The quest for a slop-proof universal ought
What does a worldview impervious to compartmentalization look like?
I have customarily distinguished between the two online venues which showcase my thoughts on culture, politics economics and big questions by degree of topicality. My blog, Late in the Day, generally deals with issues currently on the nation’s and world’s radar. Its posts are more inclined to link to, and excerpt from, other sources as required to bolster points I want to make. This Substack, Precipice, tends toward essays the flow of which is less interrupted by looks at the thoughts of others.
We’re going to do things a little differently today. This post can be seen as a continuation of a thought process I began working out at LITD this morning. Both, in turn, are written in the service of a notion I want to explore in an essay for a new publication to which I've been invited to contribute.
In that LITD post, I look at two takes on populism, both of which I came across even earlier this morning, during my first round of online poking around. One is from Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writing at The Spectator. I found his framing of it as a reaction to the limited choices posed to the Western public, much as social democracy was a century ago, commendable. I felt that he got onto shaky ground when he concluded that populism is so inexorably on the rise that elites had better reconsider their presumptions lest they get run over. He may want to take another look at the cultural landscape, and the degree to which the elites have prevailed. Then I offer the Daren Jonescu characterization of the entire elite-vs.-populist dichotomy as a ruse, or at least as a profoundly mistaken conclusion. Both have lost sight of “the institutions, principles, and apolitical wonders that were once the wellsprings of civilization and the guardrails of rational coexistence.”
No sooner had I hit “publish” than I came upon a symposium in the October issue of The New Criterion entitled “The New Conservative Dilemma.”
Since 2015, I’ve been perplexed by the zeal with which a number of public intellectuals have signed onto a project that is clearly different in kind from the conservatism they’d previously embraced. New Criterion editor Roger Kimball is one such figure.
Let me start with one of the symposium essays, by Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, a journal founded in 1957 by Russell Kirk. McCarthy’s symposium contribution, entitled “Conservatism Reconfigured,” posits “four types of response to the crumbling of the foundations that made conservatism possible for the last two hundred years.”
The first of the four he discusses is what he calls the restorationists:
The “restorationists” are those who believe a return to the industrial economy and a Christian culture is possible. Economic nationalists and Christian nationalists are two varieties of restorationist. Compactmagazine has a restorationist outlook, as does much of the New Right, and the leading populist figures in the Republican Party, such as Trump and DeSantis, make restorationist claims.
He doubts their efficacy for two reasons: One, the industrial revolution came and went, and much of the way it shaped Western society has been superseded by new organizational models, and two, institutional Christianity no longer has the backing of the political framework. In fact, that framework is now openly hostile to it, as Aaron Renn has so ably shown.
The second type is the nihilists, who “are defined by their rejection of the Left, rather than their desire to restore conservatism. Christianity, bourgeois security, the patriotic masses, and the ancien régime are all equally dead to them. Yet this does not make them despondent or inclined to accept left-wing authority. They will resist though they have nothing but resistance itself.”
The third type is what he calls the “withdrawalists,” as exemplified by the Christian retreat from society proposed by Rod Dreher in The Benedict Option.
The fourth type is the accommodationists:
These men and women, who often represent the “conservative” voices in liberal media, accept their place in a post-industrial, culturally progressive America. They tend to live like withdrawalists, in gated communities and red states, and console themselves with the assurance that their own family, their own private school, and their own church has not yet lost count of the number of human sexes (or “genders”). Their job is to make liberals seem tolerant for tolerating conservatives who attack the same right-wing targets that liberals attack. Accommodationists do not like restorationists or nihilists, and they will thunder in outrage any time restorationists and nihilists join forces against the Left. The privilege of judging the moral hygiene of other people’s alliances, while never accepting judgment for their own strange bedfellows, is characteristic of accommodationists.
McCarthy says that if there is any hope for conservatism’s unification and viability, the restorationists will lead the way. He concedes that it’s a monumental task and by no means certain to succeed.
I happen to think he’s wrong. Restorationism is bound up with the common-good notion that has Marco Rubio so excited, and the outright championing of industrial policy by the likes of Oren Cass. That would require conservatism to jettison the aspects of its foundation bequeathed by Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Henry Hazlitt et al. Economic liberty is inseparable from any other kind, and it happens on the micro, not the macro, level.
But I’d now like to zero in on what Kimball, in his introduction to the symposium, has to say about McCarthy’s four-types formulation - in particular, the accomodationists:
The most bootless—also the most contemptible—is the response of “conservatives” he calls “accommodationists”:
Their job is to make liberals seem tolerant for tolerating conservatives who attack the same right-wing targets that liberals attack. Accommodationists . . . will thunder in outrage any time [other conservatives] join forces against the Left.
Accommodationists are terrified of being mistaken for populists. But, as Margot Cleveland points out below, “The irony here is that those conservatives who most loudly declared populism at odds with conservatism—a refrain repeated ad nauseam to distance themselves from Trump and his supporters—soon abandoned conservatism itself.” The step from accommodation to capitulation is always a short one.
Get that? He holds them in contempt.
Now, I think these symposium contributors are being deliberate and disingenuous in their omission of yet another type. They accomplish this by lumping them - us - in with the accommodationists.
Yes, there are real accommodationists, and it’s difficult for me to not regard them with contempt. Bill Kristol’s we’re-all-Democrats-at-least-for-now pronouncement in the last election cycle betrays a silliness unbecoming of the spawn of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. The site he cofounded, The Bulwark, doesn't even try to bill itself as conservative by any definition at this point. Heath Mayo and his project, Principles First, may have gone irretrievably wobbly with the untenable position that gay marriage is something conservatives ought to get behind, given their fealty to strong families.
But there are those of us who inhabit that narrowest of all slivers of terrain. We have not gone wobbly, but, conversely, we had enough of a grip on ourselves to resist the vulgar appeal of Trump and the Neo-Trumpists who have appeared in his wake. This may look like “the privilege of judging the moral hygiene of other people’s alliances” to Daniel McCarthy (expressed by MAGA social-media flame-throwers in the 2016 cycle as being wedded to “muh principles”), but I call it having some modicum of common sense. A charlatan who is now hedging his political bets on such core issues as abortion, Ukraine and labor standoffs - much as he did eight years ago by declaring any modifications to Social Security and Medicare as being off the table - doesn’t give a rip about what evangelical Christians or free-market economics champions -or these restorationists, for that matter - hold dear. He approaches being a politician with one thing in mind: How to maximize his own glorification.
Back in 2015, Matthew Continetti, in a piece that appeared at both the Washington Free Beacon and National Review entitled “The Radical Middle’s Revenge,” came up with a pretty spot-on analysis of what kind of post-American was most susceptible to having his or her passions ignited by this unprecedented force:
These voters don’t give a whit about corporate tax reform or TPP or the capital gains rate or the fate of Uber, they make a distinction between deserved benefits like Social Security and Medicare and undeserved ones like welfare and food stamps, their patriotism is real and nationalistic and skeptical of foreign entanglement, they wept on 9/11, they want America to be strong, dominant, confident, the America of their youth, their young adulthood, the America of 40 or 30 or even 20 years ago. They do not speak in the cadences or dialect of New York or Washington, their thoughts can be garbled, easily dismissed, or impugned, they are not members of a designated victim group and thus lack moral standing in the eyes of the media, but still they deserve as much attention and sympathy as any of our fellow citizens, still they vote.
What the radical middle has seen in recent years has not given them reason to be confident in our government, our political system, our legion of politicians clambering up the professional ladder office to office. Two inconclusive wars, a financial crisis, recession, and weak recovery, government failure from Katrina to the TSA to the launch of Obamacare to the federal background check system, an unelected and unaccountable managerial bureaucracy that targets grassroots organizations and makes law through diktat, race riots and Ebola and judicial overreach. And through it all, as constant as the northern star, a myopic drive on the part of leaders in both parties to enact a “comprehensive immigration reform” that would incentivize illegal immigration and increase legal immigration despite public opposition.
In short, Trumpism was never a recognizably conservative movement. It was just an expression of being fed up on the part of a swath of the populace that had never fully identified with any established ideological category.
I can’t sign on to any kind of conservatism that insists that I forego any pillar of the whole package. That looks to me like settling for something that will never offer resolution.
Conservatism is more than any of the bullet-point formulations that have been offered as ways to encapsulate it. It’s a sensibility, an orientation toward the world.
But it’s also concerned with immutable verities.
It may be a tragic worldview, but it’s also absolutist. It can’t allow for situations in which “well, maybe in this one case” is seen as a proper response to something that runs counter to human freedom, dignity, community, tradition and order.
As I say, I’m still working out just what the scope ought to be for the piece I intend to write for the new publication I mentioned at the outset. What I hope I’ve done here is further erect the scaffolding for what that will be.
As always, I welcome your input. I presume these questions haunt you as well.