Right-wing Conservatives Cannot Make Good Art

Faint, acrid, tangy. There is a smell from conservative art. The sugary synthetic aftertaste pretending to be nourishment. The scent of a humid, locked room where people are agreeing loudly with one another about what they already believe and call it culture. Alright, alright. I concede my blanket statement from the get-go: Evelyn Waugh wrote devastating novels of a decaying world. Flannery O'Connor was a devout Catholic who gave us grotesque, searingly moral fiction. T.S. Eliot's politics were reprehensible—anti-Semitic, reactionary, arch-traditionalist—and The Waste Land remains one of the great English-language poems of the twentieth century. J.G. Ballard called himself a right-wing republican libertarian while writing transgressive, visionary fiction. Clint Eastwood made Westerns and crime films with moral gravity, and he's a registered Republican. But these artists aren't making conservative art. They're artists focused on craft, the truth, and the terrible human mystery of being…