It's Time for a Renaissance.

Conservatives complain about the decline of art and entertainment, but have zero skin in the game. If they focused less on Content Creators and more on Culture Creators, their complaints would matter.

Many stars of New Media call themselves “Culture Warriors,” and they need to stop.

They are pundits. Posters. Podcasters. Talking heads with no passion or aptitude for the arts. They create ZERO culture.

On the rare occasion they notice the arts, it's to voice tired complaints about "the left" having destroyed them. They lament the lack of beauty or depth or transcendence in today's art and entertainment, the crassness and emptiness of modern music, or the ugliness of modern architecture. They create nothing themselves.

They dump capital into making podcasts that look like feature films, yet build no new studios, commission no new screenplays, found no new theatres or publishing companies, open no museums.

Why would they? Art isn't "useful." It produces nothing tangible. It's notoriously difficult to monetize. It's easier and more lucrative to sit in front of a camera and bark into a microphone, sneering that "facts don't care about feelings."

But feelings inspire action. Art excites feeling. Artists create culture, and, as one controversial figure cleverly observed: "Politics is downstream of culture."

By that measure if our culture improves then our politics improve; if our politics improve, our lives improve. Society is enriched. The civilizational collapse conservatives constantly warn about might be staved off a bit longer.

In this fervently anti-establishment era there's no excuse not to invest in new cultural institutions.

Americans have lost faith in multiple entities they once trusted, from journalism and academia to science and medicine. Our cultural institutions are no different. They're arguably in worse shape than these other entities, and ripe for replacement by those with the talent and vision to do it.

Meanwhile artists do themselves no favors. They and the industries which foster them have been instrumental in alienating a public already inclined to trivialize them.

Furthermore few artists appear to see the irony in continuing to pose as rebels against the status quo while the academy, the press, the entertainment industry and even corporate HR departments adopt the same “revolutionary” initiatives that they do.

The old paradigm is dead. America’s traditional tastemakers no longer hold a monopoly over the cultural conversation. Rather than more “Content Creators,” New Media and those disaffected by traditional media should focus more on becoming CULTURE creators.

Monarchies and presidencies come and go. Empires and civilizations collapse. News cycles last a week. But Homer still lives. Mozart still lives. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Michelangelo, Monet. Orwell's fiction has eclipsed his larger body of nonfiction. Solzhenitsyn's literary genius vivified the horrors of true events and shook up the world.

Nobody is fucking with Thriller.

America has its own artistic legacy (especially in music and drama). Old forms optimized, new genres minted. Jazz. Rap. Broadway. Hollywood. A stunning cultural legacy for such a young nation.

But these cultural achievements are neglected by "cultural commentators," ignored by pundits and dismissed by "patriots" whose brightest "Stars" are X posters and podcasters, while "the other side" pumps endless pop slop into the culture, and into the hearts and minds of the young...who then go onto vote.

Politics is downstream of culture.

There has never been a better time to foster America’s artistic ingenuity.

Those who are unhappy with America's politics yet who refuse to engage with culture need to wake up.