Conservative Culture War
So I take it that Robert Stacy McCain is unhappy about something. Offhand, as a sometimes ”splenetic conservative” myself, I would suggest that perpetuating internecine feuds along class, educational and generational lines is not going to accomplish anything. It seems to me that when conservatives are already largely outnumbered among Millennials and post-graduate degree-holders and are becoming more so among college-educated people, and when the GOP is steadily losing the upper-middle class in general, lecturing, or rather berating, ”arrogant” young educated professionals is a good way to drive away members of the rising generations even more quickly. This claim seems particularly hard to credit:
Nothing has corrupted the conservative movement more than this tendency to grab super-bright 20-somethings right out of elite universities and elevate them to positions in the commentariat before they’ve passed any markers of adulthood other than graduating school.
Really? Was this more corrupting than reflexive obeisance to whatever ill-considered Republican policy was being pushed by the leadership or administration at the time? More corrupting than the decision of many middle-aged pols and party strategists that the only hope for the future was to push for immigration liberalization? More corrupting than the near-universal embrace of an unnecessary war by movement leaders? More corrupting than the numerous apologies written on behalf of the administration’s torture regime? More corrupting than endorsing every executive power grab and new surveillance powers? I could go on, but I think you get the point. I suppose there could be some problem in promoting young graduates too quickly, but had the movement not been doing this I’m pretty sure it would have suffered from much of the same corruption.
The signals in recent years have been quite clear: if you are privileged or capable enough to go to elite universities for your education and you are at all right-leaning in your views, you will have to apologize for your education or conceal it for the rest of your life to make yourself acceptable to many of your confreres on the right. Furthermore, should you hold any seemingly or genuinely heterodox views, these will be attributed to your toffy background, which will then be invoked as sufficient reason to ignore you entirely. At the same time, should you exhibit any behavior or preferences that mark you as “crunchy” or otherwise critical of the culture of acquisition and consumption, you will presumed guilty of one kind of deviationism or another, and obviously if you express opposition to needless wars, abuses of power and trampling on civil liberties you will be presumed to be a left-wing wolf in conservative sheep’s clothing. These have been the messages sent to the different kinds of dissident and heterodox conservatives over the last six or eight years, and they are not exactly deepening any loyalties.
Continuing in this fashion portends a future consumed by grievances and cultural cues in which both “defenders of elites” and their critics tell self-reinforcing congratulatory tales to themselves about their superior understanding of reality. The former will cheer their defense of high standards and wonkery, and the latter will celebrate their Middle American ordinariness and jeer at the poncy gits in the Northeast. I know this is where this will go because it is already happening. “Eat your own” is never exactly a winning strategy, but it is an absolutely crazy one when the reason for doing so seems to be based to a significant degree in lifestyle politics and cultural resentments. In place of one conservative cocoon, there will simply be two, and they will take pride in their lack of understanding of what goes on inside the other one.
It’s true that Sarah Palin on her own is not the problem, nor is she really at the heart of all this, but neither is she the solution. Her policy advisors could, I suppose, all be self-taught and homeschooled for their whole lives, but she would still need to be acquainted with the details of major policies sooner rather than later. Presumably, one would want her advisors to be among the best at what they do regardless of where they come from, and surely it is in that sense that Ross means elites in this post. Her nomination has become the occasion to express many simmering resentments on all sides, and this entire controversy echoes to some extent the responses provoked by Huckabee’s candidacy, and so she has been treated as the embodiment of whatever the critic or admirer thinks is wrong/right with conservatism. What all of this back-and-forth avoids is a real debate over policy priorities and what kind of policies conservatives should support. Ultimately, that reinforces the status quo and works to the detriment of populist conservatives, since it leaves the latter with the undesirable rhetorical framing that understanding policy is less important than life experience.
Update: McCain responds in another update to his original post, fixating on the remark about “crunchy” conservatism above. I did not have his criticism of Rod’s book in mind, which I had forgotten about until he mentioned it, but was using the criticism of “crunchy” cons as closet socialists/fascists/whatever as another example of the impulse to hurl abuse at other conservatives without much reason. McCain says:
Conservatism is a philosophy of government, not a matter of lifestyle preferences.
What McCain may be missing here is that much of the hostility to the “crunchy” con view was a rabid defense of individualism and an angry resentment at anyone trying to “interfere” with self-indulgent habits. The people who made an idol out of any and all lifestyle preferences as equally valid choices and viewed criticism of bad habits as unforgiveable meddling were the opponents of “crunchy” conservatism. Ironically, the so-called countercultural voices appealed to authority and tradition, while the defenders of the status quo were reduced to saying something like, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” “Crunchy” cons and their sympathizers made the mistake of attempting to apply ethical and moral standards in everyday life, which was regularly misunderstood as “politicizing” private life because the critics had an impoverished understanding of politics as only those things pertaining to the state and an almost equally impoverished understanding of culture as mostly those things pertaining to sexuality.
Conservatism includes within it a philosophy of government, but that is not all it is. It is surely also a vision of social and moral order, or to the extent that it is a political persuasion it includes within the definition of politics much more than questions of administration and legislation. We would agree that conservatism is not a matter of “lifestyle preferences”–which is why, among other things, conservatives should not be falling over themselves in adulation over Palin’s preference for hunting and the like–but it seems as if we will have to continue disagreeing on other things. Most important, we disagree whether a conservatism of place and virtue, which is what I understand traditional conservatism to be, can coexist with the culture of acquisition and consumption. Conservatism as I understand it calls for restraint and prudence, both of which are discouraged in such a culture, and it assumes the existence of a common good that necessarily involves certain limits on economic behavior, which will either be imposed from within by discipline and self-control or they will eventually be imposed from without. I would go so far as to say that economic liberty and moral restraint rise and fall together, and as the latter weakens public regulation of economic life is bound to become more severe.
McCain concludes:
Conservatism isn’t about buying organic groceries at Whole Foods or sitting around quoting Russell Kirk, it’s about constitutional government.
I would agree that conservatism is not defined by buying organic groceries at Whole Foods, but that would have a lot to do with the problems with what Pollan has called Big Organic, but I would reject the idea that what and how we eat has nothing to do with a vision of good order. I would say that without the cultural moorings of restraint and self-control that are reflected in our habits, constitutional government isn’t possible. As we have been seeing, the consequences of the culture of acquisition and consumption reveal tremendous dependency, both political and economic, and lead to terrible distortions of the constitutional system. If quoting Russell Kirk might revive some understanding of these basic truths, it could be a worthwhile thing for conservatives to be doing.
Look at National Review as a specific example of how youth and inexperience has been ruinous. Rich Lowry (40), Ramesh Ponnuru, (34), David Frum (48), Jonah Goldberg (39), Katherine Lopez (32). The one with age and real experience is the one I most enjoy reading, John Derbyshire (63).
Surely, I’m not the only person who sometimes want to knock “the other McCain” the f— out. I wonder where I’d fall on his list of despicable conservatives, coming from rural, middle-class America but matriculating at Notre Dame and then moving to inside the Beltway.
You’re probably even worse, Daniel, having done time in Washington before heading to that Midwest Ivy in Barack Obama’s neighborhood.
Give. Me. A. Break.
How many of these people actually fit McCain’s description of “super-bright 20-somethings right out of elite universities”? How many ever fit that description when they first started?
Surely the problem many of us would have with at least some of these people is not, to put it mildly, that they are “super-bright” or “right out of elite universities.” On the whole, whatever has gone wrong with NR in the last 10-20 years from our perspective is not principally a function of the “youth and inexperience” of its leading contributors. In the last eight years, the trouble has come more from a combination of bad ideas and excessive support for this administration and its policies. To say that “nothing has corrupted…more” than recruiting young graduates of elite universities is to ignore all of these other factors.
Nathan, I understand your frustration, and early on I had the same kind of reaction, but what I find more frustrating is not the dislike of Ivy League types, but the futility of feuding with people over these status markers. My parents are state university graduates, and they both came away with good educations and taught me to appreciate learning, so I don’t come to all of this with some presumption that there is something wrong with people who have educational backgrounds different from mine. I have been fortunate, and I owe that to my parents and their parents before them. What one gets from a school depends a lot on the student; a good student can come away with a better education from a less prestigious school than someone at an Ivy League university. What I don’t quite understand is the contempt that flows in the other direction.
Actually, I did not “do time” in Washington (my undergraduate school was in Southside Virginia), but I have on several occasions visited Washington, which may be just as bad.
Thanks, Daniel. I needed that dose of sense after getting my blood up courtesy of RSM.
My mistake about your not having lived in DC; I think I read on one of your last posts before you moved the web-log here that you’d just returned from Washington, and assumed that you’d been living here, rather than visiting.
Not a problem, Nathan. Something I have been slowly learning after almost four years of blogging is that there is no use in getting as worked up about these things as I once did.
“I think I read on one of your last posts before you moved the web-log here that you’d just returned from Washington, and assumed that you’d been living here, rather than visiting.”
Ah, no. That was my CPAC adventure, which was just a two-day jaunt there and back. However, I have been in the city to visit Dumbarton Oaks and went annually to philosophy talks at Georgetown when I was in college, so I am dangerously well-acquainted with the area.
Reading Ross’ post, then McCain’s response, I have only one question: since when is David Brooks either a “super-bright-20-something” or a “Harvard-educated a$$hole”?
Never let the facts get into the way of a good rant, I guess.
This false populism is just the reaction to protect the Republican Rock Stars from criticism. They need something to believe in, and constitutional governance is apparently too boring. If they believed in constitutional government, they wouldn’t have surrendered it all in the name of fear to the Executive Branch. They support the continued erosion of the Constitution based on party identity, not because of any principle. But they like to believe that they are principled.
Palin is just a symptom of how twisted it is being an ideologue these days.
I for one have some resentment of Ivy League types. I’m sure most are perfectly nice people. However, it totally stinks that a handful of prestigious schools produce the majority of individuals who go on to form this self-replicating, insular elite class of people who are able to take advantage of solid gold networking opportunities to establish permanent, multi-generational footholds in the commanding heights of arts, business and politics. This would be unfair even if the ones bred for the most powerful positions weren’t a bunch of bigheaded incompetents, which they are. The guys responsible for every debacle of the last 8 years are all from The Ivy League’s Greatest Hits, Volume 3.
So, if you went to a “great†school, facing a degree of bigotry and resentment from the common folk is a small price to pay for the huge advantages of simply interacting with the upper echelons of society. Everybody knows that any dumb schmoozer can get ahead if they got “connectionsâ€â€”we got a bunch of ‘em running this country into the ground as we speak. Frankly, I’m envious, because I was a good student, a good worker, and I can schmooze with the best of them, and the only reason I’m not making 100k+ right now, or working at some exalted institution, is because my family doesn’t get invitations to the right soirées.
I know this is just the way of the world, but especially in light of the recent performance by the “products†of these elite breeding grounds, graduation from a prestigious school does not justify automatic respect. In fact, these fortunate bastards should have much more to prove than the rest of us, in demonstrating their worthiness of the privilege.
I think it’s possible to err in both directions here. I once waded through an utterly ludicrous isteve comment thread (pre-Palin) in which multiple posters called Barack Obama “stupid” (a word actually used, IIRC) on the grounds that he attended Occidental College, a well-respected liberal arts school in the eyes of most normal people, but not Harvard or Yale and thus only for the stupid in the eyes of these zealots. Even the fact that Obama later transferred to an Ivy League school was not enough. (Salier himself, of course, did not endorse such nonsense.) This particular example consisted of conservatives attacking a liberal, but it is true that the traffic usually goes in the other direction.
On the other hand, I don’t know if I believe that “the only reason I’m not making 100k+ right now, or working at some exalted institution, is because my family doesn’t get invitations to the right soirées.” (I mean as a general principle; I mean no slur against you personally. Some people do just have bad luck.) The Ivies (and my undergraduate degree is not from an Ivy League university, so I am not speaking from self-interest) have probably been more self-consciously meritocratic over the last several decades or so than ever before. That is not to say that they always (or even frequently) succeed in actually picking the best students, but that an attempt to do so (plus affirmative action) is the major determinant behind who gets in. Class background no longer has the main role, for the most part. I believe Ross Douthat himself, for example, comes from a middle-class background. Among those who have caused “every debacle of the last 8 years,” many do have Ivy League degrees, but their pre-Ivy-League backgrounds are various. Bush himself (or perhaps also Paul Wolfowitz, a professor’s son) is the only one who was clearly a legacy admission. Ben Bernanke, if his Wikipedia bio can be believed, had a 1590 on his SATs!
Occidental College is indeed a respected four-year college in LA, though I’m prejudiced since my mother has been on the faculty there for several years (and remembers Obama attending her introductory psychology class). Oxy is a perfectly legitimate stepping stone for a place like Harvard.
Definitely post-Palin, it would be exceedingly rich for this faction of the conservative punditry to be criticizing Obama’s academic career path.
I would have expected to half-enjoy seeing the same sickening bile that conservatives heap on liberals spewn upon their own, but I must say that sight is just as revolting. These people, regardless of their ideology, are simply depraved losers, with third-class minds and fourth-class temperaments, poisoned by failure and resentment. Liberals are well acquainted with their hate, and we see it made especially loathsome for our quadrennial celebrations of electoral democracy, but it’s just as loathsome when directed at others, even those who are critical of liberalism’s many ideas and agendas. I don’t find satsifaction in seeing conservatism implode upon itself, eating its young, in that liberalism itself requires strong and purposeful opposition to maintain its own health. As a liberal, I worry about the bloat and corruption that can occur within a liberal victory if it is not matched by strong and coherent opposition from conservative voices. If the only opposition it finds is the decadent emotions of populist resentment, this is not good for either liberalism or the country itself. We may be on the verge of an historic liberal-democrat victory, and thus it is just as important that conservatives be purged of their poisons as that liberals stay on edge and not get lazy and too comfortable.
The reluctance of principled conservatives to admit that the Republican Party has outlived its usefulness and should be allowed to wither away to its irreducible core of nativists, Christianists, and crony capitalists is disappointing but not surprising. Y’all have considerable time and emotion invested in the Republican Party, and it must be emotionally difficult to come to grips with the complete loss of that investment.
My own view is that we are in for (and I hope for) a fundamental realignment in American politics, in which the rational adults in the two current parties realize that there is more that unites them than divides them, and come together, leaving the dead husks of the Democratic and Republican Parties to the left and right extremists, respectively.
Most important, we disagree whether a conservatism of place and virtue, which is what I understand traditional conservatism to be, can coexist with the culture of acquisition and consumption.
Right.
“Y’all have considerable time and emotion invested in the Republican Party, and it must be emotionally difficult to come to grips with the complete loss of that investment.”
Well, perhaps many do, but I don’t really have any such investment. There is an assumption that I see many people make that I must be a Republican because I talk about its political fortunes as much as I do, but this is not the case. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of that party. I talk about recognizing that most conservatives still identify themselves with the party, but this the result of the Cold War and the cultural revolution. What conservatives must always remember is that their alliance with this party has been historically contingent and it derived to a large extent from the fact that it was not the party of FDR and became the refuge of cultural conservatives later on.