The American Right Has No Future — Unless…

Let me just get this out of the way upfront: I am a “conservative” — not a Conservative, but a conservative. That is, I believe it imperative to conserve “the best which has been thought and said in the world” throughout history — and that there are objective standards for determining this that have absolutely nothing to do with an individual’s particular identity or historical circumstances. Just what these “objective” standards are and how they should be applied, however, is an eternal debate in which every generation must engage, and the very reason why it is so vital to preserve those that have best contributed to their illumination. So while I do not support the American Right in its current permutation, I do believe that conservatism is the only pragmatic worldview.

This is why it saddens/scares me that Conservatives today are so intent on utterly decimating its legitimacy for every thinking member of my generation. While it is certainly reasonable that many of my peers would feel this way — considering the two leading Republican candidates for Leader of the Free World are 1) the narcissistic personification of a corporate brand; and 2) a vacuous snake oil salesman — their outright disdain for anything even remotely conservative, does not leave me very hopeful for the continuance of said “Free World.” Incredibly, despite our once bright future now being eclipsed by the total destabilization of world order, it somehow has not shaken Millennials’ millenarian faith that Leftist politics is the norm, rather than the exception for human societies. The owl of Minerva does always fly at dusk, I suppose, and only hindsight is 20/20.

But if, as I contend, conservatism is the best way to look at the world, then why/how is it so disparaged today — and more importantly, could this result have been avoided? While there are about 1,001 different places I could start this story, for the sake of our impoverished attention spans, I’ll just begin with the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925.

Formally known as The State of Tennessee vs John Thomas Scopes, it was the first highly publicized battle over whether evolution should be taught in public schools. The national media ordained it as a symbol of the growing divide in American culture between Fundamentalists and those more accommodating to modern science, who viewed the Bible as beautiful and important stories, but not exactly history. From the very start, it was quite clear which side of the issue the mainstream media was on — most vividly portrayed by my fellow Baltimorean H.L. Mencken’s scathing caricatures of the town’s inhabitants as “yokels” and “morons,” and the defense attorney as a “buffoon.” Yet despite this one-sided coverage, the court did ultimately rule against its being taught.

However, this was a pyrrhic victory. The mob, I mean, media had spoken, and the real result was the ascendancy of Liberalism and driving underground of fundamentalist Christianity. For the next three decades, Liberalism — defined broadly as Science, Progress and New Deal economics — became the sole doctrine of academics and intellectuals throughout the land. Salvation was no longer to be found in Jesus, rather in “the best and the brightest” — an elite cadre of “objective” administrators, who would redeem us not by faith, but by works. Armed with nothing but the power of algebra and data, they set out to deliver us from all those irrational prejudices and loyalties that have been the root of so much evil throughout the history of humanity.

But, as in physics, in history too, actions always produce equal and opposite reactions. In the economic sphere, free market critiques began proclaiming that we were on “the road to serfdom,” while those concerned more with society extolled the forgotten virtues of tradition, character, family and community. And as the Cold War inflamed America, anti-Leftist sentiment in public opinion grew much more sultry, as well. Finally, in 1955, these disparate strands were knit together and given intellectual credence by the founding of today’s consensus-bearer of Conservatism, National Review. It’s mission was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so;” to declare that not everything progressive is necessarily “Progress;” to show that ideas have consequences.

Yet despite this nascent respectability, I believe, the movement would have remained mostly marginal if it had not been for one lovely summer of sex, drugs and rock’n roll.

As the most eminent cultural critic of the day, Lionel Trilling, noted as early as 1950 in The Liberal Imagination, the dogmas of mainstream American Liberalism just did not seem to be entirely satisfying on the human level. Its unwavering belief in Progress and the capacity of Science to solve the tragedies of human life were coming to be seen as naive at best, bankrupt at worst. Something else, something more was needed to save Liberalism from devolving into rot conformity and ideology. Yet, despite these rumblings, the self-assurety of the Liberal establishment remained steadfast — leaving them wholly unprepared to confront the consequences of what a generation of peace, prosperity and Spockian childrearing had bred for them. So when the student Radicals of the 1960s began attacking Liberalism from the even further Left, they were left defenseless.

Now, while I will undeniably grant that these movements had many legitimate grievances — racism, imperialism, “The Organization Man,” Scientism — the problem, as I see it, is that they went about trying to enact their solutions in completely the wrong way. Basically, there was just no audience in the prevailing American populace that was even remotely prepared to accept their message: a wholesale rejection of “civilization” based on idiosyncratic interpretations of Freud and Marx that the average citizen hadn’t the least bit of acquaintance with or sympathy for. It was simply too extreme, intellectual and abstract — plus it didn’t help that they painted everyone who didn’t accept their message as either ignorant Philistines, or even less charitably, just plain evil.

What I primarily take issue with, though, was their incredibly shortsighted attempt to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” — to reject America and Western history and thought in its entirety (especially considering that their entire critique, language and ideas were wholly Western, even when it purported to be drawing from other sources).* If Christianity results in “repression,” Science in the “one-dimensional man” and totalitarianism, Capitalism in meaningless materialism, and “civilization” in hierarchy, racism and sexual inequality, then something, anything, they concluded, would have to be better than this.

Since the Scopes trial, the American masses had been pulled along, however reluctantly, to continuously more “enlightened” views. But we have always been — and, alas, perhaps always will be — an anti-intellectual nation. (Let’s just suffice it to say that America’s almost exclusive focus on the material necessities of life generally leaves little time for the “higher” pursuits.) While many would have perhaps tolerated, and some even profited from, a reasoned critique of their worst offenses, they were not about about to passively accept a root and branch extraction of everything they had ever known and cherished.

Instead of attempting to meet their fellow countrymen where they stood, the Radicals tried to drag them off a cliff into an unknown abyss. I can, though, certainly sympathize with the students’ frustration with the status quo. And in the end, I cannot really blame them — it was not their fault that the poverty of their Liberal education had not properly prepared them for the role they were attempting to play. However, in the vacuum created, the Right was presented a perfect opportunity to rise up from its decades-long dormancy.

What began as a mere guerrilla insurgency, suddenly became a propped-open door back into the halls of power. Nixon called this new coalition the “Silent Majority,” made up of average Americans seeking a restoration of “law and order,” and perhaps even “common sense” — a catch all phrase meant to highlight the irrationality and infeasibility of these new Leftist projects. Unfortunately, though, instead of stopping there, the Right became reactive, and as already noted, reactions always tend to be equal and opposite. Instead of employing common sense, they doubled down in the opposite direction — re-embracing the formerly discredited Fundamentalism and, even worse, turning laissez faire Capitalism into an unquestionable article of faith.

To make a shortened version of a long story even shorter, let’s jump ahead to 2016. It’s almost 50 years later and the social views of the Radicals have become increasingly the norm: sexual freedom, radical Individualism, legalized drugs, minority rights, Multiculturalism. And what do we see on the Right? Prejudice and ideology being touted as “principle.” They have been stuck in a 50 year rearguard action that has not achieved even one significant victory in the “Culture War,” while simultaneously alienating an entire generation indoctrinated by Leftist intellectuals emboldened by the idiocy and incoherence of mainstream Conservatism (Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, every major Republican candidate).

Yet despite the doctrinairism of so-called “Social Justice Warriors,” I believe, the average Millennial is a pragmatist at heart. The problem is, other than a “will to believe” or blind-partisanship, we have no good reason to subscribe to the views espoused by Conservatives today. And until there is one, our numbers will continue to dwindle, while the “Nones” expand exponentially.

So what would a Right with a future look like?

The cardinal error of the Radicals, as I see it, was to view “Western” thought as monolithic. They mistakenly believed that no alternatives could be found within it, therefore must be rejected en masse. But as we have painstakingly discovered in the ensuing years, it is much easier to be a demolitonist than an architect — once you take a step into that abyss, it’s a loooonnngggg way down. I am a conservative because I believe there is just as much in the Western tradition that should be conserved — philosophy, science, art, constitutionalism — as should be rejected. But it is only by knowing both that I am able to make such a judgment. As Orwell sagely warned in 1984, “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” Ignorance of the past, and the ideas that have shaped the present, hurts no one but yourself because, I guarantee, the people in power do know them — and are actively using it to control you.

Now, you may retort, “But everything we learn today is still Western!” From history to philosophy to economics, politics and science, other than the few courses we are forced to take to fulfill our “diversity” requirements, it is all taught through the “white, male, hetero-nomative” lens. However, there is a big difference between knowing something and caring about it, between memorizing a few facts to pass a test and building ones life upon it. Sure, much of the knowledge is still being transmitted, but the impetus to seriously engage with it in any meaningful way has all but disappeared. Our education today merely prepares us for an appearance on Jeopardy, not for the discovery of the “good life.”

This is what the Right in the ‘60s should have proposed in response to the Radicals. Rather than grabbing the helm of the Titanic, Conservatives should have emphasized a more realistic, less triumphalist view of the West — preserving the good, while attempting to excise the bad. Instead, they’ve completely ceded all intellectual ground to a nihilistic multiculturalism that wouldn’t even know where to begin to try to make such a distinction. Despite the poverty of Liberal “education” in America today, it has managed to make Millennials just wise enough to recognize that what is on offer from the Conservative establishment is a moribund joke. Instead of preserving the best which has been thought and said in the world,” it has circumscribed itself inside a narrow and ever-narrowing provincialism based on intolerance and exclusion (while at the same time preaching “globalization” in economics — don’t even get me started on the contradictions of that!).

There are many great sources to find incisive and invigorating debate on the Right today, but you will never see that represented in the mainstream media — by either the Left or Right. Websites like The Imaginative Conservative, The American Conservative, Postmodern Conservative and Acculturated, among others, both embrace resolutely the Western heritage, yet are open to Truth from any source it may spring. The Internet, globalization and mass immigration have made Conservatism’s present course entirely untenable. The only way I see the American Right as having a future is if it can find a way beyond the politics of fear, hate and ignorance that it has crafted over the last half century to once again embrace the search for “beauty, goodness and truth” that the best of its thinkers claim to represent.