RIGHT WING KITSCH – OR WHY NURSING SCHOOL IS GOOD FOR YOU

Sadly, old habits die hard. So instead of spending time on Twitter, I’ve been spending some time on Substack. And since I’ve “liked” a few pieces of right-leaning material, I am now bombarded by a feed on right-wing posts, blogs, notes, and comments.

Through this experience, I’ve come to realize that a new category of content has formed – right-wing kitsch. Kitsch is an interesting phenomenon, but a little difficult to define. It is generally considered a kind of banal and imitative form of art that is nonetheless also naive and lacking self awareness.

It is also a fairly modern phenomenon because it’s directly related to mass consumption. There is no 18th-century kitsch, but there is a lot of late 19th-century kitsch. I’m not an expert but I would say the first real appearance of mass kitsch was by the end of the 19th century. The massively influential romantic movement, combined with new means of mass production, resulted in a cornucopia of prints of angels, little boys, little girls, babies, and dogs.

There’s nothing wrong about kitsch necessarily. And surely little prints of boys and girls are better than Beyonce’s dancing boobs. But kitsch, when taken seriously by its generators, tends to poison the well. Suddenly all figurative art is at a dead end, incapable of producing anything serious.

Right-wing posting on social media has also undergone a similar devolution into kitsch, most likely for the same reasons. We now have a class of bloggers and podcasters who attempt, sometimes successfully, to make money by generating a lot of right-wing views. Like a 19th-century painter who discovered that little children sell, we now have an endlessly banal churn of thoughts and pronouncements about the “Total State,” or “Power,” or “elites,” or a “Schmittian moment,” or the “friend/enemy distinction.”

Here’s an example of an account that just keeps churning out this stuff:

The above is only one example from one account, and if I weren’t busy with work and taking care of a baby I could have published many more. So trust me on this, or just go on Twitter or Substack and see for yourself.

How should the intelligent right-wing person relate to all of this? How to react to a movement that’s took a hard dive into repetitive, predictable, and not particularly pleasant kitsch? In art, Modernism was a reaction to what many artists perceived as the unsalvageable state of “normal” art. Poetry became T. S. Elliot, painting became Picasso, and novels became James Joyce.

Personally, I am not a fan of Modernism and see it as a sad surrender of the fine arts to an obscure form of ugliness. In political thought the equivalent would perhaps be a kind of jargon-ladden high prose mostly charged by esoteric messaging, to create a barrier between ideas and the lesser minds turning them into kitsch. Not a fan.

So for now, all we can do is mock this type of blogging/podcasting/posting, take it for what it is – kitsch – and not provide money to its generators. And out of simple “Love thy neighbor,” let’s wish the bloggers-podcasters to enroll in nursing school and never go online again.