Why Culture Has Drifted to the Right
The last few years have proved that the left's dominance over culture is in a downtrend, and it's time for everyone to admit it.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone out there! The added time off of work finally gave me a chance to finish this lengthy piece that I had been working on since early November. As always, thanks for reading, and please leave a comment so we can discuss!
We have more cowboy-coded media today than at any other point in my life. About a year ago, I wanted to understand why these tropes are returning, and what it meant for American culture. What I did not expect was to find a direct line to a wider vibe shift that played a prominent role in the election of Donald Trump.
My grandfather was obsessed with America’s first explosion of westerns. He loved the optimistic storylines where the hero kills the villain and saves the town. They were fairy tales, in many ways, but that is what America wanted to see at the time. They were popular, and Hollywood milked that cash cow for decades.
Eventually, this trend became oversaturated in the late 60s. The Vietnam War would make a serious dent in America’s sense of patriotism and the conservative cultural strength that kept these shows in fashion. The western era came to an end, but the right would continue their cultural and political dominance. There were only a few TV channels after all, and it was quite easy to project conservative viewpoints to the populace.
This would only begin to swing left in the 90s, when the Internet and cable TV would enable an explosion of alternative worldviews to take shape in Hollywood. Grunge, hip hop and pop music would foreshadow the left’s surge to popularity. At the same time, wealthy, conservative media magnates lost touch with average Americans, who wanted to break from the current paradigm. Cultural consumers were seeing more diversity than they had ever seen before and they liked it a lot more than my grandpa’s favorite shows.
Fast forward to the last decade and you’ll observe that coastal, progressive viewers have enjoyed an explosion of high-brow television and film. This content has grown to dominate mainstream Hollywood studios, conversations and awards and these stories are firmly made in the progressive worldview. The content is often critical of capitalism, American imperialism, police officers, colonizers, etc. In many ways, shows such as Succession, House of Cards and Veep highlight the corruption and greed throughout our country.
Gone were the simple fairy tales of my grandfather’s era of television. In fact, most left-aligned content went the opposite direction, hoping to “wake up” and disturb audiences about the inconvenient truths of our society. And I will say truths, despite what I am about to say next.
The problem with this truth is that it only appealed to a fraction of the country, and content was perceived to be so one-sided that conservatives publicly lamented that Hollywood had grown too political. In the process, Hollywood lost influence. A majority of the country claimed that movies and TV shows intentionally suppressed the viewpoints of everyday Americans. Meanwhile, Hollywood’s content machine, largely driven by progressive artists, conditioned itself to play towards this left-aligned audience at the expense of the flyover states.
Culture, which is upstream of politics, is driven by a number of factors. The left seems to understand the importance of cultural dominance, even if I am now arguing that their foothold has lost ground. We have thousands of left-aligned books in the windows of metropolitan book stores. Left-aligned shows are featured on flagship streaming platforms. Left-aligned professors on college campuses are the dominant faction.
So, how did all of this begin to change? It’s actually simple. Hollywood isn’t making enough money. Its ideas have grown stale, with studios lacking original ideas and leaning on sequels to keep modest amounts of cash coming in. The industry is getting increasingly desperate, and that is where we found ourselves before conservative-coded content inched its way back into the mainstream.
Don’t believe me? Just watch this trailer for Twisters, one of the year’s top blockbusters. Notice the music choice, cowboy hats and ridicule of liberal intellectuals. Oh, and Little House on the Prairie is coming back. My grandpa would be proud.
The “Sheridan-verse” and its pioneering dominance
There is one man that saw this coming and kicked this cultural shift into action. His name is Taylor Sheridan. As a writer and producer, his creations have exploded onto movie screens and home televisions. He is now the architect of what some call the “Sheridan-verse” in his series of Yellowstone spinoffs.
In a few short years, he leap-frogged thousands of talented, left-aligned screenwriters in Hollywood who have been cranking out shows that have followed the recent playbook. How has he done this? Rather than write for those same coastal media critics or Hollywood executives, he wrote for middle America.
What’s interesting about Sheridan is that he is not your average conservative. If you look closely, you’ll see that his worldview is an updated version of my grandpa’s Americana. He is not a ruthless fascist or a gleeful colonizer. Those who ignored his rise to fame likely assumed that his stories were simple recreations of the fairy tales my grandpa enjoyed such as Bonanza. But once you watch some of the content for yourself, you realize that he breaks with that tradition to share an updated vision that breaks with mainstream conservatism and therefore feels interesting to middle America without feeling overly progressive. Some highlights of his stories include:
Indigenous People: A respect of native cultures, including blunt examples of how they were betrayed by America and how their strength and knowledge was intentionally wiped out by ruthless institutions headed by greedy white men
Environmentalism: How delicate the balance we have with our environment is, often highlighted by the ways that we damage nature for the sake of progress and growth
Anti-Corporate: Stories of how impersonal bureaucracies and shareholder capitalism have destroyed the dynamism of small-knit communities and the American individual
Diversity: His characters come from various racial and class backgrounds, and you can argue that he has more capably adopted the diverse representation trends than many left-aligned creators have
He is also critical of centralized government, and the misguided campaigns they’ve conducted in the name of power, critiquing things such as the War on Drugs and Wall Street. Even his latest show, dubbed Landman, is more of an apologetic look at the people keeping our oil-based society running. His conservative audience agrees with him on many of these themes, highlighting the cultural progress that the left has gained since conservatives last controlled the airwaves. But more importantly, he has actually cemented new touchstones in conservative-coded culture. Touchstones that you may even call progressive.
That said, he knows when to kick nuance to the curb by including a ham-fisted scene where a character hops in their obscenely large pickup truck to put the liberals in their place about the tangible environmental costs of veganism. People like their entertainment!
The Creation of the Left’s Cultural Echo Chamber
The critical shows that left-wing Americans love have astounding cultural influence within their own echo chamber, but “normie” viewership and their influence on the right is at a low point. Let’s look at a head-to-head comparison. Succession, which was dominant on the coasts while Yellowstone dominated overall viewership. This sets up the financial issues in Hollywood, as you can only get so far creating content for a minority of the country, and cost-conscious executives are beginning to realize it.
The economic uncertainty of Hollywood isn’t necessarily a problem for those on the left, until they lose an election and find themselves shocked at the country they live in. It turns out that the left’s deepening echo chamber painted a different picture about America, and fewer people are looking at that picture than they thought.
What should scare progressives is what comes next. The existence of an increasingly divergent echo chamber will weaken its participants over time. For example, Disney has experienced flop after flop in its various properties such as Star Wars and Marvel because they focused their scripts and marketing on stories written for coastal progressives and not middle America. These disappointments have spawned their own culture war conflicts, but the reality is that they were nowhere near as impactful and profitable as the original Star Wars, Disney and Marvel movies that made billions by appealing to all types of Americans.
This issue has echoed across many sectors of Hollywood, and I think we will be experiencing a change in how blockbuster films are made in the coming years. If this takes place, one of the institutions that the left has relied upon, will be playing a different tune for a different crowd.
There are venues where this echo chamber breaks down, and some instances of echo chambers being created on the right that can be just as damaging for conservative goals. Perhaps I’ll save this for a future essay on other aspects of the right’s cultural successes in the last decade. It will be a multi-dimensional piece that looks into the rise of self-help content, long-form podcasts, new media, Elon Musk, sports and hustle culture. For now, please give a read to
’s excellent piece on Joe Rogan, which does a good job at outlining the political opportunities that liberals missed due to their own echo chamber.
What’s Next for Left-aligned Media?
This isn’t one of those pundit moments where I simply ask the most progressive voices to sit back and be grateful for what they’ve gained since 1990. I am also not saying that creators should start making fun of LGBTQ people to earn a quick buck. However, accepting this lost cultural influence can serve as a valuable first step to recalibrating political and cultural messaging.
It is not easy to move culture in a progressive direction. You are fighting against decades of history and comforting fairy tales. To actually move the needle on social issues through art, these stories need to speak to middle America and coastal progressives in a way that is not patronizing or scolding. They should also be entertaining and unique if you can accomplish it! If you need an example of this, look no further than the previously mentioned Sheridan, who has actually moved more conservatives left on issues of capitalism, colonialism and America’s foreign policy than anyone writing for Succession has.
The last few years contain many lessons that will help progressives understand why they lost both cultural influence and the 2024 election. I am intrigued to see whether these lessons are heeded, and who among this cohort can take advantage of the opportunity. I foresee this to be be a challenging time for many creative figures, because the same people who enjoyed their moment at the top of the cultural pyramid are not necessarily the people who can reclaim that spot from below.