It’s important to emphasize often the vast chasm that separates traditional conservatism, which has largely vanished from this country, and media conservatism. Also known as Conservative Inc. or mainstream conservatism.
The former category is largely organic to this country and represents the developments of post-colonial America through the nineteenth century and up to the challenge faced in the burgeoning Progressivist Movement. Elements of traditional American conservatism can be traced, despite their waging a war seemingly against time itself, through popular opposition to WW1 entry, the creation of Federal Reserve, the New Deal Revolution, and entry into WW2.
After WW2, with America standing with the Soviet Union as the dual world conquerers and Liberal Democracy beginning its quest for world hegemony, traditional conservatism entered a Long Night.
The latter conservatism was the conservatism birthed by the efforts of Bill Buckley and sought merely to consolidate and cut the excesses off the victories of the New Deal revolution. It did not seek a path back toward the Old Republic, but was ready to accept and take up the reigns of the New World Order achieved in the final burial of Europe after 1948 (Marshall Plan).
I’ve come to distinguish these two conservatisms in the difference between Values Conservatism (contemporary) and Sociological Conservatism (traditional). This distinction bears on the topic of interpreting the character of the most popular figures in the so-called conservative movement. The values conservatives are less interested in older ways of thinking: recovering place, honoring historical and natural hierarchies, revering one’s heritage, preserving the arts and aesthetic impulses of one’s people.
Instead, the values conservatives have slowly adopted a position of individualistic morality and cultural neutrality. In this view, the things that matter are one’s personal character and behavior. Cultural matters largely pertain to the actions and commitments of individuals: the adherence to individual sexual mores, not stealing, not having vulgar language, not using drugs or other vices, going to church, believing in God, etc.
These are all good things, of course, attributable to traditional conservatives as well. But because of their focus on individualism, they tend to completely neglect so many of the elements of an older more broadly Western conservatism that might be characterized in the “Old Western Men” like CS Lewis or Russell Kirk.
Values conservatives tend to be more culturally neutral in that, for them, music itself (not the lyrics) is neither good nor bad; aesthetic tastes are not morally laden; the idea of symbolism in politics is outdated; architectural decisions are just trends with no ultimate meaning; technology can be good or bad, depending on how the individual uses it; clothing trends, so long as they are not actually vulgar or promiscuous, are neutral.
In this sense, they have adopted the radical nominalism of American baptist culture. This is why traditionalist conservatives were either more wary of total capitalism or outright against it, recognizing that the corporate drive to revolutionize culture and drive it away from historical cultural norms in dress, taste, entertainment, and community adhesion was too strong a power within the Good Society.
This all brings us to several “conservative” takes on the Rihanna performance at the Super Bowl, which of course no self-respecting human being should be watching anyway.

This is the stance of those for whom music, dress, dance, color coordination, and symbolism are all meaningless in themselves. For the majority of mainstream conservative leaders, because there was nothing explicit in what they were probably looking for (sexual themes and demonic themes), there was therefore “nothing wrong.”
This is the outlook of the New Right; it is liberal, in the classical sense, and there is therefore no awareness of the onward march away from America’s cultural roots. What is meant by “losing culture” is that culture is basically neutral and all the conservative needs to do is inject its individual “values” into the framework of any given art form. This is the hubris of neoconservative misinterpretation of the meaning of social order.
Rihanna is not culturally neutral and conservatism is not supposed to be culturally neutral either. Rihanna represents the cultural revolution, the great undermining of a distinctly American cultural style that was derivative of its Anglo genesis. Rihanna represents the continued transformation of American culture away from a particular body of styles, tastes, and mannerism that characterized the American way. Rihanna only makes sense after the manufactured and Left-wing elite-driven cultural revolution of the 1960s. Rihanna as a cultural figure is a symbol that America lives under the social occupation of a Mind foreign to its own soul.
“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” —Plato
Rihanna represents America’s Rihannafication, the complete ghettoization of American entertainment that pervades not only music, but movies, games, advertisements, apps, art, literature, and everyday discourse.
Ghettoization is the transfer of habits and norms that were once suppressed to the wayside of a society—shamed into the corners and alleys of a social order—and making these the new core of the cultural life of a society. The sloppiness, the grunginess, the indignation, that characterizes the demeanor of those who acted at odds with the norms of Old America and were therefore stifled have now been released.
They have now not only been allowed by society to express themselves freely—in Liberal fashion— but foisted on the old majority as a sign of their primacy. American culture has been turned on its head, dominated by the most disgusting aspects of the uncivilized.
Conservatism is not supposed to be the Liberalism that treats all cultural expressions equally. The Rihannafication of America is not culturally neutral, but because Conservatism as a Movement and well-funded participant in the meta-Leftist march of history does see itself as neutral, the Rihannafication of this country continues completely unopposed.
As contemporary “conservatives” work hard to defend the walls of America’s cultural Babylonian Captivity, those who seek to remember our actual cultural heritage should spend more time reflecting on the wisdom of men like Roger Scruton: