Left vs Right Art

This was originally going to be part of the post below, until I realised that missive is cumbersome and ungainly enough as it is. So...

How do these two quotes, also derived from the James book discussed below, speak to each other?

The first derives from Barthes:

While the mythology of the Right is 'well-fed, sleek, expansive [and] garrulous,' the mythology of the Left is barren: 'Whatever it does, there remains something about it stiff and literal, a suggestion of something done to order….In fact, what can be more meagre than the Stalin myth? No inventiveness here, and only a clumsy appropriation: the signifier of the myth…is not varied in the least: it is reduced to a litany.

The second, just a Chunnel trip away:

Terry Eagleton makes an observation that radicals and conservatives alike -- as opposed to postmodernists -- are traditionalists, ‘it is simply that they adhere to entirely different traditions’ (Eagleton 1996, ix).

So if radicals have myths and traditions just the same as conservatives do, why does Barthes think the radicals get it so wrong in their imagery? He certainly seems to be slipping the Communist art wholesale -- and, well, "unproblematically" -- into the leftist constellation. While I don't agree with this association, I think what Barthes is getting at is still, more or less, the case. I'm speaking mostly of those insufferably programmatic leftist art works that leave ambiguity aside, contradicting their (supposed) political belief in the non-hierachic distribution of human intelligence, capabilities and potential. So that the political endpoint of the piece is not so much implied as bellowed. The rhetorical devices -- be they visual, literary or musical -- are not bothered by things like nuance, ambivalence and uncertainty. Perhaps it's consciousness raising that's aimed at? The rough hewn piece veritably shocking the viewer into action and out of apathy? Is the slow-burn of art not valid here? Those pieces which come back and back to you because they don't quite compute? I'm not admonishing passion in art. (Although I am starting to feel like the pompous Olivier Castro-Staal character from Six Feet Under.) But I must've seen/heard/read tens of such pieces in the last years of the Howard era in Australia, yet none of them truly stuck.