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

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.

There's also the question of distinguishing between political rhetoric and reality. In the US, whatever people think, the Democrats are the party that have been shown to benefit business the most (measured by stock exchange performance) and the Republicans expand government and the public sector the most (mainly with war and security expenditure).

Unlike Eliot, who described himself as Anglo-Catholic (High Church of England, basically: the ultra-Conservative wing of the Church) and a Monarchist (and he wasn't talking Constitutional Monarchy there), and published lines that it's all but impossible to argue aren't anti-Semitic.

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.

My sense is the conservative thing about some artists that bothers me is this urge to fit everything into neat little boxes, this control freak Kubrick style.

whereas out-of-control has dwarves, red-curtained rooms, hoodlums and hooligans, owls... you know the drill.

Yeah. this is incredibly irritating. Momus, did you put that essay on skulls & all things goth on your blog? I could swear I read it there & thought, huh, I completely agree.

Bresson = very Catholic.

So OTM

yeah i think i said something about transcendence through suffering.

What? What evidence are you using for either? I can see Bush and Hoover expanding government and Reagan certainly got more government money to spend than ever before but I still don't see how you came to either conclusion. Are you assuming FDR was just riding Hoover's policy on the New Deal?

Oh, and I to answer the thread directly I think any right-wing person in the arts who gets lauded. Has there ever been a "critically acclaimed" art or artist who was liked exlusively by "the right"? No. If that were the case they wouldn't be critically acclaimed, right?

But the Republicans do get credit for expaning the government / public sector.

ha. hahaha.

I have a gay friend that insists that Eliot was "one of the boys." He reads "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as the narrative of repressed gay man. While I can definitely see such a reading being justified, I'm not sure if there is enough evidence to say he was. (The other evidence I've heard to support this are the allusions to homoerotic passages in Dante that Eliot uses). What do you all think of this.

It's true that Eliot had gay/bisexual left-leaning friends (ie. Virginia Woolf), so I guess some liberals like him. I like him.

yeah, it's for these reasons we have the useful 'things are beyond left and right' cliche.

i mean of course catholics are conservative, in their sexual politics and more often than not in their politics more broadly. their whole schtick is against rational secularism (ie the historical left, inheritor of the french revolution).

tuomas' point re the lutherans is interesting -- you would imagine that the lutherans would have no time at all for the state, would you not?

I don't think expanding the military is an inherently liberal/left principle! Liberal/left doesn't mean that you want big government in every sector regardless of what it does (otherwise fascists would be the ultimate leftists). Nor does it prove that Democrats are further right than Republicans just because the economy does better under them! If anything, it could seem to suggest that (slightly) liberal policies actually work economically.

john currin.

(perfect neo-con, a la adam curtis "power of nightmares" defn.)

I was referring the "mainstream liberal-left". Not the mainstream as a liberal place necessarily.

The "stock markets perform better under Democrats" thing is documented here (CNN) and here (New York Times).

Wow, that's really quite an amazing study. One thing I have with it is if it takes into account who has control of Congress at the time. Would Reagan get credit for the 1980s despite Democrats being in control of the houses, etc?

that's a bit of a red herring, considering Reagan's economic policies were enthusiastically backed (at least in the first term) by a cooperative majority of "Reagan Democrats" and Republicans (the raising of the nat'l debt ceiling, etc.)

so you could really put any conservative OR right-wing artist in here and it wd work