4.23 - Formal Conservatism

I just read a piece called "The Long Con," a Baffler article from 2012 about the mendacity of Mitt Romney's stump speeches and their roots in the unscrupulous advertising culture of far-right-wing websites. In the article, Rick Perlstein catalogs a murderer's row of lying fringe conservatives. One of them is introduced in this way:

Mark Skousen, a Mormon, is the nephew of W. Cleon Skousen, author of the legendarily bizarre Birchite tract The Naked Communist, which claimed to have exposed the secret forty-five-point plan by which the Soviet Union hoped to take over the United States government. (Among the sinister aims laid out in the document: gain control of all student newspapers; “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”)

I found this passage hilarious, obviously, and also redolent of one of the more puzzling motifs that Ayn Rand wrote into Atlas Shrugged: the character of the modern, effete composer who no longer thinks that melody is necessary to put in his music. This, to Rand, is an offensive approach to aesthetics. She wants her art to look like things and her music to sound like things, dammit. Somehow this preference is presented as an extension of her principle that A=A, even though you couldn't find two more different approaches to cognition than grasping the fact of a tautology and assessing the merits of a piece of organized noise. So dumb.

What's up with these far-right loonies wanting their to avoid "meaningless forms" in their art so much? I think it's a pretty straightforward answer. We've all heard of the Disgust Principle (I think it's called that) which posits that conservatism and liberalism are somewhat hard-wired based on the ease with which someone is disgusted by unpleasantness. Someone did a study that found conservatives more squeamish around images of maggots and other pestilential stuff than liberals were. Could this also extend to art?

My dad is the walking embodiment of the claim that conservatism corresponds to and actually answers an innate dislike of unfamiliarity. And from him, I know that his dislike of the sight of two guys kissing extends just as readily to a dislike of abstract art, and music you have to work to listen to, and other non-traditional forms of expression. In him, they are part of one insistence on cohesion. Interesting that in these two other examples, we see the same impulse.

I bet this runs pretty uniformly through most conservatives, and may even offer an answer to the one question hanging over all of it: what, exactly separates libtard from contard? Answer: the lib can handle abstract art.