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It’s no secret that the United States is more or less defined by its own culture war, and has been for quite some time. Conflict between conservatives and progressives is rampant, but what gets lost in the endless game of tug-of-war between America’s two dominant ideologies is pop culture’s role in influencing political climates.

All forms of pop culture — from social media posts to new songs on the radio — can bypass the political messaging that so often eludes skeptical voters. With more simple delivery and less negative perception, pop culture figures are more easily able to speak to their supporters. In recent years, pop culture has been relatively progressive. Hollywood, major league sports, musical artists and more have been rejected by conservatives for their (candidly bare-minimum) progressiveness, but we’ve never seen those sides flip until now.

In the past year, conservatives started investing energy in making their culture a part of pop culture. Largely built out of contempt for the assumed chokehold liberals have on most major forms of media, right-wingers are finally having their moment in 2023. After years of grievances within their own social spheres, conservatives are exploring the agenda-pushing frontier that liberals have come to dominate.

It started with Bud Light. Back as early as April, conservatives boycotted the Anheuser-Busch beverage after transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney partnered with the company for promotions.

From there, the right-wingers went nuclear. There’s no way to pinpoint when, but somewhere along this timeline, conservatives realized that the very mainstream culture they mistrust could become their means of mobilization. With an army of online campaigners, Bud Light lost its spot as the best-selling beer nationwide – a position it had held for roughly two decades.

As the summer went on, this full-fledged boycott proved to be less and less of a fluke. When “The Sound of Freedom,” a film with ties to QAnon about combating child-trafficking, hit theaters in July, it suddenly became one of the biggest flicks of the summer. It’s also worth noting that the film implemented a ticket-sharing technique that allowed buyers to give tickets to strangers.

The movie not only grossly misrepresented the “true story” it was based on, but used child-trafficking as a way to easily deflect any criticisms of its bigoted roots into “not caring about children.” The film got its target audience to unify behind its ideals en route to being the 10th highest-grossing project of 2023.

Similarly successful was country singer Jason Aldean’s track “Try That In A Small Town”: a rural anthem with not-so subtle anti-Black Lives Matter subtext and a threatening tone toward those who disagree. To double down, the song’s music video features footage from BLM protests. In the video, Aldean and his band perform in front of a courthouse in Columbia, Tenn., the site of a 1946 protest surrounding the lynching of a Black teen.

The track garnered little noise in May, but when the aforementioned video was put out, Aldean’s track skyrocketed to become his first number one song ever. That being said, this track still played second fiddle to one other.

Arlo Stone | Digital Design Director

Around early August, Oliver Anthony went viral for his acoustic, anti-government “Rich Men North of Richmond.” The track may have had the most unlikely ascension into a Billboard top hit ever, as Anthony had never released a charting song before then. The track was even an opening subject at the first Republican presidential debate. Anthony had fans convinced his track was a soulful plea for rural support. But instead, the song makes modern references to “welfare queens” and shockingly hilarious demands for the U.S. to protect miners and not just “minors on an island somewhere.”

“Rich Men North of Richmond” is the culmination of this summer’s conservative ambush into pop-culture – a phenomenon that was statistically quite successful. But with this change, we have to remember that it’s a facade. The same way “woke” media is criticized by the left for performative actions, this spike in conservative media is no more than a mission to pander to its audience. Most of pop-culture’s assets are solely intended to line pockets anyway, after all.

The real catastrophe here is that, so far, non-conservatives have been just as captivated by the fireworks. These types of trends can’t happen without the content escaping the echo chambers in which they were cultivated – which is what we see right now. Conservatives have always been sidetracked by the “liberal media,” but now we’re in the midst of a mutual rubbernecking that has us more focused on winning the “culture war” than we are with discussing real political topics.

It feels as if we’ve filtered critical issues with a culture-shaped strainer, which is nothing more than a distraction.

It sounds stupid to say the key is simply to stop caring, but that’s ultimately what we must do. By directing our gripes towards low-hanging messages, the higher-up figureheads and promoters of the conservative ideology get heat off their backs

Jonah Weintraub is a junior broadcast and digital journalism major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at jsweintr@syr.edu.

Published on September 27, 2023 at 11:23 pm