The virtues of ideological art — value vs propaganda

What is successful right-wing art?

- Ross Douthat

I posed that question to Jonathan Keeperman, who runs the far-right publisher Passage Press, on my podcast a couple of weeks ago, and you can tell that it’s a tricky question because he took two separate bites at answering it, offering one response in our conversation and a revised one in a subsequent post on his Substack.

In the first answer he suggested that we should understand “right-wing art” as any art that tells the whole truth about the world, free from the ideological strictures and sensitivity reads imposed by contemporary progressivism. To me that seemed conveniently circular — reality has a well-known conservative bias, therefore any truthtelling art is inherently right-wing - and he tacitly acknowledged as much in his follow-up; there he suggested that the very concept of “right-wing art” might be a category error, since art can’t be circumscribed by politics and the artist’s job is to be a truthteller and let the political implications take care of themselves.

The second answer is the more attractive one for creators and critics, but I don’t find it quite satisfying either. Certainly it doesn’t resolve the tension inherent in Mr Keeperman’s own publishing project, which is trying to break away from the agitprop that often defines right-wing culture in modern America (think Dinesh D’Souza documentaries and Christian message movies), while also trading on the idea that there is special aesthetic value in the forbidden territory of far-right prose, among writers (from H P Lovecraft down to Curtis Yarvin) deemed dangerous because of their racism or sexism or authoritarianism.