A Crisis in the Arts
by Andrew Klavan
Conservatives tend to see our popular culture as a toxic waste site where traditional values—religion, family, patriotism, initiative and personal responsibility– are ferociously mocked 24/7. They see Hollywood as occupied by a nihilistic leftists interested less in entertainment than in ideology and making films that ram radical ideas down our country’s throat. They see the arts generally as controlled by people who have contempt for the hopes and fears of ordinary middle class Americans, portraying them as a crass booboisie.
And in all these critiques, conservatives are right. Popular culture is at war with America and with the idea that ours is a good country, let alone a great one. The question is not whether this war is taking place, but whether we’re going to fight back.
That’s exactly the question Klavan, the best selling author of over a dozen works of fiction, addresses in Crisis in the Arts: Why the Left Owns the Culture and How Conservatives can Begin to Take it Back. Klavan shows that it is not enough for conservatives to bemoan the left’s hostile takeover of the culture or to withdraw from the culture because they see it as politically hostile and morally vulgar. Conservatives can win the culture war, but only if they put an army of culture warriors in the field, people who understand that enduring art is not about propaganda but about human striving and the struggle between good and evil. As Klavan writes, “For those conservatives with artistic talent and ambition this is a spectacular moment to take to the barricades… But to take advantage of this moment, conservative shave to come to grips with a situation that they naturally find uncomfortable: to wit, we are now the counter culture. We need to act like the rebels we now are and stop trying to win the favor of the big studios and publishers and mainstream reviewers. We need to make stuff. Good stuff. And get it out to the audience any way we can.”
Crisis in the Arts is a battle plan for fighting the culture war by a leading conservative who has been behind enemy lines with several New York Times best sellers and who refuses to cede our cultural heritage to people hostile to America.
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