Jonah Goldberg followed up this …

Dinesh D’Souza had a similar motivation in making “America: Imagine the World Without Her,” a new documentary love letter to his adopted country. He’s often described as the Right’s Michael Moore, but he’s aiming higher, hoping to contend one day with Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone in the feature-film business. He tells National Review that “the Left knows the power of telling a story.” Stone and Spielberg are “much bigger than Michael Moore. They don’t make liberal films — they just make films, and they have a point of view. I want to make films with a different point of view.”

D’Souza’s absolutely right about Spielberg (though too kind to Stone). One of my biggest complaints about contemporary conservatism — in and out of politics — is that it has lost sight of the importance of storytelling.

My late friend Andrew Breitbart liked to say that politics is downstream of culture, meaning that any truly successful political turnaround needs to start by changing popular attitudes. Adam Bellow, a storied editor of conservative books, has a similar conviction and is trying to launch a conservative revolt in the world of fiction.

I wish them great success. Still, I think there’s something missing in this ancient conversation on the right (conservatives have been making such arguments since the 1950s — if not the 1450s, with the publication of the Gutenberg Bible). Conservatives refuse to celebrate, or even notice, how much of the popular culture is on their side.

Sure, Hollywood is generally very liberal, but America isn’t. Judging by their campaign donations, Hollywood liberals are very supportive of abortion rights. But there’s a reason why sitcoms since Maude haven’t had a lot of storylines about abortion. Indeed, nearly every pregnant TV character treats her unborn child as if it’s already a human being.

The Left may be anti-military, but such movies tend to do poorly, which is why we see more pro-military films. Similarly, it’s a safe bet that Hollywood liberals loathe guns. But you wouldn’t know that by what they produce. Not many action stars save the day by quoting a poem. Most Hollywood liberals probably oppose the death penalty, yet they make lots of movies where the bad guy meets a grisly death to the cheers of the audience. The Left rolls its eyes at “family values,” but family values are at the heart of most successful sitcoms and dramas.

One explanation is that while it is true that culture is upstream from politics, reality and, I would argue, morality are upstream from culture. Good stories must align with reality and a sense of justice. They can be set in space or Middle Earth, but if they don’t tap into something real about the human condition, they will fail. As Margaret Thatcher used to say, “The facts of life are conservative.”

Confirmation of that, I think, can be found in liberal Hollywood’s failure to be as liberal as it wants to be. And that’s definitely funny because it’s true.

… with this:

If you took great offense of the recent episode of HBO’s “True Blood” in which two vampires crashed a Ted Cruz fundraiser — at the Bush Library no less — and said some bad words about Republicans, I have some advice: Lighten up.

The other week I wrote about how the standard conservative critique of the popular culture is just a bit too tightly wound. This minor kerfuffle strikes me as a good illustration of my point. For those who don’t watch the show — i.e. somewhat more than 300 million out of America’s 314 million residents — True Blood is about a world in which vampires finally “come out of the coffin” thanks largely to the invention of a synthetic blood substitute “True Blood.”

Most of the series takes place in the Louisiana town of Bon Temps, a town infested not only with improbably important vampires and mystical deities, but a small army of nasty southern caricatures living alongside sexually liberated Bohemians that would make Brooklyn hipsters blush. The utterly ridiculous plot lines aren’t important for the purposes of this discussion — or pretty much for any other purpose. But suffice it to say pretty much every episode involves lots of sex — often including the homosexual variety — drugs, profanity, tedious and logically inconsistent speeches about the evils of bigotry, and a hodgepodge of mossy clichés about, again, sex, politics, culture, history, and religion wrapped in the candy coating of pretty naked people. “Gilligan’s Island” was vastly more plausible than True Blood (even accounting for the fact the Howell’s had an extensive wardrobe for a three-hour tour, yet the people who lived on the boat had only one set of clothes apiece).

For instance, in the offending Ted Cruz episode, the people who shot up the Bush library weren’t the vampires, but Yakuza gangsters with submachine guns (last seen beheading a post-coital yoga swami). My biggest complaint is that none of the vampires have decamped for New York to slaughter the cast of “Girls” (“I can’t die! I just landed an internship at the Utne Reader!”).

I find the show moderately (probably not the right word) entertaining, but then again I have a soft spot for the vampire genre, not to mention gratuitous sex and violence. That’s just me. I’m not proud of it. But I certainly don’t take the show too seriously, and anyone who does probably isn’t worth taking seriously.

And that goes far more for its fans than its foes. The show was intended from the outset to provide running commentary on gay issues. It was never subtle about this. The opening credit sequence shows a sign like you might see outside a small town church or fire station that reads “God Hates Fangs.”

Now the problem with analogizing homosexuals to vampires is really quite simple: It’s a terribly bigoted analogy! Whenever the show dives into extended comparisons of vampires and gays — which is often — I always wonder if the writers realize what they’re saying. If you made the show from an even remotely right-of-center perspective, it would be boycotted by LBGT groups immediately.

According to True Blood‘s own storyline, vampires have been evil, bigoted, cruel, and murderous for millennia. They have their own secret, manipulative agenda. They control events from dark corners. They quite literally have the power to brainwash people. Not surprisingly, the comparison to vampires is a classic staple of anti-Semitism. Indeed, some argue that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was one extended anti-Semitic caricature (a rich, manipulative, blood-sucking rootless cosmopolitan from Eastern Europe with a “hooked” nose at a time of high Jewish immigration? Pure coincidence!). A fan of the show might say, “Only some vampires are evil, bigoted, cruel and murderous. There are nice vampires too.”

Okay, well. First the whole original storyline is about how Bill Compton is different than other vampires because he’s noble and decent, suggesting the other vamps aren’t. Second, try to make that kind of “it’s not all gays” or “it’s not all blacks” or (outside of the Middle East, U.N. or, increasingly, MSNBC) “it’s not all Jews” argument without sounding bigoted. Hey, I can’t be anti-vampire, some of my best friends are vampires! And, third, let me explain something else: Shut up.

It reminds me of when “28 Weeks Later” came out and everyone went gaga about how it was an extended anti-war metaphor of the Iraq invasion and the “green zone.” Few dwelled on the fact that in that metaphor the enemy — the zombies — must be shown no mercy and ruthlessly exterminated. They just thought it was cool that a zombie movie was making such an obvious reference to the war, or something.

And that I think is the source of the real problem here. By any objective or commonsense measure, the uptight Republicans slaughtered at the Ted Cruz fundraiser are happier and more productive members of society than virtually every other character in the show. From the sympathetic white-trash werewolves to the corrupt human rabble-rousers, from the vampire aristocrats to the endless string of slatternly young women and men who come and go with regularity, the show focuses on creatures who are, variously, decent-but-doomed, evil, stupid, or morally, spiritually, or intellectually lost.

The one thing these people have going for them? They are cool — at least by the glandular, knee-jerk liberal, fashion-forward, standards of the show’s producers and its niche pay-cable audience. In other words, to the extent the show is politically appealing, it is an irrational hot mess (much like the goo vampires turn into when struck with a wooden stake). It’s like it was written for Bill Maher’s studio audience, a group that doesn’t care about real facts or arguments — they just want to hear how they’re awesome and the people they hate aren’t.

To them, rich Republican men in bolo ties and rich Republican women in prim pantsuits aren’t cool. And you know what? That’s fine. Indeed, in real life, those Republicans would look at most of the motley characters inhabiting “True Blood” and see a gaggle of losers. And for the most part, they’d be right.

Conservatives need to get over their insecurities about not being cool in the eyes of liberals (and American adults generally could stand to worry about this sort of thing a lot less than they do). Once you start looking for it, it’s amazing how much liberal commentary — particularly about sex and religion — boils down to a kind of sneering self-satisfaction that liberals are hip and conservatives are squares (just think about how much “analysis” of Obama has been rooted in the assumption he’s cool). …

Moreover, the simple fact is that the popular culture has lots of archetypes that are essentially conservative and cool. Very few male action stars fit the model of how Salon thinks men should behave, what with all the gunplay, mansplaining, and refusal to get the required signatures on the necessary sexual-consent forms. The men of “Lone Survivor” are certainly cool. Even better, they are cool and have a code of honor. The same goes for the female protagonist of “Zero Dark Thirty.”

The point is that cool isn’t monolithic in a diverse and rich culture. For some, Southern Gothic sybaritic crapulence is cool; for others, self-sacrifice and patriotism are cool. And for lots of us, both have their places.