A recent exchange between Jonathan Keeperman and Ross Douthat in The New York Times has brought an old question back to the surface: What is conservative art?
For years, many on the right have complained about cultural decline. Fewer have clearly described what they would build instead. If conservative art is to flourish, it must be defined in positive terms, not juist defended against what it opposes.
Keeperman deserves credit for trying. In his conversation with Douthat and in later comments, he argues that conservative art has often been timid, overly moralistic, nostalgic, or grievance-driven. He suggests that art which is “good” and “honest,” art that tells hard truths about entropy, hierarchy, and human limits, is functionally right-wing.
There is real insight here. Art that only preaches rarely lasts. Art that avoids risk rarely matters. And it is true that stories which show the limits of human control quietly undermine modern illusions that we can control everything given enough resources and science.
But the conversation also shows something else: we need a fuller definition for conservative art, specifically for what makes art conservative. Too narrow, and it becomes factional. Too loose, and it means nothing.
Definitions matter. A culture’s art shapes its imagination. Its imagination shapes its future.
The Current Dominant Framework: Expressive Individualism
Right now, much contemporary art operates within what is often called expressive individualism. At its core, this form of art promises freedom. The self is seen as inwardly authentic and, in a way, pure. Identity is discovered through expression. Authority must justify itself, and freedom means unconstrained.
In theory, that sounds liberating. In practice, it is — not so. Artists are encouraged to express themselves, but only within approved moral boundaries. Because of gatekeepers and sensitivity readers (which have become the norm) it is prebowdlerized, stripping out anything that might be offensive to the perceived audience. Some taboos, mostly those coded right-wing values, are celebrated when broken; others, those cherished by the left, bring swift punishment. The limits are real, but they shift. The result is not boundless freedom, but careful self-policing. As a result, much art feels bold and flat at the same time. It pushes against tradition while remaining confined within elite-approved lines.
All art needs form. The issue is the kind of constraint. Any poet who has tried both free verse and the sonnet knows this. When form disappears, it becomes harder to judge true merit. Without structure, there is little resistance. It becomes difficult to tell what is merely expressed from what is well made. The sonnet’s limits — meter, rhyme, length — do not suffocate the poem. They give it bones. The form sharpens the work.
Much contemporary storytelling bends toward the world as its artists and gatekeepers believe it should be: toward liberation, toward equality or equity, and especially toward the removal of constraint. Expressive individualism promises freedom through fewer limits. But art without stable form drifts, and art shaped only by shifting moral fashion flattens.
Conservative art begins elsewhere. It begins with truth, with the world as it is: bounded, structured, tragic, beautiful, resistant to wishful redesign. Aspiration remains, but it grows from reality rather than replacing it. Conservative art does not suppress the self. It places the self within structure — moral, natural, inherited — and finds freedom there.
What Conservative Art Assumes
1. Reality Is Structured
Conservative art assumes the world has shape. Actions carry weight. Good and evil are not invented by vote but are inherent in reality. Human nature does not reset every decade but has constants that do not change with fashions. Power changes those who use it, and generally not for the better. Loyalty matters. Betrayal wounds.
These are not party slogans. They are facts about life.
In The Lord of the Rings, the Ring cannot be made harmless by good intentions. It corrupts because the corruption of power is real. It takes real sacrifice to heal the wounds left by unrestrained power. The characters grow by accepting a moral order they did not create.
Identity is not self-invented. It is discovered through duty and trial.
2. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Belong Together
Conservative art does not split beauty from moral weight. It does not glamorize evil as style. It does not reduce goodness to sentiment. And these three elements belong together: truth without beauty hardens into despair. Beauty without truth dissolves into decadence. Goodness without beauty collapses into propaganda.
In The Book of the New Sun, the world is strange and broken. The narrator is flawed. Yet the story assumes meaning beyond decay. Beauty and corruption exist side by side, but the world is not empty.
3. Limits Are Meaningful — and Critical
Death. Time. Biology. Entropy. Competence. These are not injustices to engineer away. They are conditions of life. Every human story unfolds inside limits. We do not choose the century of our birth. We do not choose the fact of aging. We cannot love everyone equally. We cannot master every skill. We cannot escape mortality. These boundaries shape the drama of existence.
Conservative art does not treat such limits as insults. It treats them as the framework within which character is revealed.
In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell confronts the limits of control. He cannot contain the violence he sees. He cannot restore the world to what it once was. The story refuses the fantasy that evil can be fully managed. It forces the audience to face the fact that human authority is finite.
That recognition is bracing.
But limits do more than frustrate. They form.
Scarcity makes generosity meaningful. Mortality makes courage urgent. Time makes loyalty costly. Biology makes parenthood binding. Competence creates hierarchy of responsibility. A runner without a track does not run farther. He wanders. A game without rules does not become more exciting. It becomes chaos.
Without limits, there is no sacrifice. Without sacrifice, there is no depth.
4. Tradition Is Living Memory
Conservative art neither freezes the past nor discards it. Rather, it uses inheritance as material. Every artist inherits something — language, symbols, stories, forms, archetypes. No one creates from nothing. Even rebellion borrows the grammar of what it rejects. The question is not whether we inherit, but how we use what we inherit.
Conservative art does not treat tradition as museum glass, but neither does it pretend that history is a burden to escape. Rather, the conservative artist recognizes that tradition is accumulated human experience that is shared by all in a healthy culture. It carries warnings, patterns, metaphors, and hard-won insight. It offers tested ways of telling stories about love, betrayal, sacrifice, justice, and mercy.
In The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis draws from medieval cosmology, Christian theology, classical myth, and fairy tale, reshaping them for a modern audience. The past becomes seed, not relic. Likewise, in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien does not recreate Anglo-Saxon epic. He engages in subcreation, making his own world rebuilt from inherited fragments and embellished. Ancient forms become new narrative.
That is tradition functioning properly.
Tradition's shared imaginative language allows a culture to recognize itself across generations. When a story draws on common symbols — the prodigal son, the fallen king, the faithful friend, the sacrificial hero — it connects present experience to long memory. Without that memory, art becomes thin. It may be technically clever, but it lacks depth. It has no roots. Each story must invent its moral vocabulary from scratch.
5. Initiation Is Necessary
Expressive individualism centers self-assertion. Conservative art centers formation, particularly the Hero's Journey, the ancient narrative structure that nearly all myth is shaped by. Over the course of this story journey, potential must narrow into responsibility. Heroes must earn authority while their strength is tested. Power is earned painfully.
In Braveheart, William Wallace is forged by loss and loyalty. Leadership costs him. He transcends what he was through sacrifice.
Freedom without formation, without transformation in fire, is thin. Conservative art shows growth through ordeal.
6. Redemption Is Costly but Real
Conservative art is neither naïve nor cynical. It does not pretend human beings are naturally pure. It does not promise that the right system will fix everything. But it also refuses despair. Brokenness is not an exception; it is part of the human story. Yet brokenness is not the final word.
Redemption in conservative art is never cheap or easy. It requires sacrifice, endurance, humility, or loss. It does not erase consequences, but it does give suffering meaning.
In Gladiator, Maximus does not escape death, nor does he rebuild Rome with a speech. Justice comes through endurance and sacrifice. Order is restored at a cost that cannot be reversed. His redemption is not personal triumph, but rather the restoration of rightful order through suffering. In The Lord of the Rings, victory leaves scars. Frodo cannot return unchanged; physically, he has lost a finger, and emotionally he is utterly different. Redemption does not restore innocence; it deepens character.
Utopian stories assume everything can be fixed. Cynical stories assume nothing can. Conservative art stands between those extremes. It shows that sacrifice, loyalty, repentance, and courage matter, even when the world remains wounded.
Redemption does not deny reality. It works within it.
7. Building Rather Than Reacting
Art that exposes illusion performs a real service. It clears ground and reminds us that human beings are not infinitely malleable, nor can systems engineer away sin, entropy, or hierarchy. On this point, Keeperman is right: conservative art cannot be timid, and it cannot survive on moral slogans. But exposure alone is not enough to sustain a counterculture. It must also build on that cleared ground.
It must show authority that is legitimate, not merely corrupt. It must depict loyalty that binds and strengthens, not chains that constrain. It must portray responsibility as weighty, not oppressive. And it must show communities that can be renewed, not only critiqued. A story may begin with disillusionment and pass through tragedy. But if it is to build, it must show that structure can be created or restored, that order can be re-earned, that meaning survives fracture.
This is why positive movements such as superversive fiction, articulated by writers like Jagi Lamplighter and Tom Simon, matter. The aim is not to deny darkness, but to overcome it through the affirmation of courage, sacrifice, and rightful order. The goal is coherence and the celebration of the things that are positive and true.
Conservative art does not exist only to argue against prevailing myths; it's not at its core reactionary art. It exists to shape an imagination in which responsibility, formation, and redemption are believable again.
Exposure clears the field. Building plants the seed. Both have value. But if you want to sustain a civilization, you must build.
The Vanilla Base
Much contemporary art asks the audience to imagine what the world might look like if its restraints were lifted — if identity were fully self-defined, if institutions were remade, if limits were overcome. Its energy bends toward aspiration and the idea that the world can be perfected. It invites us to wish, or it goes the opposite way, toward nihilism and despair.
Conservative art begins elsewhere. It begins with the world as it is, the middle way, neither perfect nor demolished — bounded, resistant, imperfect, beautiful, a Middle Earth. It does not start by removing limits. It asks how to live well within them. It does not assume that authority is suspect or that tradition is a burden. It looks away from brokenness and toward redemption.
Most people don't walk into a theater or bookstore looking for “conservative art.” But they recognize the difference when they encounter it, when a story treats sacrifice as real rather than ironic, when evil is real, when growth costs something, when hope is earned instead of assumed. They know it when they see it.
Moreover, conservative art, as defined here, is not a list of talking points. It is a foundation that allows for an enormous variety of flavors, as many flavors as there are types of conservatism. Picture this structure as a vanilla ice cream base. Different artists will add different flavors: patriotism, military courage, snark, objectivism, faith, tradition, masculinism. Those variations matter. But if the base is missing — if reality has no structure, if limits are illusions, if redemption is sentimental — the story may entertain, but it will not endure.
Vanilla is not flashy, but without it, the rest is just toppings, empty sugar.
Contemporary art often asks us to imagine the world remade. Conservative art asks us to recognize the world we actually inhabit, imperfect and broken and breathtakingly beautiful. It provides inspiration that this world desperately needs.
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