Avi Woolf is Wrong
Like Kilgore Trout (if that is his real name) before him, Buckley Club scribe Avi Woolf is Wrong. And we here at The Buckley Club is Wrong consider it our solemn duty to explain why.
Let us begin with the beginning. Writes Mr. Woolf:
A common trope among liberals is that conservatives blindly trust authority and power, willing slaves of dead, antiquated traditions and ideas. It’s a myth with a lot of staying power, despite the valiant efforts of conservatives to dispel this notion; see, for instance this wonderful effort by conservative philosopher Ed Feser.
Already, I have had to steady myself on the furniture. Be easy, Avi! What do you mean we aren’t willing slaves of antiquated traditions? The Founders may be less than three centuries gone, but the ideas upon which they founded this republic stretch back a bit longer. I trust I don’t need to elaborate.
The philosopher you are looking for is not Feser, but Sobchak.
But the truth is that we conservatives are facing a profound crisis of mistrustof authority of any and all kinds in our own camp. Prof. Tom Nichols has correctly pinpointed the general problem of the “Death of Expertise” among the general public, which means that most people in general distrust authorities as superior to them in knowledge or understanding.
I’ll let Neal Stephenson take this one.
But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
Or perhaps that obscure 20th century man of letters (have you heard of him?), W.F. Buckley might sway you.
“I am obliged to confess that I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
Moving on!
In the past, and to some extent in the present, too, conservatives have never tired of pointing out how pretty much the entirety of “traditional” power and influence bastions — mainstream media, universities, government bureaucracies, popular culture
One quibble: Your definition of “traditional” seems limited to the United States of the past, say, 150 years. There are older traditions, you know. (cf. Sobchak, et. al).
But this reality means that at a basic, fundamental level, conservatives have no choice but to be instinctively, temperamentally skeptical and distrustful of authority as is traditionally conceived
Maybe you’re just looking for authority in all the wrong places? Perhaps the crisis is not Authority, but the authorities?
William Buckley once described a conservative as “a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” Well, that’s still the case, only things have really only gotten worse as far as conservative influence in most of the aforementioned bastions. [Emphasis added]
Would it be fair to say that the entire project of standing athwart & yelling has been a complete and total failure? Might we try something else?
It’s hard to stay sane with that sort of siege mentality, which can often come with a persecution complex, for so many years and not crack.
Literally one sentence prior you admit that things have only gotten worse, and now you’re back to pathologizing your interlocutors. Physician, heal thyself!
The response of many — especially in the wake of Trumpmania, but also beforehand — is to simply give up, argue everyone should “eat at Arby’s” or “burn it all down” because it’s all hopeless anyway.
Right?
Almost like soldiers who’ve been in the front-line trenches for too long, some of us have simply gone insane with despair. I myself often have such feelings.
Ah, cheer up, lad! I promise you’ll be much happier when you realize that the fight is hopelessly lost.
Almost all of us follow “elitists” — be they named Buckley, Hayek, Chesterton, or otherwise.
Absolutely. I was actually just discussing this with Gilbert Keith, and he’s got some thoughts on tradition that he think you’d enjoy reading.
We need people who often see farther and yes, know more, who can forcefully and bravely give our side a fair hearing and even victories in the halls of influence, not just of political power.
And Harry Potter needs to graduate top-of-class in Hogwart’s if he hopes to make a career out of this magic business.
Everything you read, all the policies and victories conservatives did achieve, were the product of those eggheads and intellectuals we so fear.
Look, I was never opposed to making Antonin Scalia King of America, but he’s gone now, and this argument has expired with him.
Talk radio can get conservative politicians elected, but only elites can effect lasting change in the ever so crucial battlegrounds of ideas, whether it show in legislation or cultural power.
The thing is that this takes time, effort, and a lot of hard work. Much like it is better to join the political game than complain about it while doing nothing
I am not trying to be flip when I say this: On what possible evidence do you base this statement? Let’s just use gay marriage as a convenient proxy, since the battle was recent. When the voters banned it in CA, what happened? When the duly elected representatives of the people passed a religious freedom bill in IN, what happened? What do you think is going to happen in NC under the onslaught of every corporation, media hack, and celebrity (washed-up or otherwise)?
You have lovely ideals, and in a different society, I would share them. But this is not the United States of 1776 or 1789. This is the era of the Pen and the Phone and the personality cult and disregard for the rule of law. If you continue to play their game, you will continue to lose. And worse, you will channel all the productive energy of the right into being part of a duped, controlled opposition.
Paul Ryan does not like you. He is not interested in “fighting” for you or your interests. Nor is Mitch McConnell, nor anyone else in Washington, D.C. These men are not your friends nor allies. They are your rulers, and they hold you in contempt.
The left did not take over so many crucial bastions in the 1960s with Black Magic
You’re right. They took them over long, long before that. The Frankfurt School is easy to use as a marker because it’s so egregious, but Cthulu has been swimming left since first he woke. The US State Department was for decades a sort of Communist dinner club, for WFB’s sake.
From Jackson to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Wilson to Roosevelt to Johnson we have only ever moved left. If you want to debate this, I’d be happy to. For now, just try to think about a moment where America moved perceptibly right. And if all you can come up with is “Reagan!” (and that’s all I can come up with), consider that this game has been going on a lot longer, and going a lot worse, than you’d thought.
Nor will it do to merely rail against these institutions from the sidelines, or from “alternative” sources which often end up becoming just as radical and demagogic as their radical left counterparts.
Let us stipulate that Robert Conquest is smarter than either of us, and consider your comment in light of his three laws.
Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
Lastly:
Conservatism’s crisis of authority will not be saved on the battlefield of politics, but in the arena of ideas, and the institutions that convey the same. The left took those over; they now need to be taken back for all — especially right-wingers.
My friend, we never had them. You’re mistaking “less-left” for “right.”
You can burn it all down, or you can prepare the fight until you achieve breakthroughs.
Or you can focus on your family and your faith and your community, as you see it. The United States will never again be a nation of limited government and individual liberty, as it has not been since Washington. Ronaldus Magnus was a dead-cat bounce.
William F. Buckley was a brilliant man, and reading my dad’s NR as a kid in school opened my eyes to all manner of ideas, but his movement died with him. The Cold War is over, and we fought at best to a draw. Look around you. This is Alger Hiss’ country, not Whittaker Chambers’.
