The horrors of war are a recurring theme in the great Western art of the last century.
By now, the argument has a bleak familiarity: Conservatives lack the toolkit to make good art, and all too often they lack the perception to recognize good art. Something like this position has been sketched in countless think pieces, including a recent one in First Things (“Why Can’t Conservatives Create Art?”), and has been substantiated through such regrettable ventures as the substitute Super Bowl halftime show led by Kid Rock.
Last year, in these very pages, I reviewed a book whose title sums up this depressing state of affairs: 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read). Actually, it is the book’s subtitle that is most discouraging of all: It refers to the grim reality that there exists a vast trove of great literature that is simply beyond the ken of many conservative-minded people—those who, theoretically, should be most attuned to the riches of Western civilization. But the author Christopher J. Scalia rightly argued that conservatives have claimed as their own a very particular subset of books that seemingly ratify their worldviews, such as Atlas Shrugged or The Lord of the Rings. As Scalia put it: “The problem is that our reliance on them obscures the significance and abundance of conservative ideals and principles in literature more broadly.”
Scalia was right. Many conservatives operate on the principle that art not explicitly engineered or marketed to appeal to them—say, a book promoted on conservative media, or a movie produced by Daily Wire Studios—is somehow inimical to their worldview. It’s their loss: They adopt a needlessly adversarial posture towards mainstream works simply for being mainstream.
For antiwar conservatives, however, the situation is a bit simpler: There exists a whole body of great books, movies, and music premised on the notion that war, especially war undertaken fecklessly or in the absence of sincere diplomacy, is a horror. That much antiwar art is associated with the left is merely a reflection of the fact that Republican Party branding often conceals its strong noninterventionist heritage. Today, however, the left’s enfeebled response to the Iran War shows that it was more exercised by Donald Trump’s tax returns than it is by his tragic foreign policy fiasco. In this environment, it is long past time for anti-war conservatives to claim this corpus as their own.
Calling all conservatives: put down your Ayn Rand and pick up some Kurt Vonnegut.
As is made clear by contrasting the plodding capitalist homilies of Rand with the zippy comic wisdom of Vonnegut, antiwar art has among its many virtues the capacity to induce abundant laughter. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—two of the funniest books of the last century—marshal satire, surrealism, and sarcasm to communicate their antiwar vision. Similarly, Robert Altman’s 1970 movie M*A*S*H suggested that gallows humor was a means for its cast of Korean War army medics, led by Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, to retain a state of compos mentis. “The picture has so much spirit that you keep laughing—and without discomfort, because all the targets should be laughed at,” wrote Pauline Kael in her famous New Yorker review of M*A*S*H. “The laughter is at the horror and absurdities of war, and, specifically, the people who flourish in the military bureaucracy.”
War rattles the soul not just for the costs it exacts—in lives, in spiritual wellbeing, in treasure—but for conferring the authority to grant it to rudderless, often non-veteran elected officials and gung-ho, myopic military brass. This devilish insight is at the heart of the greatest of all antiwar comedies, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). Possessed by the notion that communists have among their aims the takeover of the water supply, the insane Air Force Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) takes steps to assure the commencement of World War III. But the seemingly non-insane characters in the movie are equally feckless and reckless, including lame President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) and wild-eyed General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott), who anticipates and outdoes Pete Hegseth in the nonchalant swagger with which he discusses armed conflict and its costs.
Anti-war conservatives should embrace M*A*S*H, Dr. Strangelove, and other movies made in the same spirit—including Richard Lester’s How I Won the War (1967)—because they all make the same essential point, one that comes close to the libertarian position against war: The officials tasked with prosecuting war are too often unworthy of their office.
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Of course, the treasury of great antiwar art encompasses far more than satires: Read or seen today, Norman Mailer’s novel The Naked and the Dead, Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory, and John Hersey’s nonfiction book Hiroshima permit a public estranged from firsthand or even secondhand experience with war to experience its devastations. The great films about Vietnam range from unrepentantly dovish, like Hal Ashby’s Coming Home, to touchingly patriotic, like Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, to searingly outraged, like Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War, but none portray that war as anything other than a cataclysm.
The reason conservatives should claim anti-war art, though, is not just because it is on the side of the angels but because it is good. If these works were incorporated into the list of approved conservative art, think pieces about our artistic ignorance would disappear overnight. “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” is a better song than anything by Jason Aldean; and, sorry, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is superior, as music and message, than anything by Lee Greenwood. I promise that conservatives will be more edified (and entertained) by seeing the Mike Nichols film version of Catch-22 than by buying a ticket to the allegedly non-woke Scary Movie sequel.
A first step to upping the cultural literacy of conservatives is rediscovering our peacenik past.