Artists who appear to be conservative/right-wing at heart, yet are mostly lauded by liberals/leftists.

This would be more interesting going the other way - supposedly right-wing (but not really) artists that get shunned by leftists. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Lynrd Skynrd.

thumbs up to milo re salvador dali (who vladimir nabokov once called
"the spanish norman rockwell" [though mr. rockwell himself was somewhat left-leaning]).

i stand corrected. marinetti didn't invade fiume, tho'.

others: john ford (or at least certain french lefty film-lovers did). lee ving (alex in nyc to thread!) morrissey.

50 Cent

Are you talking about Johnny Cash? And did you know that Tucker Carlson was once a contributing editor to the right-wing Arkansas Democrat-Gazette?

We need more gun-toting, nasty scotch loving Democrats--the image of the "pansy liberal" is an understimated in why the vote goes to the Elephants and not the Donkeys in the South.

We get it, you don't like the show.

Yes - I think there's a difference between conservative and right wing.

I see conservative as a kind of harking back to the past, with a strong distaste for the present. Often combined with a distrust of government in general, and a wish to restrict government intervention of all kinds.

I think Robert Crumb and William Burroughs both fit into this category.

More consistently what you see is that the "conservative" leanings of artists lauded by "the left" boils down to wanting to live in the woods and own guns and the rest of the world can fuck right off. Which I often think sounds like a pretty attractive option myself.

I'm wondering if aestheticism unites left and right the same way libertarianism does. In other words, we need a three-dimensional model which includes dimensions like libertarianism and aestheticism as well as just left and right.

I no longer write for Vice, and it's funny that what separated us in the end was an aesthetic disagreement; I wanted to attack skull imagery in a piece, and they didn't want to. Now, is it left wing or right wing to wear a skull t-shirt or have a skull tattoo? It could be either, but it's offensive to my particular aesthetic.

(Tender-minded, childlike, optimistic, wholesome, healthy, Eros, no skulls, believe people, left to their own devices, are basically good) v (Tough-minded, adult, pessimistic, sleazy, destructive, Thanatos, skulls, believe people, left to their own devices, are basically bad)

Now, to me there is a certain correlation between tender-mindedness and liberal-left politics, and between tough-minded "realism" and the right, but it's not a hard-and-fast one. There are tender-minded conservatives (David Cameron?) and tough-minded leftists (Brecht?).

ech, not so much.

i am glad that you allowed for exceptions to the general rule. i would argue that american liberalism was most effective when it was MORE tough-minded -- folks like FDR, LBJ, MLK, RFK, and countless labor leaders weren't pushovers or saps. i would even go so far as to say as liberalism grew MORE soft-minded, it declined in both influence and electibility.

It's not just this board. I mean, what does "conservative" even mean anymore? It's awfully goddamn hard to tell. Liberalism has been debased as a label too, but at least I still feel like I have a general idea what it means.

"Cameron would lead a moderately unenlightened businessman’s government; Brown a moderately enlightened businessman’s government. The difference between the two, while a bit more than wafer thin, will hardly register on any political scale... Does it matter, indeed, whether there is a Conservative or a Labour government? At the moment, not much... the two major parties fundamentally share the same ideology."

Alfred, were Eliot and Bresson conservative or just Catholic?

NO FUCKING WAY was Johnny Cash conservative

This is a lot more complicated than many late-career fans believe, judging by my riffling through the autobiography and the 8 hours of TV stuff (especially from the '60s and '70s) I saw last year. He was certainly a flag-waver in a way contemporary young libs tend to snort at, and I don't think he ever urged the US to unconditionally pull out of Vietnam. In the book I recall him writing that he liked Reagan and Clinton personally, and didn't vote for either of them.

"I don't want the Thatcher years back, but I don't want the Brown-Prescott years either.I am prepared to give David Cameron his chance - even though he is a Tory."

Conservative means "not liberal" and "far-right/extreme conservative" means "Really-not-liberal". So you've got free-market libertarianism and fascism sharing a room along with monarchy and some other junk that never shared a common thread outside of being outside the mainstream liberal-left, hence the confusion.

Well, he's conservative in some senses, mostly aesthetically, but his politics and lyrics seem pretty explicitly left-wing, even socialist on most issues. A little dubious on race and immigration, yes, if that's what you're talking about.

Conservative means "not liberal" and "far-right/extreme conservative" means "Really-not-liberal". So you've got free-market libertarianism and fascism sharing a room along with monarchy and some other junk that never shared a common thread outside of being outside the mainstream liberal-left, hence the confusion.

But I could say something similar from the other side: Stalin and anarchist communes are all lumped together along with Greenpeace and Swedish social democracy and some other junk that never shared any real common thread outside of being outside the mainstream neocon-right. (And how can the mainstream be liberal-left when GEORGE W. BUSH IS PRESIDENT?)

Anyway, wasn't James Joyce somewhat right-wing? Is he lauded by liberals and leftists?

Is PJ O'Rourke really lauded by leftists? Found him amusing in high school myself.