I was on a walk around my local area in London when I was stopped in my tracks by a young man sauntering past me, wearing stone-wash jeans, a pair of shades and a “Reagan-Bush ’84” T-shirt. He gave off an incredibly smug air but, to be fair, he did look good. It’s a nice T-shirt, not like those garish Reform-branded football kits, so I could see why it might be appealing. A quick search informed me that for gen-Z rightwingers in the US, it has become the “conservative take on a band shirt or the once-ubiquitous Che Guevara tee”.

That casual display of conservative aesthetics reminded me of something else too: a much discussed cover of New York magazine from earlier this year, after Trump 2.0’s inauguration, which showed young rightwingers celebrating as they “contemplate cultural domination”.

“Conservatism – as a cultural force, not just a political condition – is back in a real way for the first time since the 1980s,” the journalist Brock Colyar wrote. Perhaps, given the way the British and American cultural spheres seem more enmeshed than ever, it was only a matter of time before I happened upon a Republican T-shirt in my back yard.

The US right has long had designs on controlling culture – frustrated by the idea that, despite many political successes, the arts remain in the grip of a liberal-left orthodoxy. (It’s neatly echoed in Britain by debates about BBC “wokeness”.) If there is anything members of the Maga movement want more than their guys in office, it is to feel that their worldview is reflected back to them whenever they turn on a screen or head into a gallery. That is what lies behind Donald Trump’s attacks on the Smithsonian museum, which he seeks to purge of “improper ideology”, and his threatened imposition of 100% tariffs on non-US-made films.

But as we draw to the close of the year, what has come to pass from this prediction of a conservative seizure of culture? There were early claims of victory. In the Atlantic, after the latest season of The White Lotus came out, the commentator Helen Lewis wrote that it was “the first great work of art in the post-woke era”. The critic Kevin Maher in the Times proclaimed simply that “woke is dead” and that “middle-aged white men” are back in – he cited the return of Mel Gibson, who has been repeatedly accused of bigotry, and his forthcoming follow-up to The Passion of the Christ.

What caused the biggest stir, however, was the trajectory of Sydney Sweeney, the breakout Euphoria actor who fronted an advertising campaign by American Eagle that played with the idea of her having “great jeans/genes”. Some critics saw the advert as flirting with white supremacist eugenics. Meanwhile, Sweeney, who was reported to have registered as a Republican voter in Florida a few months before Trump’s election, has been hailed as representing a return to more “traditional”, white-centric beauty standards in the culture.

Earlier this month, when addressing the controversy in an interview for GQ, the journalist Katherine Stoeffel said the criticism centred around the idea that “in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority”, offering Sweeney the opportunity to clarify. With startlingly empty eyes, Sweeney answered: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.” For this, rightwing zealots see her as leading the great unwokening of Hollywood: stars, rejoice! You need no longer kowtow to cancel culture. Perhaps she simply thinks the furore is silly and doesn’t want to entertain it. But presented with the chance to distance herself from such a divisive narrative that’s been projected on her, why would she not?

If there is a great popular desire for fewer woke cultural figures, the verdict is still decidedly out: Sweeney’s latest film, Christy, in which she portrays the boxer Christy Martin, has recorded one of the worst opening weekends in box-office history. (It follows on from her box-office bombs of Eden and Americana, which opened in the US this year.) A few flops don’t tell us everything. But as Sweeney is perhaps the most talked about star of the year, it raises a question: the right may be determined to disrupt Hollywood and the arts, but does it actually care enough about it to consistently show up? Buying a political T-shirt is an easy commitment; having to sit through a two-hour biopic to prop up the conservative-leaning lead star, less so.

Whatever electoral successes, and no matter how much it attempts to reorder institutions, the right will not enjoy cultural domination because you cannot so easily manufacture popularity. It may cry out for the Super Bowl half-time show to feature a Nashville-approved conservative singer, but it will have to get on Duolingo in time to understand record-breaker Bad Bunny’s 2026 performance, in which he’ll most likely cuss out Trump and ICE entirely in Spanish.

Contemporary conservatism has failed to become cool because its instincts are more about edgy provocation than any serious appreciation of art and culture. Great art will always be about expanding our worlds, not making them smaller. Even Kelsey Grammer, arguably Hollywood’s most prominent conservative, knows this: despite being an open Trump supporter, he has affirmed his decades-long commitment to diversity, which includes executive-producing the 2000s sitcom Girlfriends, about four Black women in Los Angeles.

Those predictions about a post-woke Hollywood also look laughable considering some of the great woke film successes of the year: take Sinners, an African-American horror film scored with southern Black music, or One Battle After Another, about an ex-revolutionary and his mixed-race daughter fighting against explicitly racist US state authorities. Both have garnered critical success (the former doing very well at the box office) and have Oscars buzz. The young mixed-race actor Chase Infiniti looks in much better stead than Sweeney.

In the end, people will queue up for what they want to watch and listen to. When most people ask for culture recommendations, they don’t ask “Is it diverse?” or “Is it conservative?”, they ask, “Is it any good?” So perhaps Sweeney should spend more time letting us know why her films are worth watching rather than what colour her eyes are.