Just one long piece in this post.
David Brooks, The Atlantic, 18 Nov 2021: The Terrifying Future of the American Right, subtitled, “What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference”
David Brooks, middle-of-the-road columnist for the New York Times, has a longish essay on The Atlantic’s site about what he heard and concluded by visiting a conference of conservative activists.
He begins by introducing Rachel Bovard, summarizing her background.
She’s bright, cheerful, and funny, and has a side hustle as a sommelier. And, like most young people, she has absorbed the dominant ideas of her peer group.
One of the ideas she’s absorbed is that the conservatives who came before her were insufferably naive. They thought liberals and conservatives both want what’s best for America, disagreeing only on how to get there. But that’s not true, she believes. “Woke elites—increasingly the mainstream left of this country—do not want what we want,” she told the National Conservatism Conference, which was held earlier this month in a bland hotel alongside theme parks in Orlando. “What they want is to destroy us,” she said. “Not only will they use every power at their disposal to achieve their goal,” but they’ve already been doing it for years “by dominating every cultural, intellectual, and political institution.”
Comment: this strikes me as paranoid and naive. While elements of liberal “wokism” and cancel culture can go too far, liberals are the ones trying to make progress (fix problems) for the nation while conservatives are the ones who want to stop history, deny science and racism, preserve white supremacy, and complain about being persecuted. But let’s go on. What do conservatives really want? She gives a speech.
The atmosphere is electric. She’s giving the best synopsis of national conservatism I’ve heard at the conference we’re attending—and with flair! Progressives pretend to be the oppressed ones, she tells the crowd, “but in reality, it’s just an old boys’ club, another frat house for entitled rich kids contrived to perpetuate their unearned privilege. It’s Skull and Bones for gender-studies majors!” She finishes to a rousing ovation. People leap to their feet.
I have the sinking sensation that the thunderous sound I’m hearing is the future of the Republican Party.
Yet Brooks is surprised at how charming everyone is. He describes the movement’s three strains. About the Information Age and the “cultural elite” — the media, the universities, Hollywood — that they’ve inveighed against. About their hostility toward Big Tech, and their turn against Big Business. Their current apocalyptic tone. Hawley, Cruz, Rubio. Hawley rails about American men. A movie director’s daughter characterizes the 1956 John Wayne movie as about “how Americans tamed the West and how Christian values got brought to ‘savage, undeveloped land’.” Brooks: “This is about as dumb a reading of The Searchers as it’s possible to imagine.”
Debates about the classic-liberal order. Yoram Hazony, who thinks Christian values should dominate. Christopher Rufo; Rod Dreher; Viktor Orban.
Brooks summarizes:
The NatCons are wrong to think there is a unified thing called “the left” that hates America. This is just the apocalyptic menace many of them had to invent in order to justify their decision to vote for Donald Trump.
They are wrong, too, to think there is a wokeist Anschluss taking over all the institutions of American life. For people who spend so much time railing about the evils of social media, they sure seem to spend an awful lot of their lives on Twitter. Ninety percent of their discourse is about the discourse. Anecdotalism was also rampant at the conference—generalizing from three anecdotes about people who got canceled to conclude that all of American life is a woke hellscape. They need to get out more.Furthermore, if Hazony thinks America is about to return to Christian dominance, he’s living in 1956. Evangelical Christianity has lost many millions of believers across recent decades. Secularism is surging, and white Christianity is shrinking into a rump presence in American life. America is becoming more religiously diverse every day. Christians are in no position to impose their values—regarding same-sex marriage or anything else—on the public square. Self-aware Christians know this.
Finally, there is something extremely off-putting about the NatCon public pose. In person, as I say, I find many of them charming, warm, and friendly. But their public posture is dominated by the psychology of threat and menace. If there was one expression of sympathy, kindness, or grace uttered from the podium in Orlando, I did not hear it. But I did hear callousness, invocations of combat, and whiffs of brutality.
Finally, I’ve occasionally wondered what would happen if you could conduct an experiment. Put all the conservatives complaining about persecution on one big island, all the liberals trying to fix real-world problems on another. All those who don’t “believe” in vaccines on one island, all those who do (and take them) on another. How many on each will still be alive a few plagues later? All the white supremacists on one island, all the woke liberals on another. Which island would prevail? How many will survive on Kyle Rittenhouse’s island, where everyone is armed and anyone can wade into a crowd with a big gun and shoot people and get away with it by claiming they were scared?
Brooks ends on a similar idea:
I found myself thinking of what I was seeing as some kind of new theme park: NatCon World, a hermetically sealed dystopian universe with its own confected thrills and chills, its own illiberal rides. I tried to console myself by noting that this NatCon theme park is the brainchild of a few isolated intellectuals with a screwy view of American politics and history. But the disconcerting reality is that America’s rarified NatCon World is just one piece of a larger illiberal populist revolt that is strong and rising.
