Just a quick note: none of the art in this piece is any good, and should probably not be viewed by anyone. Still, you’re presumably an adult and I can’t stop you.

You’ve been warned.

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My own imitation of the dumb art that is promulgated in right-wing groups online, produced from a photo found on Express Digest. Made in imitation of the so-called “fashwave” aesthetic. — My own imitation of the dumb art that is promulgated in right-wing groups online, produced from a photo found on *Express Digest*. Made in imitation of the so-called “fashwave” aesthetic.

Edgar and I play role-playing games with groups of friends over the internet twice a week. One group, on Wednesday nights, takes a more casual approach, while the one on Saturday tends to dive deeper into things. Lately, I’ve been running a separate game for both groups, which share only myself and Edgar (the participants, while they know one another, are on friendly terms, it’s simply that larger groups get unwieldy.)

The games I prefer are almost universally Powered by the Apocalypse games (I’ve tried other things, but Dungeons and Dragons is really just a combat simulator with light improv elements, and PbtA tends to be much lighter weight and reactive.) On Wednesdays, I’ve been running the original flavor, Apocalypse World, by Vincent and Meguy Baker. On Saturday, I’ve been running The Veil, by Fraser Simons. The former is post-apocalyptic, and the latter is cyberpunk, but both require a world be built for them, and both are fairly near-future science fiction.

In both, the United States collapsed: one saw the American continent ripped apart by an analog of the Mongol Hordes, made up of people from the Great Plains and the American West who no longer had the material foundations for the lives that they had lived, clinging to the iconography of the American cowboy but reproducing a way of life more akin to the Mongol Hordes. In the latter, the material conditions for prosperity remain, but are captured by the private sector, who increasingly replicate the forms of feudalism practiced in the European middle ages, but with the jargon of Silicon Valley layered over it to an extent. They are resisted by a number of forces, including a mutant hybrid of Millennarian Christianity and the QAnon conspiracy (there is also a moderate form of this same faith; I described them as corresponding roughly as much as Wahhabism [the most militant form of which was Da’esh/ISIS,] and Shriners).

I honestly don’t know what to make of the shriners, but they seem harmless enough.

Something came out of the material I put together and the way that my groups reacted to it. A parody, a shadow of something that is clearly visible when you look at the world today.

In the latter game, it came out stronger, though it’s present in both. It’s a certain aesthetic that I can’t think of as anything but “American Cringe.” Allow me to back up a bit before I provide a definition.

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It’s an insane artwork, if you look closely at it.

First, some examples: Rocky IV is American Cringe. Every Rambo movie after First Blood is American Cringe. The books of Tom Clancy are American Cringe. The movie Independence Day is American Cringe. The music of Toby Keith from 2002 on is American Cringe, as is most post-2001 pop country, especially when it strays into politics. The costumes worn by the TEA Party in during the height of their popularity (say 2008-2011) were American Cringe. The Apotheosis of Washington, painted in 1865 by Constantino Brumidi is, potentially, the first instance of American Cringe.

However, given that we live in an age apparently beyond satire (the number of students I’ve had who didn’t understand that “A Modest Proposal” was a satire is proof enough of that for me,) there are parodies of it that are taken unironically as examples of it. For example, Fallout 3 and 4 (the Bethesda-produced entries in the series,) have a rather vocal conservative fan base. The same goes for Bioshock Infinite. As well as any right-wing attempt to make use of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger or Bruce Springsteen.

American Cringe is a particular aesthetic sensibility that developed near the end of the Cold War and was dusted off again at the beginning of this century after receding into the background a bit. It is the sort of pro-American cultural product that, essentially, comes pre-parodied (which is possibly the best explanation for what the aesthetic of “cringe” is, in my opinion) and is clung to with a distressing earnestness, because it is paradoxically viewed as more authentic for how ridiculous it seems: clearly, one would only post this on the internet, or consume it with such vigor, if they really believed it.

In many ways, it’s simply bad art that we’re signaled we have a moral duty to consume unironically.

The “War on Christmas” is a perennial favorite of right-wing culture warriors. Image taken from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. — The “War on Christmas” is a perennial favorite of right-wing culture warriors. Image taken from the *St. Louis Post-Dispatch*.

For decades, America has been a battleground for a series of culture wars. Largely, these are seen as a tactic to keep the coalition of the American right wing intact: after all, if you’re frothing at the mouth over abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and the sanctity of Christmas, you might not notice that business interests are strip-mining you for political support while offering you nothing but token concessions.

Largely, if we consider the culture war to be about issues, it’s about the issues closest to being about image, i.e., it’s about identity politics (different, notably from the “dis-identity politics” that I’ve talked about recently on this website). Specifically, it’s about the inheritor culture of the hitherto dominant American culture – the Straight, Cisgender, White, Protestant (but making allowances for helpful members of the Catholic Church and other religions), and speaking in a mid-western accent that seems to make up the bulk of the sitting president’s campaign rally crowds and who would probably call themselves “regular” or “normal” Americans – and literally everyone else.

However, the weapons of the culture war are weapons of discourse, and in some areas, the conservative backbone really shines here: when it comes to naming things, they tend to win outright – consider how Fred Luntz successfully re-branded “global warming” as “climate change” back in the Bush era to make it seem more controllable and less serious, or consider how “Obamacare” beat out “ACA” as the name for the signature healthcare act promulgated by the last president. In other areas, they flounder as soon as they get started. Almost as much as Josh Hawley does when trying to claim he’s not using fascist talking points.

This is where we find the aesthetic that I think of as American Cringe. It’s closely related to – and I would say includes – the aesthetic of Christian Art (the most commercially successful version of which was probably noted anti-Semite Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, which grossed $622.3 million on a budget of $30 million.) This was discussed on a podcast I listen to, The Daily Zeitgeist, on Monday of this week (November 30), and I’m probably going to crib a few of their sources, as they helpfully put out footnotes.

But it’s not simply explicitly Christian art that I’m referring to: it’s also the fact that every attempt to make a right wing version of Saturday Night Live or the Daily Show fails spectacularly (to confirm this, I watched 35 seconds of Mike Huckabee’s attempt at a monologue and quickly found myself doing the dishes and then smoking a cigarette. It is so antithetical to attention-grabbing that I lost interest in not just it but everything I was doing around it).

Let’s start from the Christian art question, because I feel that might be particularly telling.

To be fair to Christian films, apparently Old Fashioned has a higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes than 50 Shades of Grey. — To be fair to Christian films, apparently *Old Fashioned* has a higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes than *50 Shades of Grey*.

So in considering these problems, I immediately come to the same conclusion that the hosts of the aforementioned podcast made when looking at the evidence: these culture warriors are failing because they are simply imitating the other side of the equation – one article linked in the episode’s footnotes, Vox’s “Why are Christian Movies so Painfully Bad?” describes the plot and planning behind Old-Fashioned, which appears to be a beat-by-beat inversion of 50 Shades of Grey: instead of a woman being wooed by a millionaire with a BDSM kink, it’s about a woman being wooed by her landlord who insists on going through the motions of old-fashioned courtship, including not being willing to be alone in the same house as a woman to whom he’s not married (in short, he’s Mike Pence as played by a conventionally handsome actor.)

This article (written by Brandon Ambrosino), in turn quotes christian film critic Alissa Wilkinson, who wrote an article republished on Indiewire entitled “Why Christian Artists Don’t Want To Be ‘Christian Artists’”, who said that:

Over the past few decades, Christians, and evangelicals in particular, have been really, really prolific in making pop culture products that parallel what's going on in mainstream cultural production. The music industry (CCM) is probably the most well-known example of this, but as we know, there's a Christian film industry, and a Christian romance novel publishing industry, and the list goes on. (Let's not forget about the existence of GodTube and the mercifully-defunct ChristianChirp, aka Twitter for Christians.)

Wilkinson eventually concludes that:

… [J]ust as often, what I hear is that they don't because they're afraid that the "Christian world" will glom onto them, making them the next poster child for the cause: "Look! Christians can be cool, too!" Then, precisely because the gears are ready and well-oiled, they fear they'll be sucked into being packaged for "the Christian market." (And often they want their art to be appreciated because it is well-made, not because a Christian made it and we all gotta stick together.)

I can’t necessarily dispute this, but I have heard from some ex-evangelical friends – or ex-Conservative Catholic – that they went through the process of being dragged by church groups to see The Passion of the Christ, which loaned it the air of a “Christian movie” and thus of less interest outside of the Christian sphere.

Of course, one might say that this imitative approach to the arts isn’t confined to the political right. The His Dark Materials books, written by Philip Pullman, are explicitly and directly in conversation with the extremely Christian Chronicles of Narnia. Personally, I don’t feel that there’s any contradiction in stating that His Dark Materials has value, while most explicitly Christian art doesn’t appear to have value for me for the very reason that it’s in conversation with a legitimately good work of young adult fiction. It comments upon it, examines it, holds up its problems and presents to the readers a space that is mysterious and unknown and open. This is something that frankly cannot be done within the paradigm of Christian art as it currently stands, because Christian art is so focused on communicating an answer, rather than sitting with the question. If you question my conclusion, consider looking at Soviet films from the Stalin era, and then explain to me how they were doing anything different. (I remember hearing about one Soviet romance movie, where Stalin consistently appeared on-screen as an enabler of the couple’s relationship, essentially making a secular version of the traditional Christian love story, just with Stalin in the place of Jesus. I can’t find any evidence of it, though, so perhaps I had a fever dream.)

This is getting off in the weeds.

This is part of what led me to consider this question further after hearing it brought up on that podcast: how is such a large segment of the population – a plurality, if not a majority – so incapable of producing noteworthy art? And what might this have to do with the culture war that never actually seems to stop?

Tegan Brozyna, writing for Christians for Social Activism, suggests in her article “In Protest of the Protestant Art Ethic” that, “Many mainstream and evangelical churches shy away from visual art. This is reflected in our worship spaces, what we sell in our bookstores, and our institutions of higher learning, few of which offer majors in studio art. It is a rare gem of a church that commissions art.” This would suggest an economic foundation – good artists, wanting to keep the lights on, go for paying work. She suggests, however, that it goes beyond this, and that, “Feeling threatened by the art world, the church consequently gravitates toward the safe, sterile, and saccharine.” In short, because they are unwilling to provide the material basis for a strong art tradition to continue, they have lost their art tradition.

There’s also the fact that so many of their artists got started by making fan art of Sega Genesis characters, which leads to some rather insane combinations. Mix that with American national tragedies and you get some of the most confusing things ev… — There’s also the fact that so many of their artists got started by making fan art of Sega Genesis characters, which leads to some rather insane combinations. Mix *that* with American national tragedies and you get some of the most confusing things ever written.

So, yes, a large part of this air is the fact that it’s a mere imitation, a replacement for secular media the way that someone at an AA meeting will mainline coffee and cigarettes while they talk about how they cut their dependence on alcohol (in the words of the late, great Erik Peterson of Mischief Brew, “Swapping one addiction for another”). It’s an attempt to replace something that is forbidden with its nearest substitute.

Perhaps American Cringe comes from a secular version of this de-secularization: shutting out “liberal” productions in the hopes of creating an untainted culture. Of course, all of these savvy businessmen who are sinking money into supporting the careers of conservative comics and Christian Contemporary Music always bet that they’re going to be Oreo, while the “liberal” product is going to be Hydrox.

These fools have never pulled off the Oreo maneuver once with this strategy.

Let’s leave aside Christian Art, because it’s only part of the melange of things that I consider to constitute American Cringe. This being said, I freely admit that there is some excellent religious art out there that doesn’t fall into this, as I’ve been really enjoying mewithoutYou’s album It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All a Dream! It's Alright, and have a lot of thoughts about Mary Doria Russel’s The Sparrow (to whit, it would have been much better if the author hadn’t brought up Christopher Columbus in reference to it). It’s time to get back to the supposed subject of this piece.

So, the sterility and sentimentality of Christian art is one ingredient, and we see a similar sterility in attempts to create traditional right wing comedy. I’m not really interested in “right wing memes” because, frankly, they only seem to be used to “trigger” or “own the libs” (“trigger” of course, comes from the discourse around accommodations for people who suffer from psychological trauma) and don’t really have any value beyond that, though perhaps the reduction of discourse to a form of attack, and the incorporation of that into one’s identity, is itself something to consider.

Because, looking back at that awful comedy from a most-likely-lead-poisoned former governor, we can see that this is exactly what he’s trying to do: to “own” the libs without using foul language. As if there’s anything interesting or valuable in listening to someone in their sixties repeat the word “poop” like an infant instead of saying “shit” like an adult.

I mentioned earlier in this piece that the endless waging of culture wars seems to be the only thing holding the conservative coalition together, something noted by Jeremy W. Peters, writing for the New York Times, in the article “These Conservatives Have a Laser Focus: ‘Owning the Libs’”, which examines the Federalist in particular, but seems to be generalizable out from there. He quotes in this piece:

“The conservative ideology that had been cohesive during the Cold War is falling apart,” said Nicole Hemmer, a research scholar at Columbia University. “It seems to me that ‘owning the libs’ is kind of the way you hold everyone together when your policy preferences are coming apart.”

But it goes beyond that, noting that they offer a sort of right-wing kind of repressive desublimation, the Federalist gives mainstream republicans “an outlet for outrage against those the president has declared his enemies, often by reducing them to a culture war caricature of liberalism.” They can get a little of the short-term dopamine loop of social media, with a larger hit of dopamine from making a perceived enemy’s day worse.

So this is the recipe we have: sentimental, sterile, and full of resentment.

This was created by someone who didn’t see anything ironic or ridiculous about it.

And here we have the foundation for bad art all put together. American Cringe takes it further, by layering on tropes of palingenetic American nationalism (I think here about the fact that Rush Limbaugh has a series of children’s books about what he thinks American history is), which often forms the cornerstone of the sentimental element of the art in question. It’s a matter of creating a mythologized worldview and repeating it so that there’s no air left in the room, instead of inviting people to explore meaningful questions about life and the world. There’s an emphasis on shaming those who disagree and praising those who do, and this fails every test of memorable art.

The really confusing thing is that many of the most memorable works from the history of literature and the arts were fundamentally of a more conservative bent. Charles Dickens had a paternalistic streak a mile wide, William Faulkner had regressive views on slavery and desegregation, Evelyn Waugh thought that class divisions were natural and good, Ernest Hemingway was the founding father of toxic masculinity, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby feels like it comes straight of the neckbeard’s playbook.

A quick – not at all comprehensive – survey of the supposed great writers, point me towards only four I would characterize as being more left-leaning: George Orwell (young Orwell, at least), John Milton (an ardent Republican in the English Civil War,) Mark Twain (an anti-Imperialist and an abolitionist,) and James Joyce (who referred to himself as being a socialist on at least one occasion). There are obviously more, but our culture lionizes far more conservative writers and artists than progressive ones, so the absolute inability of the modern conservative movement to produce art that’s worth a damn is quite striking – especially as they seem to insist that only their cultural products are worth paying attention to.

Everything that they produce, and it’s hard to avoid the cultural artifacts that they push, is much more valuable as fodder for parody than it is in its own right, and I would argue that this is the hallmark of a failed culture. If their art can’t be enjoyed, only mocked, then what does that say about the character of the artists that produced it? And what does it say about the chauvinists that argue that it is the best and most worthwhile culture that there is?

As much as I wish I could wave a wand and make all of the American Cringe go away, it’s not going anywhere. It’s been here since America lost its collective mind in September of 2001, which threw the entire population of the country into a paranoiac frenzy from which a number of people simply never emerged. I understand that many people are still scarred by what we saw that day, but I’m living in 2020, where the United States has suffered – as of this writing – 89 and 2/3rds times the death toll of 9/11, and I note that the people who were most vocal about that tragedy are the most likely to deny the current one. So it seems to me that the problem for them wasn’t the tragedy of the loss but the affront of the attack.

I repeat: lost our collective minds. This is most likely why people don’t get satire any more — irony is dead, and we have killed it.

Without an external threat that they can reach, their energies simply get dumped into more and more culture war bullshit, and they have no real tactic outside of trying to own the libs and producing American Cringe – and as time goes on, and the “libs” become more and more inured to their attempted attacks, it all just recedes back in to cringe.

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As an addendum: I’m willing to categorize the following Left and Liberal media as American Cringe as well – The Prairie Home Companion, the Bush-era films of Michael Moore, and (I regret to inform you) Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.

Don’t @ me.

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American Cringe: Why Can’t the Contemporary Right Make Art?