Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism
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More in Bigthink, World of Washington
The scene is a blind date, the setting a D.C. coffee shop, where a “whip smart, beautiful woman who loves talking politics” waits at a corner table. As you approach, eager to engage her interests, you peek at the cover of her magazine, figuring that if she’s reading National Review or The Weekly Standard the legacy of Ronald Reagan might be the best topic, whereas if she’s thumbing through The Nation or Mother Jones, the better play might be to remark on Barack Obama.
Alas, she is reading New York, the newspaper beside her is the Washington Post, and the tabloid peeking from her laptop bag is The Onion. These publications share a left-of-center sensibility. But none predict her political beliefs.
As a dating dilemma, this is easily solved. Ask her questions! The problem the scene augurs for conservatives and libertarians is more difficult: Mainstream publications give our insights insufficient due, hence the rise of right-of-center outlets. But those publications rarely influence the apolitical, centrists, or liberals, for they are funded by, produced for, and read by those already sympathetic to the right — and mostly ignored by everyone else.
Escaping this ghetto requires understanding why the media slants left. Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics, there isn’t any elite liberal conspiracy at work. Bias creeps in largely because the narrative conventions of journalism are poor at capturing basic conservative and libertarian truths. An instructive example is rent control. A newspaper reporter assigned that topic can easily find a sympathetic family no longer able to afford its longtime apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood. Their plight is a moving brief for a rent ceiling.
As almost everyone long ago conceded, however, opponents of rent control offer superior counterarguments. Limiting rent degrades the quality of a city’s housing stock, causes shortages as a dearth of new units are built, and spurs a black market where well-connected elites game their way into subsidized flats. A talented reporter, given enough time and space, could craft a narrative that illustrates how rent control ultimately makes poor families worse off. His job is relatively difficult, however, for he can hardly write a pithy anecdotal lead about the hundred families that won’t occupy a non-existent apartment building because a foolish policy eliminated an unknown developer’s incentive to build it.
The right, in other words, has a problem with narrative. The stubborn facts of this world contradict pieties left, right, and libertarian, occassionally forcing each group to revise its thinking. But the core critiques of liberalism intrinsically resist the narrative form. Who can foresee the unintended consequences of government intervention in advance? Who can pinpoint the particular threats to liberty posed by an ever-growing public sector?
Nor is it always easy to make a positive case for a conservative theme. Take the argument for gradual social change, which is predicated on the notion that certain societal traditions add value we do not always fully understand. Even after the breakup of the nuclear family in African-American communities, for example, we cannot explain precisely why the absence of fathers has proven so disastrous, though facts confirm the effect so unambiguously that old conservative warnings are now accepted pop-culture themes.
The difficulty of critiquing flawed liberal positions and asserting alternatives before it’s too late is exacerbated by the conservative intellectual tradition’s lack of penetration into academia. Colleges and journalism schools rarely teach Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, or Milton Friedman. How can journalists unversed in such thinkers recognize when facts validate their ideas?
These asymmetries help explain why the right has sought to discredit the mainstream media while funding its own ideologically conceived outlets. It isn’t just a matter of “playing the refs.” Every political movement has a place for publications where debate among fellow travelers helps refine its most nuanced ideas and where the faithful can be rallied behind them.
The temptation, of course, is to convert that crucible into an echo chamber where only journalism that helps “the movement” is published. An example I’m always struck by is The Weekly Standard’s decision, back in 1997, to pass on Tucker Carlson’s devastating profile of Grover Norquist. As it happens, the excellent piece found a home at The New Republic, a liberal publication that doesn’t shy from occasional attacks on its own side. TNR’s track record of diverse editors and frequent elevation of sound journalism above ideology are reasons I find it an enjoyable read, an occasional influence on my thinking, and far harder to ignore than most magazines whose sensibilities are closer to my own. (Kudos are also due to Reason for its coverage of Ron Paul’s ties to racist newsletters — both the magazine and the libertarian movement are better off for it.)
As the right’s echo chamber grows, the ideas that reverberate weaken. Ghettoizing smart writers within rally-the-base publications is something the left can afford, given the present media landscape, while the scarcity of journalists who grasp right-of-center ideas make their isolation particularly costly. Take a writer whose work I’ve long enjoyed, Jonah Goldberg. He is a smart guy, a capable debater and possesses a rare talent for crafting columns that are laugh-out-loud funny. These qualities could win over liberals on some topics. So I cringed when I saw the original title of his recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, assuming that, despite his regular efforts to engage intelligent liberals, even those on the left who regularly engage conservatives would assume bad faith. They did, even after the title changed.
A conservative friend, who shares my aversion to polemically titled projects, recently saw a poll stating that a majority of Americans favor government-run health care, and remarked that our generation needs its own William F. Buckley to stand athwart history.
Yet great as Buckley’s influence and ability was, I’m not sure another Buckley’s what we really need. Instead, I’d prefer another Tom Wolfe, or better yet a dozen. As his generation’s conservative commentators railed against The Great Society, insisting its urban anti-poverty programs encouraged radicalism, bred dependence on the welfare state, and ignored the root causes of unemployment, Mr. Wolfe did something different: reporting. His accounts of the era’s excesses, Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers, owe their power to narrative drama and specificity. Readers couldn’t help but be impressed by Wolfe’s independent mind and feel that reforms were needed.
Nod along, then, to Wall Street Journal editorials raging against the liberal health care agenda. I’ve written on the Orange County Register op-ed page on the same topic. Were I holding the purse strings to a fund for right-leaning journalists, however, I’d charter a (white!) 12-seat plane for my dozen Tom Wolfe clones, dispatching them to every country whose health-care system Ezra Klein hopes to draw on. I’d make certain my new new journalists understood the strongest critiques of liberalism and of government-run health care. I’d also be sure their ultimate loyalty lay in investigating and rendering the world as it is, priorities that shouldn’t trouble confident conservatives and libertarians.
An exemplar of this reportorial aplomb is Heather MacDonald, whose carefully researched City Journal pieces are written as though an exhaustive airing of facts will inevitably move some readers who doubt her thesis toward its conclusions. Among commentators, Peggy Noonan and George Will are also notable, the former for her ability to cast ideas within compelling mini-narratives, and the latter for the illustrative anecdotes dug up by his research assistants.
In fact, for all my griping, I’m cautiously buoyed by certain young heterodox conservative writers, many of whom routinely create engaging commentary, honest analysis and serious works of the type that the right needs to flourish and persuade, whether or not you agree with their conclusions (not that they always agree with one another).
But a political movement cannot survive on commentary and analysis alone!
Were there only as talented a cadre of young right-leaning reporters dedicated to the journalistic project. The nation’s English departments, journalism schools, and mainstream publications teem with talented young liberal reporters who, for all their biases and blind spots, regularly produce stunning narrative writing. It certainly persuades me to embrace certain of their positions on occasion, or at least to modify my own. Will the next generation of left-leaning journalists continue to dominate the stories we tell ourselves as a society, as surely as their ideological cohorts dominate The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Newsweek today? Will liberals continue to produce the bulk of reportage in America, to pen the most ambitious literary non-fiction, and to miss relevant facts and narratives that a reporter more versed in right-leaning political philosophy would’ve caught?
Unless colleges and journalism schools start assigning Burke, Hayek, Friedman, and quite a few others, the answer depends upon whether the right is willing to invest in talented young people who understand conservatism and libertarianism, but whose foremost loyalty is to investigating their world and conveying whatever they find. Were the same resources that built National Review, The Weekly Standard, and other right-leaning publications invested in that project, tomorrow’s journalism would afford our ideas their due.
Put another way, the right must conclude that we’re better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it. Making this judgment means exhibiting confidence that we are correct more often than not. It means believing that our arguments are not merely relevant, but true. It means trusting that, when examined, the facts and stories of the world will bear out our ideas. Fate has not declared that right-leaning publications shall never be read by liberals. Nor is there a decree that all unaffiliated publications are de facto liberal. Yet as long as the right continues to believe this — and act accordingly — it will, I fear, continue to be true.
–Conor Friedersdorf is a freelance writer and an assistant editor at Bloggingheads.tv.
16 Comments - add your own
Frymaster — May 19, 2008 at 8:23 pm
I give you all due credit for this thoughtful and provocative article. But that’s all you get.
Liberals have “biases and blind spots,” while conservative “arguments are not merely relevant, but true.”
How is that different than Fox News? Yes, your vocabulary and literary references are impressive. Ideas, less so.
The fact is that conservatism has held sway for a quarter century, and, as all partisans will, “smoked too much of its own weed” and started to believe in its claims of infallibility. (See yours above.)
After a quarter century of Reaganomics, productivity has risen to record levels while real wages are a flat line. Put another way, the profit generated by an American work hour has never been higher. Have wages risen anything close to matching?
Is this brittle, divided, hyper-leveraged economy the intended consequence or the unintended one?
It doesn’t matter how you tell the story. It is what it is.
But, in the end, no partisan approach can succeed in the real world. No party can foresee the unforeseen better than any other. In fact, recognizing that policies must adapt to meet both changing conditions AND their own shortcomings is the beginning of good governance. (I find that “occasionally” is far too slow a schedule for revising my thinking. I generally do so daily.)
Real solutions to our very real problems, such as you describe, will only come from broadly accepted norms (not rules) that embrace and reflect the diversity of opinion that pundits so foolishly cram into a finite set of boxes.
Conor Friedersdorf — May 20, 2008 at 12:48 am
Frymaster,
Nowhere do I suggest that every conservative argument is true while every liberal argument is flawed. In fact I note that facts are bound to contradict conservative, liberal and libertarian pieties. As a mix of conservative and libertarian I certainly think that our ideas are correct more often than not, and that given a full airing of facts among reasonable people we’d win more often than not. I’m sure you think that too about whatever your political philosophy is. Or I hope so — otherwise you ought to switch to ideas that strike you as more worthy of your convictions.
I’ve also got to say that you’re quite wrong to suggest that I’m a partisan, a characterization I find weird since later on you say, quite rightly, that many pundits foolishly cram opinions into a finite set of boxes.
I cited philosophers whose work I admire and find persuasive. I cited no politicians. I also explicitly spoke about being swayed occasionally by publications like TNR with ideologies that don’t match my own.
So what definition of partisan are you using here? An earnest question. And in any case, thanks for taking the time to read and comment.
Ryan W. — May 20, 2008 at 1:22 am
After a quarter century of Reaganomics, productivity has risen to record levels while real wages are a flat line. Put another way, the profit generated by an American work hour has never been higher. Have wages risen anything close to matching?
After World War II, Europe’s factories were bombed to dust. Back then, unions could effectively strike to increase wages. Now, they cannot. Unfortunately for our attempts to measure the effectiveness of various policies, those policies do not exist in a vaccum. Though it’s worth asking; how many laptops and cell phones did they have in 1950. Life expectancy has continued to increase. Those with talent are able to procure the funding to start businesses rather than capital being controlled by an elite clique. Innovation is worth something by itself. That people can succeed to the level of their ability is worth something in itself. This is true even if wages ‘flatline’ (which they haven’t actually done, but that’s a whole other argument.)
stephen — May 20, 2008 at 8:45 am
Just as you find yourself swayed occasionally by thoughtful pieces in TNR, I too am swayed at times by well-framed conservative argument. I’m a democrat, but I fall firmly in the centrist, dlc, blue dog, pragmatist camp, and I find core conservative principles — small government, free markets, individual freedom — pretty hard to refute.
But rather than drawing me in, tempting me with solid argument and a compelling narrative, conservative centers in the blogosphere — NRO blogs in particular — push me away with what seems a basic lack of good will. Obama’s a LIAR! Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s a FRAUD! Michelle’s ANTI-AMERICAN! It’s all about REV. WRIGHT!
I’m open to persuasion — making me an opportunity for conservatives of good will — but too often what I find among conservative bloggers is unappealing partisan hackery masquerading as principled argument. And that’s too bad.
Frymaster — May 20, 2008 at 10:49 am
Conor,
Thanks for your reply.
When you say that “mainstream publications give our insights insufficient due,” there’s a clear implication that these ideas have some objective value. And you clearly rate that objective value higher than the objective value of competing ideas. Hence you espouse these ideas.
(Are you a cut-and-dried whateveryouare? No. You’re clearly thoughtful and, I presume, open to good ideas regardless of source. But let’s be honest: AFF says “…the fate of freedom falls upon today’s conservative and libertarian professionals in their 20s and 30s to defend these gains and lead the next battle.” Battle against me, I can only presume. So, yeah, you’re prolly a good guy, but if you lay down with dogs, you’re gonna get fleas.)
To point, there is no objective value for an idea. Just as in the economic market, the value of an idea is exactly what the market says it is.
What happened to the share price of “less FEMA” when NOLA was underwater and Bush was on the golf course? Or the price of “less nat. sec.” on that terrible day in 2001? More or less competing ideas that BOTH showed their weakness in all-to-predictable ways.
Let me be clear: the very concept that these ideas work better than those ideas in more circumstances for more people is inherently flawed. This is my definition of partisanship.
I don’t bother to align myself with a political party or, worse than that, an ideology. Distinctly unhelpful, as Rummy once said. I am a for-realsies independent.
On aggregate, liberal and conservative policies both succeed and suck equally. True success lies in the speed and accuracy with which policies are revised to meet changing conditions AND their own inadequacies.
I was very close to a person who held an executive governance position, and it is on her successes that I base my politics. She was a longtime leader in the Plague of Women Voters and a longtime Democratic activist. And she won the chief executive post in an outrageously Republican town based on her widely acknowledged common-sense. Her second term was a record-setting landslide ~80%.
Why? She shrewdly mixed cost-cutting and smart investment (debt) to solve 3 key issues that had lingered, literally, for decades through Dem and Rep leadership. Sometimes she built consensus, sometimes she bulled her way through to resolution.
Always, she used whatever policy or approach best suited the situation. The results spoke for themselves.
Yes, I set the bar for successful governance very, very high - far above partisanship as defined above. Is that a bad thing?
Closing note: link above is to another blog where I write that’s more on topic here.
Tom — May 20, 2008 at 9:40 pm
Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics, there isn’t any elite liberal conspiracy at work. Bias creeps in largely because the narrative conventions of journalism are poor at capturing basic conservative and libertarian truths. An instructive example is rent control. A newspaper reporter assigned that topic can easily find a sympathetic family no longer able to afford its longtime apartment in a gentrifying neighborhood. Their plight is a moving brief for a rent ceiling.
That’s the exact experience I had during my year in journalism: it wasn’t so much that conservative ideas were quashed, it’s that they never crossed any else’s minds.
One thing I wish Conor had developed at greater length is that this current problem is consequence of a minor triumph: there is now a legitimate alternative conservative press that has broken the near-monopoly held by liberals earlier. I do agree however, that conservative writer’s efforts are much better spent now within mainstream journalism, where their ideas can not inly be heard by a wider audience, but where they will also be subject to greater scrutiny.
So I cringed when I saw the original title of his recent book, Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, assuming that, despite his regular efforts to engage intelligent liberals, even those on the left who regularly engage conservatives would assume bad faith.
Man, do I ever second that. I tried and failed to get a friend to read Liberal Fascism, despite the fact that our reading is one of the things we most enjoy sharing. She simply dismissed Goldberg as being possessed by a Coultergiest and moved on. As disappointed as I was, I could hardly blame her.
Mike — May 21, 2008 at 11:43 am
Take a writer whose work I’ve long enjoyed, Jonah Goldberg. He is a smart guy, a capable debater and possesses a rare talent for crafting columns that are laugh-out-loud funny.
He’s a clever guy, I’ll admit, but if he understands anything deeply, he does a remarkable job of hiding it. Goldberg’s only visible talent is the making of debating points, one-liners that succeed because it takes more than a few lines to explain why they’re wrong. Liberal Fascism is a book-length collection of them, and the fact that it’s been so highly praised by the punditry of the Right shows why liberals are justified in presuming their bad faith.
Knemon — May 21, 2008 at 1:17 pm
“Liberal Fascism is a book-length collection of them,”
To anyone reading this - this is simply not true, at least not of the first half of LF (it gets a bit one-linery when it turns from past to present). If you’ve thought of reading it - do so. You’ll be surprised.
Steve Roth — May 21, 2008 at 1:54 pm
>we’re better off joining the journalistic
>project than trying to discredit it.
While you’re about it, replace “journalistic project” with “government.”
Reagan was wrong: government is not the problem. *Bad* government is the problem.
The last seven years have certainly made that clear.
Russ Carter — May 21, 2008 at 6:22 pm
If you have to think that hard on how to convey your philosophy, it’s probably just wrong. Conservatives, standing athwart history and yelling stop, are the perpetual minority preventing progress and there’s no justification for Leaders who don’t want to move forward. There has NEVER been an issue that conservatism has stopped. Everything conservatives hold dear will pass, again and again, and as long as you’re willing to accept, that you can slow and stall progress, but never stop it, then fine. But, wouldn’t it be better to just figure out how to make the inevitable progress forward more effective, even palatable for your kind, than just yelling stop…old man yells at cloud indeed…
J. Peter Freire — May 21, 2008 at 6:22 pm
I do enjoy a good equivocation, such as that invoked by Frymaster:
Let me be clear: the very concept that these ideas work better than those ideas in more circumstances for more people is inherently flawed. This is my definition of partisanship.
Gotcha. You can’t be right 100% of the time. Here’s the problem: those who favor larger governments prefer to turn their version of being right into law, thus forcing everyone else to fall in line. Classical liberals understand that, given the tendency of man to get things wrong so frequently, they shouldn’t make such demands on people.
And how is Bush golfing during Katrina a sign that big government works? Isn’t that a sign of exactly the incompetence I’m suggesting?
Frymaster — May 23, 2008 at 1:14 am
Petey, funny I didn’t see you on the author’s list over at Snarky Bastards. You certainly fit the bill, as do I semicolon dash close parens.
You may find my equivocal approach to be immature, but it’s none more so than yours. You have a hammer called somethingism, and all the world’s your nail.
So this terrible people, through the trickery of a brilliantly designed democratic process that even in this dark time can still express the will of that people, do such evil as to pass a law. Then they add sin upon sin by expecting others, who through their own free will remain participants in that free society that passed the law, to then follow that law. That is problematic. Not.
Is it that you feel you don’t need to follow any laws or is it that you just want to follow only the ones you like?
To your last point, is “passing laws” the incompetence to which you refer? I agree that the Bush administration has screwed us up a treat, mostly by getting high on the supply. But I don’t see how your apparent approach - NO government - would have done much better.
It certainly would have been cheaper. Big deal. I, for one, am willing to pay for quality.
J. Peter Freire — May 23, 2008 at 12:18 pm
You may find my equivocal approach to be immature, but it’s none more so than yours.
I know you are, but what am I?
Anyway, your point on legislation makes no sense whatsoever. By that token, should a person disagree with legislation, they are being undemocratic. Actually, yes: Ideas are undemocratic. I’m okay with that.
So, no, I don’t look at the U.S. government as a giant conspiracy, and yes, the plumbing in my Montana cave is exactly how I want it to be. But your suggestion that people express themselves through our political process omits the fact that they can do a lot of other things in absence of a federal government. Like appeal to a state government. Or a local one. Or perhaps create their own initiative by which people can voluntarily participate.
Oh what the hell. The Government’s a Conspiracy! Down with the illuminati! Ron Paul ‘08!
Frymaster — May 23, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Frymaster — May 23, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Urgh. Standard blockquote tags didn’t render. Y’all should put your tag allowances explicitly on the editor or hidden in the code view. It’s a blogging nicety. ED: please quote the quote. You way have my blessing to futz.
Frymaster — May 23, 2008 at 1:26 pm
And BTW, can anybody other than me actually sweat copper pipe?