Will Wilkinson reflects on country music as ideology:
The emotional highlights of the low-openness life are going to be the type celebrated in "One Boy, One Girl" [above]: the moment of falling in love with "the one," the wedding day, the birth of one's children (though I guess the song is about a surprising ultrasound). More generally, country music comes again and again to the marvel of advancing through life's stations, and finds delight in experiencing traditional familial and social relationships from both sides. Once I was a girl with a mother, now I'm a mother with a girl. My parents took care of me, and now I take care of them. …
Country music is a bulwark against cultural change, a reminder that "what you see is what you get," a means of keeping the charge of enchantment in "the little things" that make up the texture of the every day, and a way of literally broadcasting the emotional and cultural centrality of the conventional big-ticket experiences that make a life a life.
Dreher internalizes this notion:
If Wilkinson’s conjecture is correct, the fact that I was raised here and moved away and built a successful life, rather than doing the expected thing and marrying and building a house and raising a family in the community where we grew up might have been experienced to [my sister] Ruthie as a profound threat in ways she couldn’t articulate, though felt deeply. The idea is if I can be raised in the same house as she, yet have very different tastes and feelings about openness to experiences, the nature of our difference was destabilizing of the worldview she embraced. My leaving wasn’t just me going off to find my way through life; it was false consciousness, or perhaps a flat-out rejection of the things she valued. And it would make our children’s generation strangers to each other.
Finally, our inability to coalesce on questions of ultimate meaning must have worried her. She had such a Confucian view of life — the idea that everybody had his place and his duty in the hierarchical order. I had refused my place at home, thereby violating the order of things. My problem is that I probably have a liberal psychology, re: openness, but conservative convictions.
Meanwhile, E.D. Kain laments the hollowness of contemporary country music:
The conservative movement has been cannibalizing conservative art for years now, to the point where I’d say country music is far from a victory of conservative cultural or artistic success and is instead a mirror image of what conservative politics have become: easy and unthinking. No depth, all surface. Superficial and insular. Maybe I’m wrong, but building an entire genre on the back of the idea that regurgitating the same sound on top of the same basic premise over and over again hardly strikes me as a triumph of cultural conservatism. Admittedly, country music pulls off a not-overtly-political conservatism in ways that most conservative films have been unable to achieve. When it comes to a distinctly modern-American quasi-nationalistic conservatism, country is hard to beat.
The Dish 