Artistic Populism

What’s happening with rejection of woke arts is misunderstood as the shackles of an establishment that has grown increasingly oppressive being finally thrown off.

The error is interpreting an isolated two decade period of insanity as “how it’s always been.” While yes the current conditions are an extreme extension of prior conditions, the extremities of leftism in art are not actually about leftism at all. Liberalism, maybe, but definitely not leftism. They’re caused by managerialism—in particular clueless, all-powerful managers seeking an edge and finding it only in amplification of acceptable political ideologies, versus belief in artistic merit for its own sake.

What I mean is: when we see Bella Ramsey in The Last of Us say “I’m going to be a dad” in example number eighty billion of ideology taking preference over art, what we’re witnessing is not, as some have suggested, an inherently communist regime expressing itself, as would’ve been the case in the Soviet Union. The people “in…