Conservative pundits often love deriding the irrational arts path that many on the left head down, priding themselves on more concrete pursuits early on, which helps with important things like owning a house. Then in the next breath, that pride turns into a whine as they bemoan the sheer number of books and movies and television overflowing with leftist narratives.

Seems best to pick one. Art and the pursuit of it tend to involve irrationality, dreams, emotion, and stubbornness in the face of reality — various qualities that talking heads love deriding. I do it all the time, but that’s just self-hatred. Yet doing this discourages those who may share some of your ideology from entering the cultural fray, and leads to the sort of monoculture we find ourselves in now.
Yes, it can be silly to get an obscure arts or humanities degree, and no good day job should be taken for granted to boost dreams. But entertaining those impractical urges is what spurs many into sometimes successful arts and media careers. They then make things that people who didn’t take that route don’t like.
Over-immersion in the arts is lame, but dismissing the arts outright is equally so. Those old cringy conservative lamentations against hippie pursuits never disappeared outright. Instead, they evolved into a generally dismissive attitude to much of the art world in general, especially new and obscure forms.
The National Review is no longer railing against rock music. But conservative pundits are needlessly going after things people sorta like, dismissing comics, video games, pop music, anime, and whatever art form they tended to not like when they were teenagers. It’s not merely a failure to adapt to a changing culture, it further misses the idea that some of the people going into such careers may actually share your politics. And now you’re alienating them.
This attitude is worsened by the off-putting tendency to applaud layoffs in the arts. Even if a movie studio or arts organization produced po...