Regarding the question of why are artists usually left wing. IMHO the best theory of political left and right is the thrive/survive theory. Art is quite clearly a “thrive” thing.
Except the thrive/survive dichotomy applies to conservatives and liberals in the classical sense, not the economic right and the economic left. And by that standard, libertarians are firmly in the liberal category, even if their right-wing economic views are more commonly associated with conservatives in modern times. Even the rhetoric that right-libertarians use to justify their economic policies is distinctly different from—and in some ways, diametrically opposed to—the rhetoric that conservatives use to justify the same or similar policies. Conservatives tend to focus a lot more on scarcity and have a very survival-of-the-fittest interpretation of capitalism, whereas the libertarian view of capitalism is centered more around the idea that a rising tide lifts all ships. (To use a MtG color wheel analogy, conservatives have a Green/Black view of capitalism, while libertarians have a Blue/Red view of capitalism.) That’s not to say that libertarians don’t recognize the value of competition, or that conservatives don’t care about economic growth and technological progress, but there’s certainly a huge difference in emphasis there.
I think the real reason there’s such a shortage of distinctly libertarian art is simply because libertarians are a fairly small group, and also fairly disorganized/decentralized, so they just don’t have the cultural influence that left-liberals or conservatives do. Although it’s also worth pointing out that a lot of mainstream media does have strong anti-authoritarian and individualist undertones that I would consider to be libertarian in nature, even if it wasn’t specifically created for the sake of promoting libertarianism.
The thirve/survive dichotomy quite clearly does apply to economic right and left, inasmuch as economic right is about creating better incentives (in its more humane manifestation) or survival of the fittest (in its less human manifestation) whereas economic left is about helping the poor. If you believe you have to survive, then there is no slack to help others, and free loaders endanger everyone. If you believe you can thrive, then you can afford to be generous. Where does it leave libertarians I don’t know (probably there are different kinds of libertarians), and it might be that indeed there are few libertarians artists just because there are few libertarians. But I think that the thrive/survive theory definitely does explain why most artists are left wing rather than right wing.
Most libertarians I know believe that a more ‘right-wing’ economic system will help the poor, along with everyone else. Libertarians generally don’t tend to worry about “freeloaders” the way conservatives do, which is why they mostly focus on government regulations and corporate welfare, while conservatives mostly focus on social welfare. When libertarians do take a stand against social welfare, it tends to be less about freeloading and more about welfare programs creating perverse incentives (e.g. discouraging people who want to work but would lose their benefits and be worse off if they did). Just look at the difference between libertarian and conservative arguments against the minimum wage. Conservatives will go on about how uneducated burger flippers don’t deserve $15, while libertarians will focus a lot more on the fact that increasing the minimum wage will just make it harder for people to find work and make poor people worse overall.
Libertarians largely fall on the ‘thrive’ side of the thrive/survive spectrum. They might be closer to the middle than the far-left redistributionists, but so are moderate center-left liberals. The only difference is, unlike the center-left crowd, they see government intervention as the main obstacle preventing people from thriving.
Most libertarians who support social welfare (often in some unconventional form, like negative income tax or the citizen’s dividend, but whatever) do so because they understand that people vary widely in their ability to sustain themselves via market work, and that providing people with a minimal standard of living regardless of such ability (which is really more about ‘surviving’ than ‘thriving’!) is a widely-shared value that ultimately has to be acknowledged. Conservatives tend to be skeptical about these claims in some way or another, but even libertarians don’t actually think that one can design a social welfare system which won’t deeply impact incentives and make people more likely to freeload.
FYI, I’m skeptical about people drawing conclusions about “most” in contexts like this. I do think there’s _something_ to the distinction you’re making but I when I see statements like the ones in this thread my immediate question is “are they basing this off large surveys of self identified libertarians and conservatives, or on ‘who I run into in my filter bubble?’” which I think are very different questions.
Sure, but my claims weren’t actually about libertarians and conservatives in general, only the fraction among them who support and oppose social insurance, respectively. It doesn’t actually take much formal evidence (that is, evidence that also reaches a high ‘admissibility’ standard—which ‘who I run into in my filter bubble?’ might not!) to show that sizeable such groups do exist, or to talk about their ideas.
Part of it is just semantics, really. In contemporary times, “art” tends to be connoted as left-wing, while “design” and “craft”, which occupy much of the same space, as apolitical or even loosely on the ‘right’. Wiewing website design as “art” as opposed to a “craft”, or even just one design activity among many, isn’t quite a value-free choice!
In my country “design” is definitely associated with left wing politics. The difference between “art” or “design” and “craft” is, the former is concerned with aesthetics whereas the latter is only (or mostly) concerned with functionality. This also makes the former a “thrive” thing and the latter a rather neutral thing.
A lot of pre-modern was performed anonymously and for a greater cause—icon-painting, cathedral-building and so on. The artist as a high-profile “star” is something modern societies seem to have invented, perhaps as a substitute priesthood for progressives.
I don’t quite disagree, but “modern” can be a somewhat confusing term. William Shakespeare lived during what is now called the early modern period, and he was far from a “star” among his contemporaries; more importantly, even very notable men of letters who lived at the same time seem to only have been ‘notable’ among a highly restricted elite, and artists themselves were even lower status. It is really only with the industrial age (and related developments in culture, available media and the like) that it makes sense to start positing people in the arts (understood in a broad sense) as high-profile ‘stars’. There was definitely a sense of a “substitute priesthood” in the service of broadly secular values, but I’m not sure if I’d call that “progressive” in any real sense, since ideas of individualism and self-reliance were in fact quite influential, in a way that would be regarded as quite anti-”progressive” these days.
Regarding the question of why are artists usually left wing. IMHO the best theory of political left and right is the thrive/survive theory. Art is quite clearly a “thrive” thing.
Except the thrive/survive dichotomy applies to conservatives and liberals in the classical sense, not the economic right and the economic left. And by that standard, libertarians are firmly in the liberal category, even if their right-wing economic views are more commonly associated with conservatives in modern times. Even the rhetoric that right-libertarians use to justify their economic policies is distinctly different from—and in some ways, diametrically opposed to—the rhetoric that conservatives use to justify the same or similar policies. Conservatives tend to focus a lot more on scarcity and have a very survival-of-the-fittest interpretation of capitalism, whereas the libertarian view of capitalism is centered more around the idea that a rising tide lifts all ships. (To use a MtG color wheel analogy, conservatives have a Green/Black view of capitalism, while libertarians have a Blue/Red view of capitalism.) That’s not to say that libertarians don’t recognize the value of competition, or that conservatives don’t care about economic growth and technological progress, but there’s certainly a huge difference in emphasis there.
I think the real reason there’s such a shortage of distinctly libertarian art is simply because libertarians are a fairly small group, and also fairly disorganized/decentralized, so they just don’t have the cultural influence that left-liberals or conservatives do. Although it’s also worth pointing out that a lot of mainstream media does have strong anti-authoritarian and individualist undertones that I would consider to be libertarian in nature, even if it wasn’t specifically created for the sake of promoting libertarianism.
The thirve/survive dichotomy quite clearly does apply to economic right and left, inasmuch as economic right is about creating better incentives (in its more humane manifestation) or survival of the fittest (in its less human manifestation) whereas economic left is about helping the poor. If you believe you have to survive, then there is no slack to help others, and free loaders endanger everyone. If you believe you can thrive, then you can afford to be generous. Where does it leave libertarians I don’t know (probably there are different kinds of libertarians), and it might be that indeed there are few libertarians artists just because there are few libertarians. But I think that the thrive/survive theory definitely does explain why most artists are left wing rather than right wing.
Most libertarians I know believe that a more ‘right-wing’ economic system will help the poor, along with everyone else. Libertarians generally don’t tend to worry about “freeloaders” the way conservatives do, which is why they mostly focus on government regulations and corporate welfare, while conservatives mostly focus on social welfare. When libertarians do take a stand against social welfare, it tends to be less about freeloading and more about welfare programs creating perverse incentives (e.g. discouraging people who want to work but would lose their benefits and be worse off if they did). Just look at the difference between libertarian and conservative arguments against the minimum wage. Conservatives will go on about how uneducated burger flippers don’t deserve $15, while libertarians will focus a lot more on the fact that increasing the minimum wage will just make it harder for people to find work and make poor people worse overall.
Libertarians largely fall on the ‘thrive’ side of the thrive/survive spectrum. They might be closer to the middle than the far-left redistributionists, but so are moderate center-left liberals. The only difference is, unlike the center-left crowd, they see government intervention as the main obstacle preventing people from thriving.
Most libertarians who support social welfare (often in some unconventional form, like negative income tax or the citizen’s dividend, but whatever) do so because they understand that people vary widely in their ability to sustain themselves via market work, and that providing people with a minimal standard of living regardless of such ability (which is really more about ‘surviving’ than ‘thriving’!) is a widely-shared value that ultimately has to be acknowledged. Conservatives tend to be skeptical about these claims in some way or another, but even libertarians don’t actually think that one can design a social welfare system which won’t deeply impact incentives and make people more likely to freeload.
FYI, I’m skeptical about people drawing conclusions about “most” in contexts like this. I do think there’s _something_ to the distinction you’re making but I when I see statements like the ones in this thread my immediate question is “are they basing this off large surveys of self identified libertarians and conservatives, or on ‘who I run into in my filter bubble?’” which I think are very different questions.
Sure, but my claims weren’t actually about libertarians and conservatives in general, only the fraction among them who support and oppose social insurance, respectively. It doesn’t actually take much formal evidence (that is, evidence that also reaches a high ‘admissibility’ standard—which ‘who I run into in my filter bubble?’ might not!) to show that sizeable such groups do exist, or to talk about their ideas.
Part of it is just semantics, really. In contemporary times, “art” tends to be connoted as left-wing, while “design” and “craft”, which occupy much of the same space, as apolitical or even loosely on the ‘right’. Wiewing website design as “art” as opposed to a “craft”, or even just one design activity among many, isn’t quite a value-free choice!
In my country “design” is definitely associated with left wing politics. The difference between “art” or “design” and “craft” is, the former is concerned with aesthetics whereas the latter is only (or mostly) concerned with functionality. This also makes the former a “thrive” thing and the latter a rather neutral thing.
A lot of pre-modern was performed anonymously and for a greater cause—icon-painting, cathedral-building and so on. The artist as a high-profile “star” is something modern societies seem to have invented, perhaps as a substitute priesthood for progressives.
I don’t quite disagree, but “modern” can be a somewhat confusing term. William Shakespeare lived during what is now called the early modern period, and he was far from a “star” among his contemporaries; more importantly, even very notable men of letters who lived at the same time seem to only have been ‘notable’ among a highly restricted elite, and artists themselves were even lower status. It is really only with the industrial age (and related developments in culture, available media and the like) that it makes sense to start positing people in the arts (understood in a broad sense) as high-profile ‘stars’. There was definitely a sense of a “substitute priesthood” in the service of broadly secular values, but I’m not sure if I’d call that “progressive” in any real sense, since ideas of individualism and self-reliance were in fact quite influential, in a way that would be regarded as quite anti-”progressive” these days.