on culture progresses, both the general public and cultural elites ask less of art and reduce their interests to a checklist of “good points” or “progressive portrayals” while ignoring anything that doesn’t superficially conform to the immediate political conversations of the day.