“Our side has better ideas, but it needs better storytellers.”
These are the words of the bestselling conservative author Brad Thor, whose latest thriller, Code of Conduct, has just been released. Thor made the observation in an interview in The American Spectator. Thor, whose books can be found in any airport, is especially popular among conservatives.
Code of Conduct is one of his best. The protagonist is Scot Harvath, an ex-special forces soldier who is called in by the government to stop a secret organization from using a biological weapon against America and Israel. Harvath and his team travel to Africa to find the source of the weapon, and it leads to a dark conspiracy about world domination. Thor’s books are refreshing because unlike most politically correct thrillers these days, the bad guys are neo-socialists, one-world despots who believe the State, not God, is mankind’s true ruler.
In the Spectator interview Thor encourages his friends on the right to support conservatives in the popular culture. Doing so, he says, is “an act of conscience,” in an entertainment industry controlled by liberals.
But people will seek out great art based on that art’s ability to inspire and move their souls, not because they feel prodded by politics. We are drawn to art through an act of love, not an act of conscience. If conservatives want to affect the culture, they need to create an ecosystem where great artists can thrive. It is a long process that requires the ability to tolerate and even celebrate the eccentricities of artists.
This is not a criticism of Thor. I read and enjoyed Code of Conduct. It hooks you in from the first sentence and keeps you engaged until the end. Thor is brilliant at suspense, cool plots, and fun, likable characters. There’s no one writing better thrillers today.
But if conservatives want a deeper bench, if they want to produce great artists, they’re going to have to start the slow process of cultivation. They’re going to have to take the long view.
At the same time that I was reading Code of Conduct, I was also immersed in another volume: The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses. This is a brilliantly written and absorbing account of the controversial publication of Ulysses, the 1922 modernist masterpiece by James Joyce. As a result of its groundbreaking use of language, attacks on the Catholic Church, and sexuality, Ulysses was called pornographic and was banned. First published in Paris, it was not available in England or the United States until the 1930s.
Ulysses, which took Joyce seven years, was the beginning of liberalism’s long debate with traditional cultural values. Before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, artists could pose a challenge to social norms without descending into incoherent rage or pornography. Rock and roll, particularly in the early years, was all about love and cars and girls—not exactly revolutionary stuff. Modernist painters could only break rules because they were so steeped in knowledge of the masters—and modernism was quickly accepted by mainstream culture. Marlon Brando revolutionized acting not by rejecting craft or discipline, but by infusing it with animal energy, a force that was declared new but was actually primal and ancient.
Ulysses was scandalous because of its frank sexuality, but the scenes in question are so entangled in metaphor, wordplay, and stream of consciousness that it’s often hard to understand what Joyce is driving at. But it’s easy to root for Ulysses against the blue noses of the 1920s, because Ulysses is art.
Americans John Sumner and Anthony Comstock tried to ban the book. In the UK, Sir Archibald Bodkin tried to burn all copies and to ban importation of additional ones. Battling eye disease, poverty, and rejection by his own people, Joyce was aided by Sylvia Beach, the Paris publisher who first issued Ulysses. Joyce was also backed by the literary journal The Little Review, as well as attorney Morris Ernst, who successfully fought to finally make Ulysses legal.
Like Joyce in the early 20th century, conservatives in the early 21st are outnumbered. We also have our book burners, although the excuse to censor is now due to a work of art “triggering” somebody. Yet where is the conservative answer to The Little Review? Where is our Sylvia Beach, a publisher willing to not only crank out Republican thrillers, but challenging works of art? Who is taking the long view and getting behind the gifted conservative painter, filmmaker, or author? Joyce opened the door to so much: film noir, Mad magazine, Kerouac, hippies, and even punks. The left created an entire infrastructure to support their artists: publishers, Hollywood, comics, museums. Conservatives slept.
A century later, maybe it’s time to wake up.
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