I'm listening to Jonathan Keeperman on Ross Douthat's podcast in an episode called "The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive":
The quote above is Keeperman's. Douthat responds: "Then you’re saying all great art is somehow right wing." He thinks there can be some great art that is "left coded," but he agrees about "Girls," because "it’s a scabrous satire of a particular kind of upper middle class lifestyle in a liberal city."
Keeperman denies that he's saying "if I like it, therefore it’s right wing art, or if it tells the truth [it's right wing art]." Click on the embedded video if you want to hear Keeperman clarify or hear Douthat wedge in the concept of "vitalism" ("a celebration of individuality, strength, excellence, and an anxiety about equality and democracy as... enemies of human greatness").
That reminds me of the time — back in 2005 — I incurred the wrath of lefties by saying "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."
But back to "Girls." Why talk about "Girls" now? The reason for me is that Lena Dunham has a new essay in The New Yorker: "Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life. It took me several decades to realize that I could go my own way."
["Girls"] cemented me, in the minds of everyone I met, as a New York girl through and through. How could they have known that the safest I’d ever felt in New York was either hiding under the covers or pretending to be someone else under klieg lights? The character I played, Hannah Horvath, thought that New York held the key to all her dreams—but, tellingly, she’d grown up in Michigan.... I wasn’t a natural New Yorker, and yet I had a New Yorker’s certainty that there really wasn’t anywhere else to go....
Dunham has relocated in London.
The three-decade fight to mold myself to the city is over. In Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” about her own decision to leave New York for her native California, she writes that New York is best suited to the very young. My grandmother said that it was no place for a child. All I know for sure is that it was simply no place for me—at least, not forever. And that’s O.K....
A far cry from Douthat's "vitalism"?
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Adam Driver flourishes. Only one from that show who is killing it still.
The Girls TV show is over thirteen years old.
Plus these dudes don't look like macho men to me. They look like wimps. And the super trucks, scummy beards and even an arsenal of weapons isn't going to change that. If these dudes are talking about how vital masculinity is, they need to man up.
"Plus these dudes don't look like macho men to me. They look like wimps."
Scroll back to the beginning of the podcast. The show begins with Douthat murmuring appreciatively about Keeperman's luxuriant head of hair.
"telling the truth about the world in a way that is not compromised by artistic or ideological preferences" A weird definition. All art depends on the application of "artistic preferences." So how do we tell a piece of art is not "compromised" by them?
Anyway, all great art may be "right wing," but most right-wing art is not great.
When Joe Rogan, RFK, and Tulsi Gabbard were considered right-wing, it seemed like the line was stabilizing. Maybe Bill Maher would slide over, but that was about it. If the TV show, "Girls" is now labeled as right-wing, what remains as left-wing?
Spiros said...
The Girls TV show is over thirteen years old.
and remember Sex and the City? the babies They aborted would be in their mid twenties now..
So, if Carrie and Charlotte could be (should be) grandmothers now.
How did we convince the West to commit genetic suicide?
Randomizer said...
When Joe Rogan, RFK, and Tulsi Gabbard were considered right-wing, it seemed like the line was stabilizing. Maybe Bill Maher would slide over, but that was about it. If the TV show, "Girls" is now labeled as right-wing, what remains as left-wing?
5/5/25, 8:10 AM
—————————
The guy who thinks he knows how many dolls a little girl should have.
Will any story with a protagonist end up being right wing? No, not as long as you put that character in a system of structural inequality.
I recently rewatched the film "Grapes of Wrath." That was plainly left wing. The hero's journey was learning that the structure exists and how it works.
I asked Grok, "What is the argument that the film "Grapes of Wrath" is actually right wing?"
I got an amazingly good answer: https://x.com/i/grok/share/VO3hCLcHYcyeKADcViFhakxHM
How did we convince the West to commit genetic suicide?
Well, that show had something to do with it. Only Pretty Woman can compete with it for the most corrosive cultural influence on the souls of our young women.
When an ostensibly Left-wing artist stumbles into capturing the truth--whether it's Dunham portraying the empty existence of the BoBos in NYC or Maher's humor about the latest Woke absurdity--is result "right wing art"? Or has the artist, by refusing to self-censor, irrevocably entered a path to becoming a "right-wing" artist? If reality itself is right-wing, what does that suggest about what it is to be Progressive?
Calling Girls is right-wing is a bit much. It portrayed the idealized left-wing lifestyle of the young hipster as empty and unsatisfying, so I suppose if right is simply the absence of glorified left, then Girls is right. But only if that's what it means.
I was urging Althouse readers to watch "Girls" while it was still on because the show was a magnificent satire of the urban hipster ethos.
It was interesting to read the 2005 post and comments - if hard to follow, maybe because it's early and I wasn't carefully noting commenters' names or maybe because some commenters have changed handles over time and Blogger shows their new handles (I'm speaking of when Althouse or others would address a commenter by handle and I didn't recall seeing anything from that person).
The point seemed so clear: the impulse to create, for some, must be followed. Great artists, in serving that impulse (or feeding that monster?), following where it leads requires not (necessarily) honoring cultural fences, shibboleths, or norms. Left-wing thinking, on the other hand, requires (metaphorically and sometimes literally) a land declaration, acknowledgement of privilege, and statement of personal identity before you can get around to creating something: you must admit the structures of oppression before you can say what you want to say. And if what you want to say doesn't speak about those structures of oppression, then you're going to have to follow the forms explicitly and actually do the land declaration, etc.
I've mentioned before the time I visited the Tate Gallery a few years back and saw the Turner (new artist) Award winner that year: a piece about 7 feet high, very colorful, with images and names here and there, propped on what appeared to be elephant feet. Next to it was a loooong interpretive panel explaining how the artist had used this and that medium to make this and that point, who the images were, what events the names referred to - basically explained every bit of the work. It was an interesting-looking piece and it was explicitly anti-colonialist and all that... and it elicited absolutely no emotion from me; it was, in the end, a hodgepodge of heavy-handed symbolism that nevertheless got nowhere without the interpretive panel.
And then there's Guernica, you know?
I suppose if right is simply the absence of glorified left, then Girls is right. But only if that's what it means.
Grapes of Wrath seems to me to apply here. I read our host's Grok exchange about whether it could be interpreted as right-wing, and then I cast my mind way back to when I had to read it (ahem, it's not one of those novels I choose to return to), and what came back to me was my perplexity that it was so obviously intended to be left-wing, but it gave such a cheerless, monochrome, unappealing view of what life under socialism would be.
It is my opinion that although I'm sure Steinbeck was trying to make the case for socialism, or at least against capitalism, the bleahness of it operates (or could operate) as satire... and that's not nothing. At least, it made tender-hearted middle-school me think harder about whether socialism really was the answer.
Shorter Douthat: anything not solidly left-wing is far-right.
All the scenes of girls having bad sex are definitely right-wing. Watching all these accomplished college grad women reduced to barely-consenting sperm catchers must be intensely gratifying for a rightie.
JSM
Wow - what a blast from the past reading the old post that Ann linked. So many great commenters that are no longer commenting here (as far as I know), and such a (generally) highbrow discussion atmosphere, which has devolved over time over the polarizing subject of politics (and I include myself in the latter). In a way, it seems inevitable. To pick out one name, Simon Kenton had a great writing style. Representing the exception are comments from ‘Anonymous’ and ‘aimia’ near the end of the thread.
I love that 2005 post and debate. Wonder where I was then.
I know where Meade was. His comment earned a: meade: Well observed.
Whiskeybum said...
Well said. The contrast between the past and the present stands out to me as well.
Ross Douthat? My God, you actually seek him out?
I love that 2005 post and debate. Wonder where I was then.
I was here then, under another moniker, but I don't recall that post. A pity I missed it. I would have enjoyed participating.
I was here too, I'm pretty sure, but, then as now, I tended to skip the Dylan posts. I did expect to see more familiar names - I think, of those who no longer seem to be commenting here, vbspurs was the only one I recognized. (Surely that can't be our present Vicki!)
All the scenes of girls having bad sex are definitely right-wing. Watching all these accomplished college grad women reduced to barely-consenting sperm catchers must be intensely gratifying for a rightie.
I say this as the right-wing father of a daughter a bit past college age: it's profoundly disturbing, not gratifying. She is surrounded by worthless, wicked men who treat women like wads of tissue paper, and the women who willingly serve as their temporary receptacles. She won't live her life like that, and it is very discouraging to her in her search for her life partner.
She's not at the point of panicked baby-rabies yet, but she knows she's not getting any younger and the prospects for a decent faithful husband and family are not getting any better.
My heart aches for her, and all the other girls who were persuaded by the dreck from the Hollywood sewer to put soul-crushing careers and self-centered you-go-girl solipsism above a happy home and family.
Quick question for the host and all commenters: Is the origininal Monty Python's Flying Circus from the late 1960s right wing or just funny?
"It was interesting to read the 2005 post and comments - if hard to follow, maybe because it's early and I wasn't carefully noting commenters' names or maybe because some commenters have changed handles over time and Blogger shows their new handles (I'm speaking of when Althouse or others would address a commenter by handle and I didn't recall seeing anything from that person)."
Did you see where I responded to "lmeade"?
That was 4 years before I met L. Meade in the flesh.
The left imposes codes on their artists, rules and boundaries, which is why being an artist and a loyal leftie is very difficult.
I remember one or possibly more Dylan comments, and I think that it is pretty apparent that Dylan chaffed at the bit that the left was trying to put in his mouth.
The thing about "Girls" was that it showed up Lena's character, Hannah, in the end. Hannah, like Lena, was pretty much left-wing in everything, but in the end the series turns against her, as "Seinfeld" turned against its characters in the finale. Hannah's assumptions and desires came into conflict with reality throughout the series, but one wished her well and hoped for the best until the big slap-down at the end.
I had more to say about this but wouldn't want to spoil the ending any more than I may already have. Was the rebuke really absolute and definitive though? If you watched "Girls" or "Seinfeld" for the complete run of the series, doesn't that say something for the characters? "Girls" was a collaboration between rebel Lena Dunham and family man Judd Apatow. That conflict enriched the series. I wouldn't label Apatow conservative or rightwing in any partisan or political sense though.
"The Grapes of Wrath" is a left-wing book and movie. But director John Ford is a by-word for Americana and the conservatism of John Wayne. Going into WWII, we wanted and needed American epics and Grapes of Wrath fit the bill. Democracy was on the side of the Joads and the other Okies. Plus, when the movie was shown in the USSR as an illustration of how bad things were for America's poor, the Russians marveled that the Dust Bowl refugees actually had their own automobiles.
"How did we convince the West to commit genetic suicide?"
Those examples were never the West, they were noveau riche pseudo-sophisticates, ennui-laded over-sexualized dandies not innovators. The kind the West always has had to resist in forming its progress.
"My [Lena Dunham's] grandmother said that it [New York] was no place for a child." Is Grandma who caught Little Lena shoving pebbles into her baby sister's hoohah?
"What I'm characterizing as left wing is the belief that everyone ought to be concerned about everybody else's place in the world. "
This from the 2005 althouse blog post. The problem with these discussions is the lack of commonly shared definitions. Althouse provided hers. I'll give mine and say that "Rightwing" doesn't mean supporting Big Business or refusing the use the Government to help the poor and the working class.
Rightwing is against massive demographic change and for everyone working like serfs so a few rich people can make one more billion. There's nothing "Rightwing" about George Soros or Mark Cuban.
Almost all great art is individualistic. It arises from the artist wanting to express his own world view. Sometimes that cooincides with what the power elite think, and sometimes it doesn't.
Girls was indeed subversively, unconsciously right-wing, and nothing proves it more than the Sex and The City sequel, And Just Like That. Imagine being fifty and still looking for the best vibrator while celebrating your child's sex change. Oh, and you have a mansion and very rich minority friends now. Yes, I'll watch anything. Except Ross Douthat podcasts.
I still think it was peak liberal unthinkable when News Anchor Brian Williams praised his Girls' actress daughter's on-screen analingus after a special viewing of it in a theater with important people from his industry.
Remember his fateful last broadcast words, after his NBC suspension for lying, then demotion to MSNBC, then to some obscure Amazon show: after calling Trump voters "a great darkness" spreading across the land, he said to his viewers: "without you, there is no us."
Probably the most honest thing that ever crossed his lips. Or his daughter's bum.
“To be a great artist is inherently right wing."
Every half way reasonable person is “right wing” in their personal life, no matter what weirdo politics flows from their face spigot.
Harvard faculty in the non dei fields do not trans their kids, the kids are trained to be wealthy.
Grapes of Wrath might also be seen as an indictment of the centralized, collectivist federal government land policy that incentivized mass migration to the west to increase farming but instead stripped the prairies of their protective native grasses, causing the dust bowl that drove the Judds from their home.
Tina Trent said...
“Grapes of Wrath might also be seen as an indictment of the centralized, collectivist federal government land policy that incentivized mass migration to the west to increase farming but instead stripped the prairies of their protective native grasses, causing the dust bowl that drove the Judds from their home.”
C’mon, trust the science: Rain follows the plough.
Every half way reasonable person is “right wing” in their personal life, no matter what weirdo politics flows from their face spigot.
That is the first of Robert Conquest's three laws of politics: "1. Everyone is conservative about the things he knows best."
The other two are :
"2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
I watched the entire first season of Girls. At the time I thought that this was some conservative psyop to get this show in the air (or whatever it is to get a show in HBO).
Episode 1 starts with Lena Durhams character being cutoff by her parents. They tell her she has to get a job and pay her own bills.
Another storyline had the promiscuous character lamenting about getting an STD.
The Virginia on the show (they had a Virginia on the show) was not mocked. She was shown as timid like there were some things she did not get.
Lena's character wants a boyfriend. Adam Driver plays the character at one point he is yelling at her "what do you want?! A boyfriend?" because she is too full of herself to ask.
There were more conservative morals and object lessons displayed as object lessons on that first season than I ever recall seeing in any other modern media.
Grapes of wrath is a pro-union, pro-Government movie. The joads are driven off their land by bankers who owned the land and want to consolidate the farms to make more $$. Then in California they are exploited by Big landowners who pay their pickers and pittance and then try to screw them over with outrageous prices at the "Company Store" and giving them dirty ramshackle shacks to live in.
When they try to form a labor union, the Big Landowners hire goons to attack the strikers.
Its an devasting attack on "The Free Market" and "Losertarianism". I'm sure that's why Ross Doughnut disliked it.
From 2005; " Has it come to this, that the insane now have tenured positions in law schools across the country?".
'Fraid so.
"Jesus, what an absolute load of bollocks. Artists are (in)famously left wing. Reading Althouse and Reynolds is like stepping through the looking glass. They say the most inane things as if they are just God’s own truth."
This from the "men can have babies too" crowd...
Why I Broke Up with New York/Most people accept the city’s chaos as a toll for an expansive life.
Like domestic abuse, some continually make excuses for their abuser.
My insight into the Joads is that those big happy blond surfer dudes of the 60's were their descendants. The only part of book that impressed me was the part describing the destruction of agricultural output by the Feds.
Wayback in 2005 Althouse said, " I blog as an art project and an exercise in personal freedom."
I have to say Ann's art project is a thousand times better than the banana duct-taped to canvas. AmIright?
Tina Trent said...
Grapes of Wrath might also be seen as an indictment of the centralized, collectivist federal government land policy that incentivized mass migration to the west to increase farming but instead stripped the prairies of their protective native grasses, causing the dust bowl that drove the Judds from their home.
5/5/25, 1:35 PM
Pore Jud is daid, pore Jud Fry is daid...!
London does have a subway full of savages, so she should feel right at home there.
I remember being an obnoxious grad student and thinking/saying: "Oh wonderful, it's another 'The Individual vs. The Community' class / seminar / lecture" and sighing, thinking these purple dittomaster syllabi were just the most cliched topics from the '60s and couldn't we do something new.
But those old professors were on to something (doing the math, they must have been WWII or Silent generation, not Boomers). It all really IS about Individual vs. Community--hashing out where the boundaries are, how much one gets to impose on the other, what each can expect from the other, etc.
Great art requires immense Individualism, as the 'great' artist is one who is doing something that his community is not doing and who therefore is weakening group cohesion and solidarity. In 2025 this kind of individualism is coded as right-wing, but for those guys who'd been through WWII or the Korean War and then taught through the '60s, it was coded as left-wing: "free to be you and me" and all that.
One of the unexpected fruits of covid may be that the culture finally abandons the Modernist filter: "reject any sentence that has ever been written before unless you are being intentionally ironic / sarcastic about it." People in their early 20s and younger have very little experience of any of the great traditions and so don't find then limiting. In fact, they seem angry about the huge gaps in their educations and are starting to seek out their cultural birthrights. It would be beautifully ironic if the shitty 'Cultural Revolution' of 2017-24 with its destructive peak in 2020 ended up finally putting tModernism and Post-Modernism out of our misery, clearing the way for something old.
“Girls” was a fat-wing show.
Girls largely demonstrated how soul-sucking Manhattan-Brooklyn "Sex in City" lifestyles are for the privileged white college-educated upper-middle class girls who flock to NYC to "live their aspirations". Read NY Mag article from several weeks ago, about aging young adults in their mid-30s, still significantly subsidized by their aging baby-boomer parents, so as to afford that "Girls" existence. We've friends who are literally doing this now, for their mid-30s princess, married and yet still subsidized by two sets of baby-boomer senior citizen parents, so as to afford the Brooklyn Heights pre-war coop fantasy.
""The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Offensive"
Think that was Punk rock.
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