The world of American Arts and Letters is not a friendly place for voices hailing from right of center.
Most English Departments have marched in lockstep with a far-left world view for more than a generation and very few writers with a conservative perspective manage to survive the gauntlet of academic bias. Those who get by do so because they quickly learn to mask their perspective and focus on craft. Those unwilling to hide their perspective, just as quickly, find other academic pursuits.
In publishing, it gets no better. The small and alternative presses are dominated by people who have thrived in academia and major publishing houses are staffed by people who excelled rather than just thrived.
In the end, we have an academic environment, as well as small alternative and major publishing houses, speaking in a voice that sounds alien the majority of Americans. Is it no wonder that fewer and fewer Americans read?
Yes, there are a handful of conservative publishing houses but these tend to focus on politics and social issues rather than exploring the human condition through fiction.
The current literary scene lacks authors who offer a unique view into conservative interpretations of the world. We have an abundance of writers who create conservative caricatures designed primarily to resonate with popular culture but rarely can we find writers whose work we can walk away from knowing we have learned something.
It would be great to have a modern day Flannery O'Connor. We have several writers like Ton Wolfe and Mark Helprin whose spin on popular culture reflects the perspective of one who has been there and back - but where are examples of those who never left?
I invite others to discuss with me here, conservative authors and novelists and their perspectives.
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Comments: 17
You are quite right. Several times during my undergraduate education, it was made very clear to me and my classmates how welcome any conservative ideas were. I even ended up being accepted into (but not going to) graduate school, and part of my decision was based on my observation of how uninterested many of the professors and students were at examining all sides of an issue with a similar degree of judgment and criticism.
That said, I believe it is important not to undervalue the writings of conservative authors - or of anybody - who has left a way of life for an alternative, only to return. They bring valuable insight that is missing in the absolute sense from people who have spent their entire lives in one mindset. I would rather read why Tom Wolfe was compelled to become a liberal, and then a conservative again, than why some author has never given a second thought to spending their entire life with a leftist mindset.
I try to avoid politics on Gather because it mostly regurgitates what I hear all day long anyway, but I do enjoy finding a new perspective (left or right or center) that I seldom hear elsewhere. Thanks.
A brief glance at the industry reveals that, like other related fields like entertainment, what sells in the general market is what drives what's being published. Not some floppy liberal publisher saying "Let's keep conservative ideas suppressed"! For the mass consumer market, it's the publishers' assessment of what will sell.
For the academic market, universities give tenure to professors who publish, and tenured professors attract students who pay the bills and become alumnae and give money to the school.
If anything, drivel such as Ann Coulter's "books" would not have been published if what you were saying is true.
Now, rationalization to the side for a moment, is the dearth of conservative authors and books due to the fact that they prefer to get information from talk radio and Fox News? Or that they have a role model of a President who brags that he doesn't read? Well, gosh, I'm only kidding!
Knowing that you like to research your positions, I checked to see who Ann Coulter's publisher is: It's Crown Publishing, a division of Random House.
Among their distinguished imprints are included: Martha Stewart, Deepak Chopra, Suzanne Somers (from 3's Company) and Cynthia Lennon (John Lennon's first wife).
Some of their other titles include: Why do Men Have Nipples? and SuperStud.
Greg, you're right. Conservatives DO need their own publishing operation. How can a conservative author be taken seriously featured next to Suzanne Somers?
All very good points, but the type of conservative author he mentioned (Wolfe, Helprin) is not the type that Coulter represents. Coulter speaks for only a small segment of the conservative movement, and is repudiated entirely by many conservatives, just as Paul Krugman of the NY Times is embraced by some segment of the left and despised by a wide swath of it.
It is definitely true that universities pressure professors to publish; sometimes, that seems to be the only standard to which they are held. I had several professors who would simply not show up for class up to three or four times a semester. This was hardly the case for the majority of my professors, but it was widespread enough where it became noticeable. Nice work if you can get it.
I just don't see this vast left wing conspiracy to control the hearts and minds of the masses. Maybe during the Cold War (or during the McCarthy era) you could make a case for outside interests wrongly influencing public perspective.
In my estimation, most news outlets, publishing houses and media are all about market forces. Very few have an appetite to pander to left wing ideals at the cost of alienating their marketplace.
To me, this endless chatter I hear about left wing or liberal media seems like its simply right wing, conservative whining because they disagree.
Only my opinion for what it's worth...
You really missed the boat on this one. Tom Wolfe's doctoral thesis at Yale University was Communist Organizational Activity among American Writers, 1929-1942.. Wolfe documented how the party used social pressure to advance the career of leftist writers and destroy the career of conservative writers. Who you know and what "parties" you are invited to carries immense weight on whether you get published.
Some rather famous writers like John Dos Passos saw their careers tank after they ran afoul of this social set. George Orwell was almost one of them.
As for the tenure track of publish or perish, indeed that is the problem. If peer political pressure creates a barrier to publishing then a ratchet affect causes more and more professors and authors to be leveraged to the left.
I agree. I suppose my point was that someone who is immersed in a culture is the best voice of that culture. So whereas Tom Wolfe may write well about conservative issues and values, he is writing from the perspective of having been on the other side. Do not get me wrong this is not a bad perspective but if I were to read the story of an eskimo I would rather read the words of one who had never been south because once the journey south has been made, the perspective changes.
For what it's worth, I never said I buy into the conspiracy issue. In fact, I don't. Conspiracies tend, in my experience, to be theories developed by people to try and explain conveniently the apparent behavior of a complex system in a simplistic way, often for either their own comfort or at least controlled discomfort.
There was no conspiracy to keep me personally from going to graduate school. There is, as far as I believe, no conspiracy by the left to control the media (nor by the right; the left levels this charge at corporate America often.) Heck, I could handle a conspiracy.
What is infinitely harder to combat, and sadder, is when something is not a conspiracy but rather a cumulative effect. I am but one person among many, but my decision not to go to graduate school was partially based on fears that I would not be able to sustain an academic lifestyle. These fears were partially fed by established members of that lifestyle (tenured professors) who either subtly or not subtly made it clear that they would never approve of the tenure of someone who held certain viewpoints. The saddest and strongest part of any prejudice is that it lays buried in the human mind in a place that is hard to reach, and harder yet to stop. The same would be true for a minority student who, though not up against a true conspiracy, receives signals that his or her enrolling in a certain top program would be met with disfavor by colleagues. Or for a black family that is not blocked from buying a house on a given street, but is instead given the hard sell on other properties by a racist salesperson. There are six or more billion people on Earth making slight, subtle choices that often seem justifiable to them but are somewhat rooted in their own experiences and prejudices.
A perfect example comes in this anecdote. I was discussing with a TA of mine, back in 1997 or perhaps 1998, a student's theory that a 17th century poem was really an allegory for the mid-20th century events in Soviet Russia. The student could point to the Stalin figure and the Lenin figure and the Trotsky figure, even though this poem was written several hundred years before any of those fellows were born. This did not bother the student - or the TA - but it bothered me. I thought it was silly, and I think it is silly still. The TA compared this directly to how my being a Republican bothered him, even if his being a Democrat did not bother me. To him, this was a valid analogy. It would not be to every liberal, nor would my concern over this poem's interpretation be valid to every poet or historian.
I was born in a small town in Madison County, Illinois, a Democratic stronghold. He was born in Cuba, a communist stronghold. We were both raised in New Jersey. So many factors and tweaks exist to make us who we are today, that it would be disrespectful of me, and silly, to blame him as being part of anything so one-minded, twisted and hard-to-organize as a conspiracy.
And here I have broken my own "no politics on Gather" rule. I'm going back to writing about how much I hate camels. Thanks for the discussion. :)
I think I agree with you. I think that people's perspectives change over time (and you and I both have expressed how that happened), but that doesn't mean that there are forces preventing the conservative voices from being heard.
My only point is that I believe that the media and publishing powers that be are market driven. If enough people buy conservative writings, there's a market for it and it will be published. Other conservative writers will see these perspectives and will produce their works for publication and so on.
Again, I totally believe that, during the Cold War, communist forces probably did have undue influence on various aspects of life (I said as much in my comment), but I also beleive that the right wing, conservative movement in this country squelched even the "innocent" expressions of social change along with the obvious propaganda.
I'm sure there are lots of examples of this kind of thing happening in academia. Just this past week, I believe there were revelations that a conservative alumni organization at a major California university was "outed" for asking students (and paying them, I believe) for turning in professors in certain departments who lectured on Un-American activities.
I find those types of examples much more chilling than the examples you give.
And, I agree with you -- political discourse on Gather is rather poisonous at times. I try to limit myself to watching the few voices I respect, like Greg's. Otherwise, I'd rather stick to the fiction...
I do not believe that at all. One would think if that were the case we would have seen "The Passion of Christ II" instead of "Brokeback Mountain" coming out this winter, or a new "Left Behind" series produced by Random House rather than Tyndale House Publishers.
If profit were the sole motive than indeed we would witness such things -- but we do not, which begs for a new explanation.
The key to understanding this phenomena lays within Tom Wolfe's dissertation on the power of the Communist Party in Arts and Letters 50 years ago and the power of the left in Academia, Hollywood, Publishing and the Arts today.
The key is not conspiracy but society. People socialize with like people. People also tend to reward and punish each other for reasons that have nothing to do with artistic skill or business. In every field of endeavor there are social relationships that must be maintained and nurtured to assure success. As much as people in the arts value their role as outsiders, in reality they are very much insiders. Wolfe describes how cultural and political activists seized the social reins and controlled an industry.
In Hollywood today there are only a handful of actors and actresses who are openly conservative. Patricia Heaton once described sitting at a diner party where the conversation had descended into an orgy of Bush-bashing. She waited for a lull in the conversation then said quite loudly "I support Bush and am working for his re-election in 2004". She describes the reaction as being not unlike one would expect from having thrown-up onto the diner table. That single statement broke her artistic and business relationship with everyone at the party.
In recent years, the arts have become a focus of the culture wars and the people who people the arts have been systematically weaned down to a rather thin cultural slice. This slice is at odds with the majority and cultural realignment is in the wind.
A similar phenomena happened years ago with cable news. CNN, a company owned by the very liberal Ted Turner and his radical wife Jane Fonda, dominated cable news. CNN was not particularly a radical leftist organization, though they did air some reports that were clearly beyond the pale. What CNN was, was a company that hired staff who aired news driven by the culture of reporters rather than the culture of its audience. Reporters are, according to polls, far more liberal and radical than the population. The choices of news topics and the presentation of the news followed their cultural instincts and were successful as long as there were no alternatives. Then along came FOX News and CNN dropped in the ratings like a stone.
The moral of these stories is – the arts and media are not market driven, they are culturally driven by the people who people them. When these people become insular and shut down cultural diversity, re-alignment is inevitable.
And since I'm a little burned out on political debating, I'll just get us back on track by giving you my choices:
The one that immediately comes to mind is Sean Hannity. While he has written several good books, the ones that I know of are:
Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism and Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism Both are published by HarperCollins.
He also co-authored another one that I would like to read:
Voice of Reason: Why the Left and Right are Wrong
I also like Bill O'Reilly's book, which is published by Broadway: The O'Reilly Factor: The Good, the Bad, and the Completely Ridiculous in American Life I personally enjoy him, though I know there are a lot of people who don't. But the book isn't all about politics he also discusses his views on money, media, religion, race, and even sex.
Another "would like to read" is: Whatever It Takes: Illegal Immigration, Border Security by J.D. Hayworth and Joe Eule. It just came out this month and has been getting quite a bit of local attention because Hayworth is one of our State Reps here in Arizona. In fact, hearing him talk about the book and his views on illegal immigration on local TV and radio, was one of the reasons I decided to write my article.
Actually, what I hoped to find (do not think that I do not appreciate your references) would be authors who write fiction and plays from a conservative viewpoint.
One of the reasons why liberals thrive among the young and conservatives face an uphill battle is that liberals have grabbed the high ground of culture. It is one thing to argue a point; it is another thing to have a television character making life decisions on the basis of liberal or conservative values.
Humans do not function in a vacuum. We look around for models of behavior. If we are facing life-choices or just wondering what or how to be.....we look to the actions of our peers or to models....often these are fictional characters.
Literature, television, and the movies are really nothing more than the long tradition of telling stories so that people can learn how to behave. If all the behavior that our kids see is frolicking Hollywood liberals with lousy values...........well, Tom Wolfe writes about the consequences of that.
You know initially when I read this comment I thought, Oops! Guess I shoulda read through the article a little better., lol! And then I was going to let it go at that because I rarely read fiction (except here on Gather of course!) and I'm not familiar with Tom Wolfe.
But then tonight, I wasn't even thinking about it when all of a sudden Caspar Weinberger's book The Last Jihad? came to mind. What's interesting about Weinberger, who has now written several others, is that he writes not only from a conservative perspective, but for the purpose of advancing popular fiction that have traditional conservative values.
And I believe all of his recent books are also fictional and political thrillers, that in some way incorporate both international terror and then the ensuing struggle faced by our political leaders. Although they are fiction, this is not so different than what we have in real life! For example, we have international terror (aka al Qaeda and bin Laden). Then over here we have conservative political leaders who struggle with supporting Bush on the wiretapping and search engine subpoenas. On the one hand, it has become necessary to spy on the enemy, and on the other, it's almost contradictory to traditional conservative values that strive to maintain a system of limited government power, in order to preserve our freedoms and liberties. Fascinating stuff!
What was really fascinating for those who don't remember, was the fact that The Last Jihad ? was written before 9/11 took place - yet the first chapter is all about terrorists who use hijacked jets to strike U.S. In fact the book is really about what the future would look like if Saddam Hussein retained leadership in Iraq, and "the last jihad" is the eventual nuclear showdown he brings on with Israel and the U.S. I'd also love to read his other books, The Last Days?, The Ezekiel Option?, and Chain of Command too.?
I'm not sure why all those question marks appeared after the book titles in my last comment. It's probably something I did when I tried to make them in italics. For anyone looking for those books - none of them have a ? in the title....Sorry about that!
But hey, it's after midnight, so it's a wonder that I am even able to put two sentences together at this point. LOL!