The Conservative Need to Retake Our Culture

Conservatives and Culture - First Things

In a recent talk at the American Enterprise Institute, Dana Gioia remarked that “in the past half century, American conservatism has retreated from artistic culture.” He traces that retreat and notes: By the year 2000, rightly or wrongly, conservatives became associated with defunding, censorship, restriction, and complaint. The right seemed to be banning novels instead of writing them. It banned artwork rather than creating new visions of beau…

The conservative need to retake our culture

Conservative intellectuals have long lamented leftist dominance of culture. They recognize the danger of ceding culture to people who disagree with them on everything and watching their creations erode the founding values of the country. The focus is mostly on television, film, and other dominant forms of middle- and low-brow entertainment. But conservatives should engage with higher culture, too. Great literature, old and new, must be protected…

Robert Novak and the Problem of Contemporary Conservative Media

In a landscape of hot takes, memes, and secondary reactions to legacy media reporting, it pays to recall the real conservative journalism of a figure like Robert Novak.