Why the right hasn't hit culture's high notes

Sydney Sweeney is the poster child of Hollywood's great unwokening but her films are box-office flops

- Jason Okundaye

I was on a walk around my local area in London when I was stopped in my tracks by a young man sauntering past me, wearing stone-wash jeans, a pair of shades and a “Reagan-Bush '84” T-shirt. It’s a nice T-shirt, so I could see why it might be appealing.

A quick search informed me that for gen Z rightwingers in the US, it has become the “conservative take on a band shirt or the once-ubiquitous Che Guevara tee”.

That casual display of conservative aesthetics reminded me of something else: a cover of New York magazine from earlier this year, after Trump 2.0’s inauguration, which showed young rightwingers celebrating as they “contemplate cultural domination”.

“Conservatism - as a cultural force, not just a political condition - is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s,” the journalist Brock Colyar wrote.

The US right has long had designs on controlling culture - frustrated by the idea that the arts remain in the grip of a liberal-left orthodoxy. If there is anything members of the Maga movement want more than their guys in office, it is to feel that their worldview is reflected back to them whenever they turn on a screen or head into a gallery.