What the heck are they thinking anyway?
A recurring series that peeks behind the curtain of small c-conservative thought.
This is the first in what I hope will be a recurring series called “What the heck are they thinking anyway?” Many progressives are simply not interested in entertaining intellectual thought that comes from the political and social right. There are a variety of reasons for that, but I believe that the best way to know your own strengths and weaknesses is to study the strength and weaknesses of your opponents. Whether we like what conservative thought leaders are saying, or not, what they are saying has value in that it represents a mode of thinking and a way of living worth understanding.
Here are two opposing views on the heart and soul of conservatism in 2020 from the National Review, a well-regarded bastion of right-wing intellectual thought. The first is by the creators of the ‘reformocon’ movement, a moderate conservative vision for the post-Bush years:
The Next Coalition of the Right - Ramesh Ponnuru & Yuval Levin - March 5, 2020 - The National Review
“…reform conservatism asserted the centrality of social conservatism (broadly understood) against a lowest-common-denominator agenda of economic libertarianism. Family, community, traditional religion, civil society, and civic republicanism needed protection and support. But taking these social concerns seriously did not mean abandoning the Right’s affinity for market economics; it meant putting that affinity to use in the service of empowering working families and renewing society’s wellsprings. Roughly speaking, social conservatism (with its emphasis on family, faith, community, and country) would clarify the ends of politics and help articulate some crucial problems to be solved, while the logic of the market could point toward some plausible means of addressing these problems and remind conservatives of some inherent limits of centralized knowledge and action.”
Learning the Wrong Lessons from Reform Conservatism - Tanner Greer - March 17, 2020 - The National Review
This second piece, a response to the first, is essentially an ‘OK, Boomer’ retort from a younger conservative, who claims that conservatives need to abandon discussions of government overreach and instead focus on the fact that the left is winning the culture war, what he calls the Great Awokening. I will quote a couple of sections here, because I think they’re a very revealing look into the mind of today’s young conservatives:
From the perspective of the young conservative, the defining event of the last decade was not the election of Donald Trump but the revolution in morals and manners now dubbed the “Great Awokening.” This secular revival has blessed its adherents with a scheme of ethics, aesthetics, eschatology, and soteriology all their own. … It is worth emphasizing that the stunning advance of the woke had very little to do with the federal government. Barack Obama was not the author of the Great Awokening; the former president was a liberal of the old sort, a man who believed himself the living incarnation of the American creed. He was left frustrated and mystified by a generation of young progressives who had left behind their — and his — ancestral faith. No government forced them to leave. The agents of the Awokening made their case the old-fashioned way: In lectures, essays, and op-eds, they convinced; in newspaper headlines, music videos, and YouTube montages, they suggested; in campus protests and corporate HR codes, they coerced. But only rarely was this a matter of state coercion. Social pressure, not federal tyranny, keeps the young woke.
This young conservative is rather annoyed that his Gen X counterpart hasn’t understood the problem with culture today. He argues that they think this is about policies, about the primacy of tradition and markets over state interference, but they’re missing the forest through the trees: the left has taken over the hearts and minds of culture, and conservatism needs to offer something to counter it.
[Some] young conservatives [are] attracted to [Catholic] integralism not because they think its vision of the good is attainable, but because the integralists unapologetically advance a vision of the good. The integralists can tell them why the doctrines of the Great Awokening are malevolent falsehoods. The integralists provide a reason to stand strong against the social pressures of the woke. The integralists know what kind of man men should strive to be, what kind of woman women deserve to be, what purpose their life should be devoted to, and what rules and emotions should govern the relations of one human with another. They do not just endorse a stronger civic society — they have a gloriously specific vision of what worthy civic society actually looks like. They have a vision of human flourishing all their own, equal to and as compelling as the ethics and aesthetics fostered on them by the leftist over-culture.
This is true for all of the various poles of thought that those repelled by the Great Awokening have turned to. Be it the evo-pysch-infused “classical liberalism” of Jordan Peterson and the Intellectual Dark Web, the meme-based machismo of the Internet alt-right, Thiel-inspired techno-futurism, or the integralist’s Benedict Optioning cousins, these movements all share a key feature. They are oriented toward resisting not leftist politics but leftist culture. The story of next-generation conservatism, in other words, will be the story of a counterculture. Debates over what shape that counterculture should take cannot be resolved by a more “disciplined” policy environment.
The problem, this young conservative claims, is that past versions of conservatism, including the reformocons, have been focused on countering left-wing policy, when today’s young conservatives believe the battleground is in the arena of left-wing culture.
Little wonder then that the reformocon vision of the future struggled to take hold! Reformocons argued for the centrality of community without endorsing any concrete vision of communal life. They described the need to build new institutions without committing themselves to any specific institutions. They authored wonkish proposals to strengthen family formation but painted no picture of families worth forming. The visions of the reformocons were colorless and empty.
What do you think? Do you think the problem with conservatism today is that it is being bested by a left-wing over-culture? Is it possible for conservatives today to present a compelling vision of The Good Life, or has the combination of Donald Trump and the trumping of left-wing culture mean that they’re done?
Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Dinner Table Don’ts is a curation of News, Commentary and Analysis from Peter Thurley. Named after his first blog started while in university, Dinner Table Don’ts is a conversation about all the topics you were told to keep away from the dinner table.
While the Dinner Table Digest newsletter will be FREE for the first while as I get the kinks sorted out and onto a regular posting schedule, it will eventually transfer to a paid subscription model. It will be inexpensive, only a few bucks a month. As my capacity increases, so too may new subscription opportunities.
Learn more about what makes this newsletter special here.
They're not done. There will be new combinations of ways to exploit and exacerbate popular fears and resentments. And what is caricatured here as "The Great Awokening" is not as triumphant as it is made out to be either. There may be neo-con/neo-libs, young and old, who "believe the battleground is in the arena of left-wing culture", just as there are knee-jerk leftists who believe the battleground is in the arena of hegemonic capitalism. My sense is that this way of conceiving the spectrum of political and cultural choices and possibilities has become almost completely irrelevant for understanding 21st-century needs, threats and opportunities. I say let them blather and wrangle away. There is urgent and meaningful work that needs to be done.