For all your complaints about generalizations about the right, you share are engaging in a lot of generalizations about everyone else.

Conservatives are constrained by their desire to build and protect, whereas those on the left, being anything from deconstructionists to revolutionaries, can tear at the culture that holds a society together for cheap laughs with nary a thought for the consequences.

It is hard for a conservative to make a living in the arts because at many times a conservative may baulk at a project because it is ultimately destructive. But for those with wit, it can be done.

Take Mr Klavan himself as an example. Watch some of his Klavan on Culture on youtube. Notice that he is very funny (perhaps it doesn’t feel so funny if you’re getting the end of the stick). Notice that he engages with ideas, his humour actually engages with what people are saying and doing. Notice also that he is seeking to protect something and to build something. I suggest this is an example of a conservative artist who has chosen the harder path of creating rather than tearing down.

Some might say there are very few conservative comedians out there, I would argue that there are very few genuinely innovative and constructively funny comedians out there. Of those who do genuinely create humour, there would be as many on the left as on the right, and a whole lot more who are neutral.

If the old conservatives, meaning the Judeo Christian morals ones, fail at the arts due to their constrains, why does the left, which has evern more constraints, dominate media production? Remember, the left has the Green religion, political correctness taboos and multiculturalism to limit their creativity. And their only non political response is to put out self referential (media commenting on media) pieces like “Inglorious Basterds”.

The only difference in the creativity limitation department right now is that the left has control of the instruments. Which is why we’re deluged with picture after picture after picture of the same ol anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christian and anti-technology. That and a bazillion identical rom coms makes one ask “Where the highly acclaimed leftist creativity?” of which Mr. Goldstein speaks?

House of Leaves didn’t quite work for me. I enjoyed it, and found it quite imaginative, but ultimately the potential center seemed to get crushed by all the postmodern posturing.

Incidentally, I’m a self-identified independent who voted for Obama and has no use for tea-party/Sarah Palin conservatism. I found it telling that the ’08 convention sat bored through McCain’s moving speech, filled with values that rang of traditional conservatism like sacrifice, responsibility, and honor. Yet they burst into passionate applause for the vapid “hockey mom” have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too pep talk from Palin – a true signifier of where the conservative movement has ended up, not with hard-won stoicism but selfish materialism.

I mention this because, ironically, I seem to be to the right of you on culture. While I think the Western canon needed revamping in the modern era, I find that modernism – with its awe for the old as well as its discovery of new forms and feelings of dislocation – achieved this nicely, and that the postmodernism which followed has been a dead end.

As for conservatives and liberals in the arts, I think that any fixed ideology is dangerous when dragged into aesthetics. In this regard, it’s not so surprising that there are few distinguished right-wingers in the arts and criticism, but it IS a surprise that there are so many distinguished left-wingers. Perhaps, for a variety of reasons, the traditions of the Left allows for a sensitivity and open-mindedness towards art that is not apparent in other facets of the ideology.