although i bet this guy considers himself a "classical liberal" or some shit and therefore immune from his rule
I think classical liberal is a hilarious dodge because anyone even semi literate about the history of liberalism will pretty much take that to mean you are some Rosseau ass hippy (unlikely) or some genocidal colonial maniac (likely)
I once got into an argument with someone unironically calling himself a Hobbesian
When you commit to human instrumentality but then make the most boring reality possible
I think there was a time when conservative sentiments did have a strong influence in the cultural sphere at some time in the past. There are some entire genres that are fundamentally conservative or reactionary, like the Western and the Slasher.
But I feel the influence of conservatism in the cultural sphere has waned in inverse proportion to how much they intensify their victimization/martyrdom complex. Increasingly the conservatives and reactionary have withdrawn to what is essentially their own exclusive media sphere - ie Hallmark movies, evangelical Christian propaganda films, CHUD operator shit like Range 15, the shitty patriotic country music assembly line, etc - which gets shit tons of play almost exclusively within insular conservative circles rather than having a wider cultural impact and influence. They get pissed that "culture" has expanded beyond the extremely narrow confines of aesthetics and themes that they deem "acceptable", and so essentially secede from "the culture" and in turn surrender their real influence within cultural institutions such as Hollywood in order to make mass-produced, self-gratifying, boring crap for their own consumption and little else. And it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of victimhood, grievance and resentment, conspiracy theory consciousness, and culture war.
Paolo Freire also makes the point in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that conservatism is an anti-creative ideology.
Good points but
Conservatives co-opted country music and turned it into corporate sludge about big trucks and the flag.
Country music was stitched together Frankenstein Monster style out of different pre-existing folk music traditions as white settler propaganda. It's always been sludge, it's just been reduced to a thicker, gooey sludge
Conservatives either only take very surface level meaning from art or they interpret any number of wild bigoted brainwashing conspiracies. They want art to only be explicit and leave no room for interpretation. So they always miss the point of everything. There's no subtext and if there is subtext it's making you gay and communist.
