This double standard is more interesting than anything else in the book. It’s interesting not because it’s a tendency peculiar to Denby, but because we all feel it from time to time. “It is not easy—perhaps not even desirable—to judge other people by a consistent standard,” says a character in Anthony Powell’s novel A Question of Upbringing. “Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable, in one person may be readily tolerated in another.” When Christopher Hitchens turned, or appeared to turn, politically rightward, George Scialabba noted his own reaction and wrote: “All the someone in question has to do is begin thinking differently from me about a few important matters, and in no time I find that his qualities have subtly metamorphosed. His abundance of colorful anecdotes now looks like incessant and ingenious self-promotion. His marvelous copiousness and fluency strike me as mere mellifluous facility and mechanical prolixity.” This is the strange alchemy of bias. Scialabba should have asked, though, whether he was wrong to have appreciated those qualities before.

It’s all reminiscent of kids losing a game and accusing the other side of cheating. The beef here is with losing, but to admit that as an adult is rather uncomfortable. On this rarely acknowledged principle, face-saving intellectuals prefer to complain about their opposition’s unseemly tactics rather than the more troublesome fact that their opposition exists at all.

Because of this slippery understanding of snark, the closest that Denby is able to come to a firm definition of it is to offer this vague scenario:

The platonic ideal of snark is something like this: Two girls are sitting in a high school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space.

What the analogue of “best friend” would be in the wider world of politics and ideas is unclear, and the vagueness of the bad-mouthing makes it easy to condemn. If snark is simply invective one doesn’t like, then every person with an intact personality is against snark. Snark, as it’s used outside of Denby’s book, seems to mean criticism that some party deems too caustic in tone, but anyone who condemns snark in the Denby way, it seems, has to speak as if the whole world shares his preferences for what deserves scorn and praise. This sort of criticism therefore shorts the circuit that criticism is supposed to travel, that is, to convince others of what specific things deserve scorn and praise.

It would be better to leave Denby’s convoluted book behind, and—in drawing the line between the uses and abuses of snark—look at an established classic. Here is a line from a work, which the author described as “an experiment in literary investigation”: “According to the rumors, it was all the work of ex-soldiers (recent ex-soldiers!).”

The author is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who, while advancing west with the Red Army, was arrested by his own government and imprisoned, becoming an “ex-soldier.” When prisoners in one of the camps revolted, government propaganda found it useful to describe the rebels as “ex-soldiers,” implying that they were a ragtag mob of deranged, violent men, long out of the army and lashing out against a reasonable penal system. But these were in fact “recent ex-soldiers,” having been transformed overnight from stalwart defenders of their country into condemned criminals. Ex-soldiers they certainly were—why, just a week ago they were risking their lives for the motherland, and now here they are, being tortured as “fascists”!

But I notice I’m already imitating the tone of the man I’m writing about. It’s a frenetic, contagious style—Solzhenitsyn is the only writer who likes italics and exclamation points more than the editors at Gawker—and it shares with snark the ability to stow an entire worldview between parentheses. (Compression of meaning is something snark also shares with poetry.) Many who have heard of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) but not read it are under the impression that it’s like an encyclopedia with all the light parts cut out and that only a rare surge of piety could make anyone want to read it instead of just gazing at its spine on the shelf. This is a strange reputation for one of the most entertaining books ever written about mass murder to have, but maybe that dour dust-jacket is what’s throwing them off. It couldn’t be the prose, when every other page raises the question of whether, once you’ve found yourself laughing at sarcastic descriptions of torture and brutality, you should feel bad or just go with it.

After some initial frustrations, the Soviet government manages to put down the camp rebellion. Solzhenitsyn, with horrifying specificity, describes just how the military murdered the rebels, and adds:

So busy were they with all this that no one had leisure to open Pravda that day. It had a special theme—a day in the life of our Motherland: the successes of steelworkers; more and more crops harvested by machine. The historian surveying our country as it was that day will have an easy task.

There’s nothing particularly satirical about this style—what it describes isn’t an exaggeration, which is exactly why it holds our attention. It’s sarcastic, snide, irreverent, but most of all, it makes no effort to be objective. It is grounded entirely in the presumption of disdain of the Soviet gulag system. Far from encumbering the prose, the snark illuminates the system’s absurdity. Bereft of its snark, it would read like one of those Associated Press stories that leaves you wondering whether the reporter is withholding something crucial for fear of violating objectivity.

One of the funniest (and snarkiest) passages in the whole book describes how the Tsarist justice system dealt with Lenin before the revolution. After relating, among other things, how under communism entire peasant families were executed for “hoarding” the crops they hoped to subsist on, Solzhenitsyn describes the ordeals of the young Vladimir this way:

…he was merely expelled. Such cruelty! Yes, but he was also banished….To Sakhalin? No, to the family estate of Kokushkino, where he intended to spend the summer anyway. He wanted to work, so they gave him an opportunity….To fell trees in the frozen north? No, to practice law in Samara, where he was simultaneously active in illegal political circles. After this he was allowed to take his examinations at St. Petersburg University as an external student. (With his curriculum vitae? What was the Special section thinking of?)

That dismissive “Such cruelty!” is related to what is one of his strangest rhetorical effects, namely how when describing the remorseless cruelty of the Soviet system, he seems almost, but not quite, to convey admiration for their total lack of scruples. This black humor is just one element of tone that achieves a chord-like complexity, giving the lie to the notion that snark is always simple.

Denby laments the “knowing” tone of snark, which he says implies in-group status. He’s right about that implication. But knowingness can be the appropriate antidote to authorities who insist on playing dumb. During the camp rebellion, the government deigns to negotiate with the prisoners. It offers to involve the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD, but the prisoners refuse this.

“Don’t trust even the MVD?” The vice-minister was thrown into a sweat by this treasonable talk. “And who can have inspired in you such hatred for the MVD?” A riddle, if ever there was one.

The MVD’s record of abuse is well known to the prisoners, and to Solzhenitsyn’s readers. They are an “in-group” in the matter of Soviet torture and their knowing tone is fitting.

To make a great literary work, a writer has to find the best style for his subject. Given his position as a dissident writing in secret, it’s impossible that Solzhenitsyn could have been the objective historian, even if he’d wanted to. There were two remaining options. First, he could have been lachrymose, solemn, and shaken. This is the more obvious way to write about the murder of millions. The second approach would involve bitterness, cynicism, and a resolve not to be duped. By choosing the latter, Solzhenitsyn was able to be more, not less, affecting and honest. Snark stimulates the human attraction to conflict, and this accounts for its currency online. It also helps hold our attention when sympathy alone proves insufficient.

The sad fact about human attention is that it flags even, or especially, when you tell yourself that the subject at hand deserves it. When Roberto Bolano wanted to include in his final novel, 2666, a detailed description of the serial murder of Mexican women, he went about it by listing how they died, their professions, and much other data. Even the most sympathetic reviewers conceded that this was a hard section to get through. The effect was ultimately deadening instead of affecting, for the same reason you feel you know much less about the man whose thick file you’ve read than about a Shakespeare character who has just a dozen lines. Data is nothing; drama is everything.

Take, for example, Solzhenitsyn describing an apparent suicide by hanging: “The bosses were not greatly upset; they cut him down and wheeled him off to the scrap heap.” In this case, snark shows both how easy it is to become inured to cruelty, but also how ineradicable the standards of human decency are to those who haven’t been totally corrupted by the camps. Snark is the tone we adopt when we decide to laugh at something that demands our reverence, and therefore obedience. The invective may be against a puffed-up cultural figure or a totalitarian regime, but the different levels of bravery these two kinds of snark require shouldn’t blind us to their rhetorical affinities.

Some might say that, because of the conditions under which he wrote the book, a cruder, blog-like tone won out. Given a more leisurely environment, the argument goes, the irony would have been refined. But the political oppression which necessitated the tone also necessitated the book, and it becomes obvious quickly that The Gulag Archipelago and its snark are of a piece. In the gulag, subtlety wouldn’t have done the trick and would have sapped Solzhenitsyn’s rhetoric of its moral power. And the trick was shifting world consciousness.

And consciousness needed shifting. Nazism enjoyed some respect from those who were free to choose, but communism enjoyed more and for a longer time. Few intellectuals needed to be shocked into seeing the essential evil of Hitler’s regime. The death camps were able to speak for themselves. Specious stuff about omelets and eggs, though, seemed to constantly hover around the “progressive” dictatorships. The Soviet mass murder required a commentary, which Solzhenitsyn and others had to provide. But how does Solzhenitsyn’s snark compare to the kind currently sloshing around the Internet? The moral vision behind his snark certainly elevates it above the jealous sniping of Gawker and its ilk at the established media, which has as its counterintuitive end the effort to become the established media. But the fall of the Soviet Union hardly heralded the end of political double-talk or of political crimes on so massive a scale that earnestness and sorrowfulness will fail to convey their full injustice. The persistence of these features of political life leaves open a space for snark in our public discourse. One of the greatest books of the previous century was snarky, and it blasted away other apologists for the gulag who posed as “sober,” “level-headed,” and “reasonable.” (”In the USSR, at least they’re trying to forge something positive,” said A. J. Ayer to Kingsley Amis, who had brought up that annoying five million dead.) This teaches us, I think, that we should be wary of entering into any polite rhetorical arrangement when important matters are at stake. We should be wise enough to realize that, exasperating as irreverence can be, the alternative is worse. After all, a figure or institution that crumbles at the first touch of snark might deserve to be targeted. Denby would argue that we—the Correct—should be nice to each other and heap our scorn only on the Incorrect. That would nice if these categories were distinct except in retrospect (or even then). Since life is lived forwards, not backwards, only fanatics know for sure if they’re wrong or right in the present, and this necessitates skepticism and irreverence and, yes, snark.

Nicholas Desai has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and other publications. He lives in Virginia. Art by Katherine Eastland.

It is an unusual setting to discuss Lonegan’s underdog bid to win the Republican party’s nomination for governor this June, and with it the chance to challenge Jon Corzine, the increasingly vulnerable Democratic incumbent, in this fall’s election. But the bank vault—with its thick, automatically locking metal door (Lonegan good-naturedly assures me that there is “enough oxygen to survive for 24 hours”)—is also fittingly symbolic.

This is not just because it calls to mind the current financial crisis, and Washington’s trillion-dollar response to it, which has fueled a populist backlash against government spending and energized free-market loyalists like Lonegan. It is also fitting because, running as an unapologetic “conservative Republican” in this deep-blue state, Lonegan has been written off by the local media, ignored by Corzine and his moderate Republican rival, former U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie, and snubbed by much of the state GOP establishment, giving his campaign the bunker-like feel of an insurgent underground. Politically, Lonegan is very much in the vault.

It doesn’t help that the Garden State has been hostile territory for Republicans in recent years. The last time a Republican candidate won a statewide office in New Jersey was 1997, when Governor Christine Todd Whitman won reelection. Voter rolls offer little encouragement. While 60 percent of the state’s 4.8 million registered voters are independents, they tend to vote Democratic, and Democrats still outnumber Republicans by 1.72 million to 1.04 million.

Bleaker still are the prospects for self-styled conservatives. When the GOP fielded Jersey City mayor Bret Schundler, the tax- and toll-cutting foe of abortion and gun-control, in the 2001 race, Democrats won handily. So it’s not surprising that despite some favorable signs—polls show that more than half of New Jersey voters oppose Corzine’s reelection—Republicans still see this year’s race as an uphill struggle. “If we can win here we can win anywhere,” one veteran Republican strategist says.

* * *

To understand why Lonegan thinks he can prevail against the odds, you have to go back to the beginning. Lonegan honed his political chops during the 1990s in Bogota (pronounced bo-GO-da), a solidly middle-class borough of 8,000 that he calls “a real microcosm of New Jersey.” Bogota has long been a Democratic stronghold—at least until Lonegan, a former businessman and owner of a kitchen cabinet manufacturing company, arrived on the scene.

As Lonegan tells it, Bogota was the victim of one-party politics. Taxes were among the highest in Bergen County, municipal government spending was out of control, and corruption ran rampant. “It was another example that big government and high taxes destroy economies, even on the local level,” says Lonegan, who at 53 still has the burly, square-shouldered build of the football center he was in college.

So in 1995, Lonegan ran for mayor. Outspent 2 to 1, he won anyway. “I did it by running on a solid conservative message. I said, ‘I am going to cut the size of government. I am going to lay people off.’ And I got elected on that. What’s really shocking is I did it. That’s where the trouble came in.” Indeed, listening to Lonegan recount his mayoral years is a bit like listening to a military historian: It is a tale of bitter battles fought, usually over contracts and budgeting, with the police, with the teachers’ unions, with the recreation department, among others. Still, by the time he ran for reelection in 1999, Lonegan had cut taxes, privatized municipal services, and reduced spending. He had also made a lot of enemies.

“My first reelection was brutal,” Lonegan recalls. “Everyone said, ‘This guy doesn’t have a chance. He’s too conservative.’ I remember going to the county Republicans and asking for help, and they said, ‘Listen, you’re on your own. You’ve pissed off everybody on the planet.’…[I]t seemed like every house in town had a sign that said ‘We support Bogota police,’ ‘We support Bogota workers.’ I won that reelection with 63 percent of the vote. In fact, the headline in the paper was, ‘Lonegan Leads Republican Sweep.’ I was one of the only towns in Bergen County where Republicans won up and down the ballot. Bottom line is I learned a real good lesson: When you stand up for taxpayers, they pay you back. And that’s been my philosophy of government.”

It’s also his strategy to become governor. For Lonegan, New Jersey is not so much a state as a collection of towns—specifically, the kinds of towns whose overtaxed residents will appreciate a no-nonsense fiscal conservative who promises to slash their taxes (some of the highest in the nation), weed out corruption (not for nothing is New Jersey known as the “Soprano State”), and reduce the state’s record debt ($35 billion and climbing). It’s no coincidence that Lonegan gave his 2008 political manifesto the endearingly straightforward title Putting Taxpayers First: A Blueprint for Victory in New Jersey.

In short, Lonegan sees the state as Bogota writ large. “If you look at New Jersey structurally—567 towns and cities—we have more small towns than any state in the country,” Lonegan says. “So aren’t local governments by their nature conservative? Each one of them has their own church or synagogue, a parish of some type, a lot of volunteerism. Those are my voters: all the Bogotas of New Jersey.”

* * *

It was a gray, drizzly day in Morristown, N.J., and beneath a somber sky the crowd was subdued. True, the signs were out in full-force: “Stimulate Business, Not Government,” “Obamaunisim: Trickle Up Poverty,” “Can we bankrupt the country? Yes we can!” and of course, “Taxed enough already,” the mantra of the so-called tea parties, the nationwide protests against the Obama administration’s $787 billion stimulus package, and the reason that some 500 people from across the state had braved the rain to assemble on the city’s downtown green. But there was a problem: The man that many had come to see, the man whose name was on nearly all the campaign signs being held aloft, was nowhere to be seen. Steve Lonegan was running late.

His absence was most acutely felt when the tea party’s organizers decided to hold an impromptu debate between the visiting political candidates. A diminutive fellow in a baseball cap, the lone Democrat, called for the repeal of NAFTA, earning jeers from a free-trade friendly audience. Next up was Republican Christopher Christie, the favorite of state GOP mandarins, who came closer to the going concerns but was clearly deficient in stage presence. “Are you overtaxed?” he droned. There was a faint rumbling of agreement. “I think you’re overtaxed, too,” he said. It sounded awkward, forced. A few people shuffled their feet.

Suddenly, a roar went up. And before you knew it, there was Lonegan, bounding up on the podium, somehow getting a hold of the microphone, displacing the others. “How about we freeze the size of government and take back America!” he boomed. The crowd erupted. This was what they had come for, and Lonegan was delivering, as he launched into a practiced stem-winder against “big government bureaucrats” in Washington and incompetents in the New Jersey statehouse. There was a slight slip-up—Lonegan confused the 10th Amendment, on state sovereignty, with the 14th, and was corrected by a full-throated chorus—but there was no doubting the crowd favorite.

Watching from a few feet away, Dennis Leary, a software developer from neighboring Randolph, was impressed. “Lonegan seems to be speaking my language,” he said. “A lot of guys will talk about changing things but you don’t really believe it, like with Christie. That’s the problem with Republicans, they’re spending as much as the Democrats, so there’s only one party.” Leary surveyed the Lonegan signs. “Maybe this will be the formation of a new one.”

* * *

Lonegan has certainly been a hit with the grassroots. “He was able early on to capture that network of staunchly conservative voters who don’t have a lot of people to give their money to right now,” says Brigid Harrison, a professor of political science and law at New Jersey’s Montclair State University. “They see him as a representative of an ideology that goes beyond New Jersey, and its supporters are willing to invest in it wherever it may be.”

The campaign frequently trumpets its 10,000 individual donors—4,000 of whom have never even lived in New Jersey. They are folks like Mary Barton, a 66-year-old Republican retiree from Spokane, Wash., who told the New Jersey Star Ledger that she gave two donations to Lonegan because she was “fed up with the Democratic liberals.” The amounts are small, but as Lonegan likes to say, “That’s a lot of people writing $50 to $100 checks.”

The contrast with the Christie campaign could hardly be more pronounced. A March review of fundraising reports by the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission found that Christie drew his support from large in-state donors, collecting an average contribution of $1,250, and just 10 percent of supporters came from outside New Jersey. By contrast, Lonegan’s average donation was $395, with most in the $25-dollar-or-less range and with nearly 55 percent of those coming from out of state.

This wellspring of support from the Republican rank and file represents Lonegan’s best chance to win the June 2 primary. “One of the great things is that 68 percent of primary voters are conservatives,” says Rick Shaftan, Lonegan’s longtime political strategist. “And Lonegan is beating Christie among conservatives by almost 20 points.” Christie still leads among likely GOP voters, but Shaftan contends that this lead “is based on the 17 percent who think that he’s a conservative. We’re winning everybody else.”

In this sense, the New Jersey primary race is just the latest front in the larger war within the Republican party. It is, as Lonegan says, a “classic battle between the conservative and the moderate wing of the Republican party,” but it is also more than that. As the party struggles for relevance in the age of Obama, it is faced with a choice between the back-to-basics vision of base favorites like Lonegan and the more conciliatory approach favored by establishment figures like Christie. At bottom, it’s a strategic question: Can the Republican party be conservative and competitive, or does it need to broaden its appeal to moderates and independents?

Lonegan personifies this dilemma. “Lonegan enjoys a passionately loyal group of supporters,” observes Harrison. “But in some ways that’s a double-edged sword because while he may win the primary it’s not clear that he can win a statewide office.”

* * *

Some on the Republican side are wary of precisely that. Just as his hard-edged conservative credentials have endeared Lonegan to the grassroots, they have hurt him with prominent GOP backers and party leaders who think he’s too polarizing a figure to win a general election. When I asked publishing magnate and New Jersey native Steve Forbes about Lonegan in early April, he preferred instead to talk about Christie, whom he would endorse just a week later. Although Lonegan is running on Forbes’s favored flat-tax platform, Forbes didn’t even speak his name.

New Jersey GOP leaders are also keeping their distance from Lonegan. Proof of that comes from the Republican county conventions, largely symbolic intraparty affairs that have overwhelmingly supported Christie. To be sure, Lonegan discounts the conventions, saying that he has chosen not to participate. “In order to compete, you have to sit down with the party bosses and hacks and cut your deal,” he says. “And I will not do that.” But even he must consider it a disappointment that among the delegations siding with Christie is Lonegan’s hometown Bergen County GOP, which rejected the three-term mayor’s pitch that winning in Bogota is like winning in New Jersey.

“I don’t think that’s a valid analogy,” says Bergen GOP chairman Bob Yudin. “For a Republican to win in New Jersey you have to go into these overwhelmingly Democratic districts, like New Brunswick and Newark, and at least lessen the Democratic vote for your opponent. Lonegan can’t do that.”

Tom Wilson, who as chairman of the state GOP has been on the receiving end of Lonegan’s frequent barbs against the state party leadership, offers a more charitable, if still skeptical assessment. While he doesn’t believe Lonegan is too conservative to win a general election, he does caution that Lonegan will have a hard time uniting the Republican party behind him. “It becomes a little difficult when you’re constantly talking about how awful a group is to then turn around and ask for their support. That’s a tough pill to swallow. Not many candidates have run off the line and been successful.”

Lonegan is dismissive of such warnings. “The party line in New Jersey on the Republican side does not mean a whole lot. History has proven that over and over again. People live off the line here all the time. So I built my own line and my own message.” Lonegan has even less patience for the suggestion that he should moderate his blunt-speaking image, a criticism that he interprets to mean that “Lonegan should be vague and maybe bullshit people a little bit.”

In any case, the Barry Goldwater-quoting Lonegan insists that moderation is no virtue given the grim realities of state politics. “Right now, the Republican party needs to be taken in a new direction and the Republican leadership—and I use that term loosely—has no vision for the future of the state, other than to get control of it themselves. It becomes the shirts versus the skins. One of the things I think I recognize is the need to rebuild the Republican party from the bottom up in the image of the Founders and of Ronald Reagan, and these guys aren’t going to do it.”

* * *

For all his appeals to Reaganesque purity, others see Lonegan’s strength in his resemblance to another president: Barack Obama.

Ben Dworkin, the director of the Rebovich Institute for New Jersey Politics at Rider University, notes that “Barack Obama has introduced to this country what I call the politics of maturity. He thinks before he speaks, he talks in complete paragraphs. As a result, people demand more from politicians than the usual talking points and political homilies. They are looking for a more detailed politician.” Lonegan benefits from that, Dworkin thinks. “He presents strong conservative views, yes, but he goes beyond slogans. He will say that he supports a flat tax, but he can also explain why.”

Improbable as it may seem, there is something to this comparison. For instance, when I ask Lonegan about the first thing he would do if elected, I expect him to invoke some version of his fiery campaign pledge to gut the state budget by 20 percent. (”I feel like a kid in a candy shop. There are so many places to cut,” Lonegan once told the Philadelphia Inquirer.) But instead he gives an unexpectedly pragmatic answer. “The first thing I would do, and the thing I am already doing, is working to recruit the brightest minds because the governor right out of the box puts into place about 180 key policy people, policy people who will run different departments, and I need those people who understand limited government, free-market principles, and how to get to that point. That’s the biggest challenge: putting the best possible team together.”

Of course, Lonegan is anything but an admirer of the 44th president. One of the reasons he wants to be governor is to resist more effectively what he calls “the assault from the Obama administration and everything that goes with it.” He wants his best and brightest to bring discipline to Republican spending priorities, pointing to what he calls the “five bills that screwed up New Jersey”—bills that included measures like card check and small business tax hikes. “Despite Democratic control in the legislature, all five of those bills could not have passed without Republican support,” he says. “So that’s exactly why the Republican party is where it is.” But in unguarded moments, the combative conservative can seem a lot like the Democratic president he so vigorously opposes.

* * *

There is a confidence about Lonegan bordering on cockiness. Asked what he will do if he loses the primary, he seems baffled. “Losing is not an alterative,” he says. “I’ve never even thought of it.” In another politician, this might come off as contrived, desperate even, but when Lonegan says it you have the distinct sense that he means it. Despite the very real possibility, he has never contemplated defeat.

Still, things look grim. Even with his support among small donors, Lonegan lags behind his opponent in fundraising. As of early May, Christie had more than doubled Lonegan’s fundraising haul, collecting a total of $4.7 million compared to Lonegan’s $2.3 million. Polls show him trailing Christie by at least nine points among likely GOP primary voters. Then there is his running feud with the GOP establishment, and a generally aloof press that treats his campaign as a sideshow. With the primary fast approaching, he is still in the vault.

As he has throughout his turbulent career, however, Lonegan believes in the taxpayers. “The Democrats have taken control of New Jersey not because of some amazing vision that they have, because their vision is one of higher taxes and massive entitlement programs. It’s because of the lack of vision of the Republican party to put forth a standard-bearer and a message to resonate with voters.” Lonegan has staked his campaign, and indeed his entire political philosophy, on that simple proposition. On June 2, he will put it to the test.

Jacob Laksin is a writer in New Jersey.

Alas, ours is not the most sexually transgressive age by far, though it is assuredly one of the more permissive and remissive. As Andrew Sullivan has quipped, “The culmination of the sexual revolution was at 4 a.m. in the Mineshaft in the late 1970s. It is not the civil marriage of two elderly lesbians in a town hall in California in 2008.” Even in its details, we have extremely vague sexual politics. Its commitments—typified by the triumph of awkward, legalistic mysticism known as Planned Parenthood v. Casey—are squishy in substance and procedurally circumspect. Its boundaries, limned in the turnabouts of certain states’ marriage laws, are shifting and ill-defined.

Yet, out of the contradiction and imprecision, a common point of reference, a cultural rule of thumb, has arisen. We are given to understand that there is no legitimate ground on which to criticize someone for pursuing, exploring, and expressing ‘their sexuality’—so long, of course, as they don’t ‘harm anyone else’ in doing so. Further, we believe that there is no ground, period, on which to criticize the achievement of our full capabilities ‘as sexual beings’ but for the puritanical religious ground of sin. Absent an idea that some pursuits of sexuality are sinful, we think, no conceptual framework for attacking them exists. And therefore, because the only possible ground for disapproval is illegitimate, anyone who disapproves is speaking illegitimately, whether inside politics or out of it.

* * *

This line of thinking represents a clear and convincing victory for John Stuart Mill, a man who should be proclaimed the world’s first liberaltarian. For Mill, the good life, partially but by no means completely superintended by politics, required general adherence to two rules. Mill’s first rule commanded that nobody act in any way that harmed another. This done, his second required that everybody pursue the fulfillment of their personal human capabilities to the fullest. Mill expected his liberaltarian citizens to pursue their own happiness, but he presumed that he was right about what true happiness entailed. Personal choice was a means to a particular end, or progress in a particular direction—toward greater physical health, greater scientific advancement, better knowledge and fuller peace. For Mill, liberal-tarianism was the best way to achieve the best liberal society possible. Where libertarianism would permit each individual to pursue the full experience of happiness, liberal-tarianism, using government as a tool, would guarantee that each individual could do so. In 2006, in his New Republic article on liberal-tarianism, Brink Lindsey restated the case. ”Today’s ideological turmoil,” he wrote,

has created an opening for ideological renewal—specifically, liberalism’s renewal as a vital governing philosophy. A refashioned liberalism that incorporated key libertarian concerns and insights could make possible a truly progressive politics once again—not progressive in the sense of hewing to a particular set of preexisting left-wing commitments, but rather in the sense of attuning itself to the objective dynamics of U.S. social development. In other words, a politics that joins together under one banner the causes of both cultural and economic progress.

Choosing is good, insofar as fulfilling our human capabilities is good. What else is there for we humans to aspire to do? But the liberaltarian vision of subjective choices increasing objective happiness raises questions about just how objective Mill’s two key rules happen to be. How are ‘harm’ and ‘capabilities’ to be defined? How are their definitions grounded?

In Mill’s world, which we still largely share, there may be a distant point at which we will know all harms and capabilities, but for the foreseeable future, the process of answering this question is an end in itself. We don’t know goods and bads—capabilities and harms—until we try them out and try them on. Experimentation rules the day. When the floodgates of self-directed and self-regarding human activity are opened, the expectation is progress along all fronts. Though each of us will take a different path, developing our capabilities along lines of emphasis that best reflect and accord with our unique personal potential, in the aggregate we’ll all tend to become better at everything good and worse at everything bad. In large numbers, experimentation works. Not everyone will cultivate and enjoy their own particular excellence, and some people will always harm others, but society will be apt to progress more or less steadily. From the perspective of society, we’ll become more capable citizens in political life and more capable individuals outside it.

But that’s not what’s happened. Four years after the fall of Napoleon, Benjamin Constant succinctly expressed the difference between what he called the liberty of the ancients and of the moderns. We moderns, he explained, have no good reason to measure good citizenship by ancient standards. The spread of technology and education has shown us that, today, our capabilities are best pursued and fulfilled in lives that are disproportionately non-political. Whereas the Spartans and Athenians had so few resources for actualizing their capabilities that they had to rely on political life, full of conquering and ruling, we moderns have many more resources. Thanks to our markets and our cleverness, we created a vast new range of ‘private’ desires, which revealed huge new vistas of human capabilities to pursue. Of course, these ‘private’ desires aren’t very private at all. We’re social creatures, and though we like a little privacy now and again, we love publicity. And the more time we spend fulfilling our social capacities as publicists, the less time we’ll have—or want to have—fulfilling our political capacities as citizens. At the same time, government itself becomes increasingly self-sustaining and no longer needs our active participation or vigilance.

* * *

Is it any surprise, then, that where the mass pursuit of greater citizenship ends, the mass pursuit of greater sexuality tends to begin? Though almost any product can be marketed as offering sexual satisfaction, nothing beats the reality. No amount of video gaming or Internet porn has yet satiated all our pride, envy, greed, and lust—and if it did, we’d uncomfortably feel like we’d become, in some essential way, less than human. We have diligently cleared the decks to making sexual life a central feature of the full experience of individuality today. A great sex life, exceptionally well-tuned to our personal preferences, is very nearly our vision of the highest.

As we recognized earlier, however, ours is not the age of sybaritic abandon and Caligulan excess that we might have feared in 1972. Just as a capable sexual athlete delays and controls an orgasm, ours is, taken in the aggregate, a particularly well-managed form of excess. As with citizenship, we have learned an important lesson from the sexual revolution and the AIDS epidemic: to minimize harm while maximizing pleasure. But unlike the practice of citizenship, which seems less and less significant to living the good life, the pursuit of sexuality is something we like well enough to invest extra resources into cleverly pushing the limits even as we maintain them. We curb them to enjoy them more fully. And, barring any serious harm that results, we find ourselves only somewhat uncomfortably certain that individuals can and should push those limits in whatever way appeals to them. Whereas we are increasingly resigned to the continued shrinkage of our vestigial political member (the capability of citizenship), we all seem to agree that only ‘theocrats’ want to stop the burgeoning progress in our society of sexual capability-seeking—and that this theocratic project, because it is baseless and illegitimate, must be foredoomed.

Despite seeming so obvious and inevitable, these developments have created a subtle and perplexing dilemma. Constant cautioned that even a closely supervised representative government could make part-time citizenship a tempting offer. “The danger of modern liberty,” he warned, “is that, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence, and in the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily.” Even though curbing the pursuit of our capabilities as citizens is right and proper in modern times, doing so endangers our political liberty—not least by making it seem superfluous or an impediment to the pursuit of happiness. Yet Constant made his case for the continued relevance of political liberty in a problematic way. He defended it on the Millean ground that political liberty was indispensable to the pursuit, development, and fulfillment of our unique personal capabilities. “It is not to happiness alone, it is to self-development that our destiny calls us; and political liberty is the most powerful, the most effective means of self-development that heaven has given us.” Do we still believe that today?

* * *

The evidence suggests not. Since libertarians are those presumably most opposed to the destruction of political liberty at the hands of the state, the state of libertarian opinion concerning sexual and political liberty should be especially indicative of what’s afoot in society at large. When it comes to attitudes about liberty, libertarians are our leading indicators.

As 2008 came and went, Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch proclaimed “The Libertarian Moment” in Reason magazine: “the dawning not of some fabled, clichéd, and loosey-goosey Age of Aquarius but a time of increasingly hyper-individualized, hyper-expanded choice over every aspect of our lives, from 401(k)s to hot and cold running coffee drinks, from life-saving pharmaceuticals to online dating services.” Gillespie and Welch enthuse over today’s world, “where it’s more possible than ever to live your life on your own terms,” and make no bones about who, or what, is responsible for it. “Due to exponential advances in technology, broad-based increases in wealth, the ongoing networking of the world via trade and culture, and the decline of both state and private institutions of repression, never before has it been easier for more individuals to chart their own course and steer their lives by the stars as they see the sky.”

So much for libertarian politics: Fighting oppression is out, fighting repression is in. Hippies, it seems, were libertarians the way the inventor of the abacus was a computer scientist. Professional libertarians, as they happily attest, are in fact following a general cultural movement that prioritizes personal and consumer choice as the master concept in our cognitive filter.

Examples of the rise of sexuality in private and public life are hardly necessary. The readiest metaphors that we reach for today, for a joke, an insult, or for explanatory power, are sexual: predating ‘nerd porn’ are recognized indulgences ranging from the demonic (‘torture porn’) to the delectable (‘food porn’). (None of these are to be confused, of course, with ‘actual’ porn involving nerds, torture, or food.) Respectable English-language comedy has hit below the belt since Twelfth Night, but the rise of the niche sex fetish as the only-half-joking ideal type of all personal capabilities pursued breaks new ground.

Politically speaking, taking sexual progress as the template for all progress sets politics itself on a walk of shame. Though desire after desire is apparently ‘politicized’, the satisfaction of any desire is increasingly treated as something to be placed firmly beyond the reach of politics. Typical of the prevailing attitude is a working paper by Daniel Klein and Jason Briggeman of George Mason University. “Conservatives,” the authors remark, “say they are for small government and individual liberty, but a content analysis of leading conservative magazines shows that most have preponderantly failed to take pro-liberty positions on sex, gambling, and drugs.” Rather than the attitudes of those magazines toward the liberty to seek pleasures (which vary, as the authors note), the issue is the vision of politics captured in the authors’ attitude. From their libertarian perspective, being ‘pro-liberty’ does not mean politicizing sex, drugs, and gambling; it means legalizing them. Political speech is simply the necessary means to taking our personal pursuit of idiosyncratic pleasures off the political table. Though often we confuse politics and law, the libertarian attitude today reveals their latent antagonism. In the liberaltarian world of John Stuart Mill, likewise, Constant got it wrong: Rather than political liberty being the most powerful and effective means of self-development that heaven has given us, the rule of law is the most powerful and effective means that the state has. One might argue that the serial legalization of pleasures is itself an exercise of citizenship. But all too often, this appears to be promoted as the only reason to exercise it. The libertarian agenda is dominated accordingly—at political liberty’s expense.

Some libertarians do resist this rather grim view, blaming the collapse of political libertarianism on inevitable and unpredictable market fluctuations. “The ’shift to the left’ that we seem to observe on economic policy,” David Boaz admits, “is depressing to libertarians. But that’s mostly crisis-driven. When the results of more spending, more taxes, more regulation, and more money creation begin to be visible, we may see the kind of reaction that led to Proposition 13 and the election of Ronald Reagan at the end of the 1970s. Meanwhile, this cultural ’shift to the left’ is far more encouraging.” Yes, we may see such a shift—if citizenship survives the next 10 to 20 years intact. Consider how often federal power has dissipated itself over the past two centuries and ask yourselves, libertarians: Do you really believe in a snapback effect that will one day rejoin political to cultural liberty? Or is this but a dream deferred?

Though conservatives and libertarians have long agreed that government functions well when laws are clear, concise, and few, the erotic allure of a life freed even from politics distracts us badly from the possibility of a tyranny of law over political judgment. When liberal legal scholars like Ronald Dworkin talk about “Law’s Empire,” they set libertarians off on a technocratic vision of enlightened judge-economists and bureaucratic whiz kids who will give you unfettered access to the desires of the day so long as you accept national health care and comprehensive government regulation. Except on the very rich, who know the point of money is to spend it on goodies, these benign magistrates won’t even impose heavy tax burdens to achieve this bargain. Statism, yes, but with the state as cool parent.

* * *

Every political theory has its tensions and weak points. The steady replacement of civic republicanism with imperial legalism, in the name of endlessly expanding individual capacities, is a theoretical problem not just for libertarians. The same is true for modern liberals—and, insofar as they take themselves to be critics or correctors of liberalism, for conservatives too. In the world that we live in, the fracture lines in all our popular political theories tend to cluster at the places where their ideas about human dignity collide with their ideas about human nobility.

The traditional libertarian’s vision of nobility is that of the emancipated individual responsible enough to bear the costs of his or her own freely chosen actions. But libertarian nobility is threatened by its longtime frenemy in the social-progress business—liberal dignity. Liberals tend to see political liberty as hostile to human dignity in two ways. First, negatively, citizens enjoying political liberty can choose to refrain from voting dignity-enhancing social services into law. Second, citizens can cast their ballots for measures that affirmatively deny equal dignity, institutionalizing hierarchies of status and stigma. In the liberal vision, the ethics of nobility unjustly puts the onus on the individual to suffer indignities. Like Constant, libertarians tend to think that even latent political liberty is an important indicator of our ability to pursue and fulfill the development of our human capacities, including the capacity to seek and enjoy whatever pleasures we prefer with consenting counterparties. Under liberal pressure to legally guarantee and enforce universal dignity, however, the laissez-faire attitude toward political liberty may be converted into tacit consent to the rule of moralizing law—especially if many libertarians are already culturally predisposed to be fixated on securing and enjoying their erotic liberties. So long as the official morality to be enforced is one that rules erotic liberty a fundamental human right, who’s to complain?

Such is the logic of the Sex Vote—the population of practical liberaltarians for whom the exercise of erotic liberty in fulfillment of their capabilities far outweighs in importance any exercise of political liberty, so content are they with a government that delivers sexual freedom (and perhaps some minimum of attendant social services). For the Sex Vote, eliminating the day-to-day drudgery of citizenship itself counts high among social services: outsourcing the detail and difficulty of governance to distant, centralized experts is a feature, not a bug, of ‘unaccountable’ government. In its liberaltarianism, the Sex Vote would solve once and for all Wilde’s paradox (the trouble with socialism is it takes too many evenings). In the world that we live in, captivated by erotic liberty, such is the destiny of ’smart citizenship’ and representative government.

This is a predicament to which libertarianism has always been somewhat exposed. But today’s libertarians seem uniquely underprepared to face it. Conservatives, for their part, attempt to argue, with Jonah Goldberg, that liberaltarianism is doomed because its “first principles simply aren’t aligned.” It is true, as John Hood claims, that under liberal rule “the private sphere must give way as costs are socialized and power is centralized.” Or, as David Frum asserted, “It will be hard to afford much lifestyle freedom as payroll and income taxes rise to pay for the Obama administration’s hope and change.” Yet if we have learned anything from the mainstreaming of porn and the democratization of amateur celebrity, it’s that you don’t need to earn like a rock star in order to party like one—especially if the government is willing to cover the costs to keep you healthy enough to party on. Ask yourself: How many hipsters are too poor to party? The liberaltarian bargain, with the state as cool parent, does align its first principles: Erotic liberty shall expand as costs are socialized and power is centralized. No contradiction there. It is the allure of this promise, already planted wide and deep within the popular culture, that’s inspiring many of the young to grow more libertarian—but only as they grow more liberal.

* * *

But there is a deeper question raised by the emergence of the Sex Vote. Unlike the liberal, democratizing attitude toward the open-ended pursuit of erotic liberty, the traditional libertarian attitude at least recognizes that the arena of the erotic is as competitive as any other status-conferring activity and will foster the inevitable rise of a sexual elite. Indeed, in (dare we say) Randian fashion, it celebrates it as the whole point. Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe has reported in the London Times on the rise of highly professional and exclusive sex parties. In an erotocracy, much like a capitalist meritocracy, there will be winners and losers—those who are able to thrive given the basic currency of life, and those who are not able. In a society of sweeping erotic liberties, not everyone can rise to the top, but, more importantly, not everyone can cope successfully with their freedom. Some will be born at a disadvantage, too unattractive or introverted to avoid daily misery.

The poster boy of those on the losing end of the erotocratic stick is to be found in Michel Houellebecq’s 2001 novel The Elementary Particles. “Concerned only with her own pleasure,” as Adam Kirsch details in his World Affairs review, “Janine has no interest in mothering her children, literally abandoning the infant Michel in a pile of his own excrement. No wonder he grows up to be incapable of love or sexual connection; or that Bruno, similarly maltreated, becomes a loathsome pervert, obsessed with pornography and public masturbation, prevented only by his own cowardice from becoming a child molester.” Losers like this, perhaps very many of them, are inevitable in an erotically free society, just as the poor are inevitable under economic freedom and the disgruntled under political freedom. At the extremes, the self-actualized nobility of the sexual elite requires their tolerance of a perhaps large sexual underclass—not deprived in their ability to exercise erotic liberty, mind you, but in their ability to integrate it into a life worth living.

The traditional libertarian can accept this inequality of outcomes; not so the liberal. Where the unfettered “market”—in this case, the space of sexual liberty—does not correct for inequalities and externalities, they will conclude the state should step in. The state is the only institution capable of helping all citizens make responsible erotic choices, and the only one capable of making those choices both socially acceptable and individually affordable. But recourse to the benevolent tyranny of the state brings us full-circle back to the tension that has kept libertarianism and liberalism apart for the past 50 years.

Instead of a night watchman who will patrol the streets but stay out of your home, the government of the future will not only own your home but install the stripper pole in your basement! How are libertarians to turn back this uncanny vision of soft despotism? With the rise of anti-political traditionalist movements on the right and the Republican party at low ebb, it is no longer clear that conservatives will do it for them. If the attitude of PayPal founder Peter Thiel, writing in Cato Unbound, is at all representative, libertarians are in danger of abandoning political liberty altogether. “In the face of these realities,” writes Thiel, “one would despair if one limited one’s horizon to the world of politics. I do not despair because I no longer believe that politics encompasses all possible futures of our world. In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms—from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ’social democracy.’” That escape is no escape at all. It is a flight into bigger cages and longer chains. Political libertarianism—the very heart of libertarianism itself—cannot survive even an open marriage with an ideology that seeks freedom from politics above all. For we are political animals, and the only way yet devised to free ourselves from the human condition is to enlist ourselves in servitude.

James Poulos blogs at Postmodern Conservative. Art by Joe Oliva Ganoza.

In some ways, it was just another cringe-inducing bump on the road as the Straight Talk Express careened toward its November 4 collision with the Obama juggernaut. John McCain would have lost the election—and the state of Virginia—even if Pfotenhauer hadn’t suggested that Northern Virginia wasn’t as authentic as the rest of the state. But her gaffe did serve a useful purpose by underscoring a big problem for the GOP: Republicans simply can’t win statewide elections in Virginia if Democrats run up the score in the heavily-populated D.C. suburbs.

While George W. Bush narrowly won Beltway-straddling Fairfax County (pop. 1 million) in 2000, Obama defeated McCain there 60 to 39 percent in 2008. Just 20 years earlier, those numbers were flipped, with the elder George Bush defeating Michael Dukakis 61 to 38 percent. Democrats have also consolidated their gains in Arlington County: Al Gore and John Kerry won it by 26 and 36 points, respectively, while Obama thoroughly trounced McCain 72 to 26 percent. On Election Day, Virginia voted 53 to 47 percent for Obama, delivering its electoral votes to a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1964. It turns out that a “fake” Virginian’s vote counts just as much as a “real” Virginian’s.

The GOP’s problems aren’t going away anytime soon. Virginia’s demographics have skewed away from the Republican base in recent years and show no signs of reversing. Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics, points to the “big immigrant influx into Fairfax County and domestic outflow.” Since 2000, more than 90,000 native Northern Virginians have moved out of the county, and more than 70,000 foreign immigrants—mostly Hispanics and Asians—have moved in. And as D.C. workers continue to push farther out into Northern Virginia to start families, the youth vote has become pivotal in determining the area’s politics. Republican pollster Ed Goeas points out just how big of a problem this is for the GOP. If you look at the nationwide youth vote (18- to 30-year-olds) in presidential elections, he says, Republicans “won by one percentage point in 2000, lost by 11 points in 2004, and lost by 33 points in 2008. The electorate wasn’t different. The [share of the] youth vote was only one point higher” in 2008. According to Goeas, if McCain had performed as well as Bush did in 2000, Obama would have won by only one point instead of seven.

Can Republicans turn the state red again? Several surprising local elections in Northern Virginia this year have heartened the party as it heads into the gubernatorial contest in November, but crafting a message that will persuade the Obamaphilic professionals of D.C.’s suburbs is something it’s still trying to figure out.

* * *

“We are going to be the tip of the spear and the testing ground to see if Republicans can start moving back into the majority,” says GOP Fairfax County chairman Anthony Bedell. Bedell is a 41-year-old native Northern Virginian who took up his post following the 2008 election, and he is determined to get the GOP back in the game. “One of my philosophies is to play in every area of the county,” he says. “You go in and you decrease the Democrats’ winning margins and you increase the Republicans’ [share], and the next thing you know a Republican is winning countywide in Fairfax.” Already, the party has fielded candidates for 15 of the county’s 17 delegate races and expects to run a full slate—a marked improvement upon 2007 when Republicans ran in only 5 of those districts.

An early surprise was the close finish of Republican Joe Murray in a special election last January in traditionally blue Alexandria. Murray, a third-year law student at Catholic University and staffer for New Jersey congressman Joe Wilson, heard about the House of Delegates race from a Washington Post article. The next day, he arrived at the primary Blackberry in hand and convinced just enough people to give him a 20-to-16 vote win. He spent his winter break campaigning, going door to door every day, and lost the general election by only 16 votes out of 2,600 cast.

Simply showing up to play is the first step to regaining a foothold in the region, but many Republicans believe they need to make more dramatic moves—revamping the party’s image, if not its ideology—to win. As the Virginia GOP attempts to reach out to suburban voters, it’s backing politicians with more moderate appeal—much like Republican John Cook, who, last February, defied political trends and narrowly won a seat on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors—a district held by Democrats for over 20 years.

Cook, 45, a New York native and lawyer, moved to Northern Virginia in 1993. Since then, he’s been intensely involved in his local community. As a resident of the Kings Park area of Springfield, Cook has served on the local PTA and was elected president of his neighborhood association. So it’s no surprise that his campaign (motto: “Strengthening our neighborhoods”) focused largely on good governance issues: improving constituent services, zoning enforcement, and working with homeowners’ associations. On his campaign website, he touts such achievements as organizing the “first-ever community potluck dinner” and holding a “Neighborhood College” workshop, devoted to such goo-goo, soccer-mom agenda items as “community building techniques” and “cross-cultural understanding.”

While GOP leaders at the national level may think his platform fluffy, Cook believes that Fairfax Republicans have “struggled because we haven’t always emphasized the issues that are of most concern to the majority of voters. What works up here in Fairfax County,” he continues, is focusing on issues like “helping teachers in the classroom, neighborhoods, helping people being safe and secure in their homes, and economic growth.”

Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell is likewise focusing on what he calls “kitchen-table issues.” Among the initiatives being promoted by his campaign are an Obama-esque “green jobs” program and something called a “working mom government simplicity task force”—words unlikely to endear him to Rush Limbaugh listeners. During the lull before the 2010 congressional elections, all eyes will be on Virginia’s 2009 race to see just how successful this approach will be.

Born and raised 15 miles south of D.C. in Mt. Vernon, McDonnell likes to tout his northern Virginia roots. On an overcast Saturday morning in late March, 500 people gathered in a firehouse in Annandale to officially kick off his campaign. “Growing up in northern Virginia, I learned from [my parents] values that have lasted a lifetime,” he tells the crowd. To drive home the point, during a two-minute biographical video shown at the rally, the narrator says that McDonnell learned “his values—faith, family, hard work, honesty” in the “middle-class neighborhoods of Fairfax County and Hampton Roads.”

McDonnell’s impressive biography ought to have statewide appeal: a father of five, 21 years in the Army and Reserves, a master’s degree in business administration, executive at a Fortune 500 company, state delegate, attorney general. When he speaks, he comes across as an affable businessman—a less plastic version of Mitt Romney. With his non-regional (read: Yankee) dialect, McDonnell talks like northern Virginians—in stark contrast to former gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore, whose Appalachian twang some found indecipherable. In a crisp charcoal business suit and red tie, the salt-and-pepper-haired 54-year-old looks like northern Virginians, too. He certainly doesn’t seem like the type to be caught in George Allen’s cowboy boots.

* * *

“Are you trying to be the next Bobby Jindal?”

It’s a question Amit Singh, the son of Indian immigrants and a young libertarian firebrand, heard a lot while working the phones for the Republican party. In truth, the Indian-American Louisiana governor provided little inspiration for Singh. His role model, rather, is Texas congressman Ron Paul.

While Fairfax county supervisor John Cook has tried to pull the party to the center, Singh exerts pressure in the opposite direction—leading an insurgency of limited-government purists who are fighting against what they see as the GOP’s turn towards reckless spending and intrusive federal legislation. Turned off by “big-government conservatism,” Singh and his comrades favor a back-to-basics conservatism that emphasizes smaller government and tax cuts.

In the spring of 2008, Singh, a 33-year-old defense consultant from Arlington, says he intended to volunteer for Republican congressional candidate Mark Ellmore, who was running from his Arlington district. But when he visited Ellmore’s website he was shocked at what he found.

“I was pretty much floored because his entire front banner was about increasing the size of Medicare and Medicaid and SCHIP. I was just shocked,” Singh tells me at the Mediterranean restaurant Moby Dick in Clarendon. “At this point, what’s the difference? Why would I support this guy?” By February, Singh decided to challenge Ellmore in the Republican primary.

More than a few people thought Singh’s campaign was a joke. (It didn’t help that his campaign proposals included shuttering the Department of Education and opening up trade with Iran and Cuba.) But Singh went on to raise over $60,000 in three months and gained endorsements from two top conservative Virginia blogs. His campaign was featured favorably in the likes of Reason and the American Conservative, both of which cheered on the next-generation Ron Paul Republican.

But the “rEVOLution”—as the Paulites call it—was not to be. Singh lost the primary with 43 percent of the vote. But he’s not giving up on his political activism anytime soon. “If you put yourself out there, you at least get that soapbox to talk on,” he says. “One dissenting opinion can cause a lot of effect.…If you can start showing a trend, we won’t be so quick to bail huge banks out, bail failing car companies out.” With any luck, he hopes, “the forces of big government will be somewhat checked by the people themselves.”

As a leading voice for the Campaign for Liberty—the grassroots organization that rose from the ashes of the Paul campaign—Singh has thrown his weight behind McDonnell. (Singh cites McDonnell’s promise to “reduce government regulations which are hindering free enterprise” as the basis of his support.) While some might scoff at the importance of the Ron Paul vote, every vote counts. Singh’s was just another vote Republicans couldn’t afford to lose last fall but did. For the moment though, McDonnell appears to be successfully keeping his center-right coalition intact.

* * *

In the current moment of unchecked Democratic control, McDonnell may not even need to pledge to roll back the welfare state to maintain conservative support. Simply standing athwart the more unpopular parts of the liberal Democratic agenda may convince conservatives that McDonnell is the lesser of two evils. In his kickoff speech, McDonnell touched on all the usual party shibboleths: abortion, gun rights, and offshore drilling. But the conservative talking point that got the biggest rise out of the audience was his opposition to a “card-check” bill, which would allow unionization without a secret ballot election. “All three of my opponents recently stood in union picket lines in Northern Virginia, and now will not oppose the job-killing card-check bill!” he shouted, eliciting loud boos from the crowd. “We can’t let big national unions turn Virginia into southern Michigan!”

“McDonnell wants to turn card check into the issue this year,” the Washington Post’s Anita Kumar wrote on May 27. “He talks about it everywhere he goes.” Republicans argue that a Democratic victory in 2009 would mean an end to right-to-work laws at the state level, even if a national card-check measure doesn’t pass Congress. “If you lose the House of Delegates and one of the Democrats wins the governor’s race, the right-to-work law in Virginia is gone,” says the Fairfax’s Bedell. Card check, he adds, is a “unifying issue for Republicans, and a unifying issue for businessmen and women. They’ve kind of gone away from the Republican party in Fairfax County, but they’re coming back.”

Fairfax Republicans have also made headway attacking their opponents on deficit spending and taxes. During his campaign, John Cook brought attention to the $650 million deficit in the Democrat-controlled county. Cook supported specific budget cuts—focusing particularly on the $20 million spent each year on public housing. Bedell anticipates that Democrats will soon find themselves in an unhappy bind between cutting spending or raising taxes to balance the budget. The effects of this trade-off are already beginning to materialize: The Washington Post reported that over 150,000 households will see their property taxes increase this year, some by as much as 10 percent, despite declining home values in the county.

The tax issue already appears to have claimed its first two Democratic victims on May 5, when two Alexandria city council members were defeated by Republican challenger Frank Fannon and Republican-leaning independent Alicia Hughes. “It was spending and taxes” that led to Republican victory, says Fannon, a lifelong Alexandrian and 41-year-old manager at Sun Trust mortgage. He points out that the city budget had swelled by 50 percent in the past decade, and the council all but assured his victory by raising residential real estate taxes by 6 percent the week before the election.

While Fannon’s election provides another glimmer of hope for the GOP—he will be the first Republican to sit on the council since 2003—it’s unclear whether his win foreshadows GOP prospects in statewide elections. Fannon acknowledges that had he been on the ballot last November, he would have been overwhelmed by the Obama wave in Alexandria, where he defeated McCain with 72 percent of the vote.

* * *

Michael Barone believes that Virginia might become competitive again as voter turnout falls. “A lot of the young singles vote that rallied so well for Obama are going to be hard to get out for other elections,” he explains. “[Young voters are] transient. They’re not going to vote for a board of supervisors election.” Indeed, the turnout for the Fairfax County board of supervisors election was just 100,000—only 20 percent of the 2008 presidential election turnout.

This November will test whether Republicans can make a comeback in the Old Dominion. Obama’s national popularity remains high, and accusations that the GOP no longer has room for moderates reached fever pitch after Senator Arlen Specter’s defection to the Democrats earlier this spring. But now that costly federal programs like health care are poised to place an even greater strain on recession-stressed voters than the bailouts of last winter, a candidate who promises to be tight-fisted with their money may have a chance.

But if McDonnell can’t pull off a win, it may mean that Virginia has taken a decisive turn from red to blue, and Republicans will have to take cold comfort in the knowledge that they’re winners in “real” Virginia, if not in real life.

John McCormack is a deputy online editor at the Weekly Standard.

I am not often asked whether there is a cure. When I heard the question for the first time, only a year ago, my answer, which appalled the questioner, was that my family probably wouldn’t be interested in one.

Of course, to speak of an after-the-fact cure for a genetic disorder is to liberate imagination from basic science, but consider for a moment the implications of saying that, if a cure for my sister’s condition appeared tomorrow, my family would refuse it. It may sound like a thought experiment from an introductory philosophy textbook, but the answer to this painfully undergraduate question is, in its way, an answer to those bioethical questions about disability that now seem so pressing. Should deaf parents be allowed to inflict deafness on their children by denying them cochlear implants? Can quadriplegia justify assisted suicide? Was the Americans with Disabilities Act poorly conceived? (Yes, no, and colossally.) I hope that by getting to the bottom of my intuitive unwillingness to see my sister “cured,” I can begin to offer a conservative bioethics, one that sees love, not autonomy, as the basis of human dignity.

***

Before beginning, it would be a good idea to know what to call them. Is it all right to say “the disabled?” If not, which is better, “disabled people” or “people with disabilities?” “Physically-impaired” sounds too negative, but “differently-abled” is obvious cant.

Philip Corbett, house stylist for the New York Times, prefers “person with a disability” because “a person with a disability is a person, first of all, with many characteristics beyond the disability.” I do not dispute with Corbett that they are, but his elegant point buckles under an inelegant phrase. More importantly, his idea that disability should be considered merely incidental is misleading.

For one thing, it is dangerous to write off any trait as a mere happened-to-be. Did Joan of Arc simply happen to be a woman? Would Oscar Wilde have been Oscar Wilde if he’d been straight? If we knock off every characteristic attributable to accidents of genetics and fate, can we hope to leave any mark of individuality standing?

But this point, which holds for most characteristics, goes double for disability. It contradicts decades of sloganeering to say so, but, very often, a man’s disability is the defining aspect of his life.

***

Consider the late Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disability rights activist and author of the New York Times Magazine article “Unspeakable Conversations,” one of the most famous documents in the canon of disability activism. The article tells of Johnson’s encounter with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, who notoriously endorses elective infanticide in cases where a child’s disability sentences him to a life of extraordinary suffering.  Johnson had originally been invited to oppose Singer in a public debate, but she refused the terms: “This sounds a lot like debating my life—and on my opponent’s turf, with my opponent moderating, to boot.” She made a counterproposal—a guest appearance in one of Singer’s classes and a public lecture of her own—which Princeton accepted.

Defending the value of one’s own life is, of course, insultingly superfluous. If I can summon the motivation to so much as turn up at such a forum, doesn’t that prove the point beyond question?

A simple point, but one with a hidden irony. Singer’s case for elective infanticide assumes that disability always makes life less fulfilling, and Johnson’s appearance proved the opposite before she even opened her mouth. Far from puttering away her days in some dismal nursing home, this “bedpan crip” (her words) was trading barbs with a famous Ivy League professor! Johnson’s neuromuscular disorder did not stop her from snagging such a distinguished speaking engagement. On the other hand, without her disability, would she have been invited in the first place? Disability did not stand in the way of her success; quite the opposite, disability shaped it.

Even if Johnson hadn’t put disability at the center of her professional career, she could hardly have avoided putting it at the center of her life. There is no aspect of her existence that it did not affect, no situation in which she could have set it aside or made it invisible, no system of accommodations so effortless that it could have vanished into routine. We cannot reduce a man to his disability, but neither can we look past it. Look past it to what? An imaginary version of that person minus his disability? What an insult, to insist that the only way we can deal with a man is by pretending he is someone else.

***

To base public policy on an imaginary future in which disability is irrelevant is therefore not simply futile but incoherent. If we wish to deal with disability in some kind of public way, we must approach it with some other intention than making it invisible. So, if we cannot say of disability simply that we would like to see it eradicated, what should we say about it?

“Luxury undermines empires, which is another way of saying that civilization leads to the death of civilization.” The words are Patrick Brantlinger’s, but they could just as easily have been Tocqueville’s, Gibbon’s, or Baudelaire’s. They also could have been Oswald Spengler’s, which should suffice to explain why reactionary moaning about flabbiness and decadence has never been warmly received among disability theorists: It is not hard for them to imagine where a celebration of self-discipline, virility, and athleticism leaves the wheelchair-bound, feebleminded, and incontinent. However, a strange twist of fate has made the weakest Americans the heroes of our war on idleness and indifference rather than its villains, or its victims. Love of rugged virtue is sometimes an adolescent fascination with power, the “school of virility” that Ezra Pound said “seems to imagine that man is differentiated from the lower animals by possession of a phallus.” But sometimes it is more than that. A more mature version might be: A healthy interest in happiness is good, but only when tempered by a suspicion that happiness is less an ultimate goal than a side effect. A man could live a good life by pursuing virtue, personal excellence, love, or salvation, but, if he does nothing but chase pleasure for its own sake, his life will be happy—and very, very small.

So far, so uncontroversial. The missing link between the above summary and a grand narrative of cultural decline is this: As idle pleasures become more and more alluring, they become harder and harder to resist. One need not be a paranoiac about the decline of civilization to admit that leisure is more appealing than virtue, which demands greater sacrifices and promises less straightforward rewards. As our entertainments offer greater thrills at cheaper rates, the choice between the good fight and good fun starts to look obvious.

It used to be that crotchety bellwethers of decadence would nudge our country towards self-discipline by holding up its manliest heroes and reciting Teddy Roosevelt’s paean to men who dare (which made those Americans who could not so much as go to the store without assistance begin to feel very nervous). But different ages need different heroes. Other generations had to contend with the temptations of consumerism, luxury, and ever-increasing opportunities for laziness; ours has to contend with science. The fantasy is the same: the eradication of pain, and the eventual obsolescence of all those habits that feel awful but build character. Science in our day, like leisure in others, has improved so rapidly that its champions have begun to suspect that the age of painlessness is finally at hand.

I cannot be certain that science will never discover cures for disability, but I am quite sure that such scientific triumphalism is perverse. Let me return to my sister’s story.

***

I remember noticing something about her Special Ed classmates: Those whose disabilities were genetic, like Martha’s, were thought to be capable of improvement but not radical transformation. Genetic mutation cannot be cured, just managed. The autistic children, on the other hand, were more likely to be shuttled by their parents to whichever medical center had just completed a promising study. Cure-chasing did not always make these parents seem frantic and desperate, but, even at its most benign, the practice struck me as incompatible with the kind of acceptance that love is supposed to involve.

I don’t mean to suggest that unconditional love means accepting disability as a mere difference rather than a handicap. Some disability theorists have proposed a social construction model of disability, which argues, in the words of the U.N. Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, that “disability resides in the society not in the person.” I might be willing to accept that mild forms of autism—Asperger’s, for example—might be effectively “cured” by greater acceptance of their attendant quirks, but mental retardation is less ambiguous. It is a tragedy that my sister cannot put her thoughts into language, that she lives her life from moment to moment, that my parents have woken up at 5 a.m. to find the contents of Martha’s diaper smeared on her bedroom walls. But, having accepted the tragedy of Martha’s condition, it was easy for my family to embrace her without harboring any secret wish that she were someone different. Martha will probably never learn to speak, and will certainly never live independently; “All right,” we said, “let’s go from there.” To love Martha means accepting the difficulties that loving her entails.

***

An uncharitable reader might think I have just suggested that, when confronted with disability, the thing to do is to lie back and think of England. Does my attitude towards Martha’s disability amount to an indifference to suffering or, worse, an endorsement of suffering for suffering’s sake?

The idea that suffering gives life its meaning has a long and illustrious pedigree, certainly, from flagellant saints to John F. Kennedy (”. . . not because they are easy, but because they are hard”). But those difficulties were freely chosen; disability is a different sort of pain entirely, one less easily cast as a charming bit of adversity to be overcome. While there are certain kinds of disability that we should not try to erase, it is not because suffering builds character. Suffering is the ornament of humanity only when undergone for some higher purpose. There is only one way to persuade someone to accept disability in spite of its difficulties, and that is to convince him that the compensating benefits are worth it.

When the compensating benefit is love, the answer is easy. I know first-hand the problems inherent in trying to build a relationship with a disabled person while cherishing the misplaced hope that the difficulties they carry with them will one day disappear. Even the tiniest nagging doubt can be a barrier to love, as in the case of my sister’s autistic classmates. To frame the idea in a different way, we all hope for our friends’ continual self-improvement: that our favorite penny-pincher will become more charitable, that our directionless nephew will discover some driving passion, that the melancholic next door will find inner peace. But in none of these cases would we want our friend to become someone else. They should become better, but should stay recognizably themselves. When a man’s disability is fundamental to his character, then there is no difference between wishing for a cure and wishing he were someone else. As Jim Sinclair put it in 1993, “It is not possible to separate autism from the person. Therefore, when parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’”

What about less fundamental disabilities, like quadriplegia from a car accident? There is value in accepting them, too, though the compensating benefit is different. We can all agree that an individual who has lost his legs should not also have to lose his job, as long as he can still perform it, and our moral intuition tells us that accommodations should be made both for the man’s special needs and for his dignity. But what do we mean by “dignity?” Whether a wheelchair-bound man reaches his desk by way of a ramp or with the assistance of a coworker, the end result is the same: He gets to work. Some disability activists believe that the latter scenario is, if not an injustice, then at least an indignity, an involuntary kind of subordination. They think so because they believe people are fundamentally autonomous—a strange fiction.  As galling as it can be to accept help, it goes with the territory of being human. There is a point at which “accommodation” ceases to be a gesture of compassion and becomes a costly reinforcement of the modern myth that strength of character is synonymous with self-sufficiency, a myth that is already dangerously popular. Enshrining the fallacy in law, or even convention, puts the weight of society behind a fallacy that makes physical weakness seem inhuman. Forcing a disabled employee to accept charity, or telling him he can only be fully human if he is fully independent: Which is more cruel?

But let’s judge the tree by its fruits: How might this love-centric bioethics be applied to an actual question of policy like, say, the debate over cochlear implants (CI)? The Left has already put forward its own defense of deaf parents who want to deny their newborn children a treatment that can effectively cure a child’s deafness. (The device does not restore hearing, but it does simulate auditory signals, and children who receive the implants early are usually able to learn spoken language.) They argue that the deaf community is a minority group entitled to preserve its own special character, which means ensuring that deaf children grow up within their parents’ community. The “cultural genocide” argument (the phrase originates with the National Association for the Deaf) may strike the conservative ear as multi-culti and relativistic. I happen to agree with it, but it does not especially matter whether any of us would accept or reject CIs for our own children. The question is whether doctors can insist on the treatment over the parents’ wishes, as they are empowered to insist on blood transfusions for the children of Jehovah’s Witnesses. We already assume that everyone prefers life to death and that to believe otherwise is inhuman and insane. If we believe that a preference for physical perfection over imperfection is similarly self-evident, then the decision to refuse cochlear implants for your child begins to look like neglect.

But I am not willing to privilege physical wholeness so quickly. It is not simply a matter of a child being capable of living a full life without his hearing. In this case, the inability to hear is the very thing that makes a full life possible; without it, the child would grow up a stranger in his own family. It is not a zero-sum choice between hearing and his parents’ love, of course, but the CI controversy does demand that the medical profession make a clear decision: Would a sane person sacrifice his child’s hearing for the sake of fuzzy and intangible benefits like the opportunity to share a language and culture with him? Scientific triumphalism would say no. I am not worried that its answer will be given the force of law anytime soon, but I worry for the culture that takes its side.

There is a strong temptation to say, very simply, that these sorts of decisions are family affairs and none of the public’s business. However, the answer is not as simple as recognizing a family’s right to privacy, as the case of elective abortion makes clear. The decision to carry a disabled child to term means something very different depending on how ordinary or extraordinary the decision is. The public’s attitude towards children with Down Syndrome is not the same when 15 percent of women choose to abort such children as when 90 percent do. (The exact figure in the United States is 91 percent.) If elective abortion continues to be the overwhelming norm, the child’s disability will come to be seen as something the mother brought upon herself rather than as something she simply accepted. The assumption will be that no normal woman would have borne the child since, after all, normal women don’t. This same shift—from seeing disability as a family’s fate to seeing it as a self-inflicted burden—will naturally follow if more quadriplegics follow the example of Daniel James, the British rugby player who ended his life at the Swiss clinic Dignitas after an injury left him paralyzed. (Dignitas has ended the lives of more than a hundred Britons since it opened ten years ago, and, in that time, not a single spouse, relative, or friend has been prosecuted for the legal crime of assisting them.) The difference between ordinary and extraordinary measures is an important moral one; it determines the moral—and therefore legal—expectations we have of our neighbors and ourselves. These private decisions have public consequences.

* * *

It is fair to ask whether casting people with disabilities as moral heroes can be meaningfully distinguished from treating them as talismans, drive-time radio stories who happen, rather inconveniently, to have their own desires apart from what we desire of them. Don’t we cringe when the local news imputes great heroism to a handicapped person simply for moving on with his life? There is very little heroism in making the best of things, and none at all in grasping desperately at anything that might ease an inconvenience. However, in this sketch of a conservative bioethics, I have asked the disabled and their families to show real heroism by accepting their suffering with some measure of grace and by swallowing their pride and accepting an unusual measure of dependence. The heroism lies in the choice, not the affliction. The hero is held up as an example, not drafted as a symbol.  These differences are not slight.

Floyd Patterson, the most Catholic heavyweight champion in the history of boxing, explained his willingness to endure months of difficult training this way: “What were the requirements? Sacrifice. That’s all. To anybody who comes from the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, sacrifice comes easy.”

Love—whether it’s love for a sport, love for one’s sister, or love for humanity in all its forms, however grotesque—is the thing that makes a man say, “Sacrifice. That’s all.” Its yoke is easy, its burden light. Life with a disability involves sacrifices, some of which are merely onerous and should be eliminated, some of which cannot be eliminated without implicitly disputing love’s power to turn sacrifice into a gift.

Science has asked us to endorse its vision of a perpetually comfortable and easy world, and so we cannot help but make a firm choice, now, whether to celebrate self-discipline or to resent its necessity. If we choose the latter, we may soon find ourselves living in the world of Wall*E—painless, and pointless. If we choose the former, we may find that the prophets of our new asceticism are the deaf parents who decline cochlear implants for their newborn, the wheelchair-bound employee who finds nothing undignified about asking a co-worker for help every morning, the mother who carries a Down Syndrome baby to term—those who have had hardship thrust upon them and, nevertheless, have found some nobility in it.  Science and disability law will both continue to develop, but we must be careful in choosing the goal toward which their progress is directed.

Helen Rittelmeyer is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She blogs at http://cigarettesmokingblog.blogspot.com. Illustration by Joe Oliva Ganoza.

This double standard is more interesting than anything else in the book. It’s interesting not because it’s a tendency peculiar to Denby, but because we all feel it from time to time. “It is not easy—perhaps not even desirable—to judge other people by a consistent standard,” says a character in Anthony Powell’s novel A Question of Upbringing. “Conduct obnoxious, even unbearable, in one person may be readily tolerated in another.” When Christopher Hitchens turned, or appeared to turn, politically rightward, George Scialabba noted his own reaction and wrote: “All the someone in question has to do is begin thinking differently from me about a few important matters, and in no time I find that his qualities have subtly metamorphosed. His abundance of colorful anecdotes now looks like incessant and ingenious self-promotion. His marvelous copiousness and fluency strike me as mere mellifluous facility and mechanical prolixity.” This is the strange alchemy of bias. Scialabba should have asked, though, whether he was wrong to have appreciated those qualities before.

It’s all reminiscent of kids losing a game and accusing the other side of cheating. The beef here is with losing, but to admit that as an adult is rather uncomfortable. On this rarely acknowledged principle, face-saving intellectuals prefer to complain about their opposition’s unseemly tactics rather than the more troublesome fact that their opposition exists at all.

Because of this slippery understanding of snark, the closest that Denby is able to come to a firm definition of it is to offer this vague scenario:

The platonic ideal of snark is something like this: Two girls are sitting in a high school cafeteria putting down a third, who’s sitting on the other side of the room. What’s peculiar about this event is that the girl on the other side of the room is their best friend. In that scenario, snark is abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows within a closed space.

What the analogue of “best friend” would be in the wider world of politics and ideas is unclear, and the vagueness of the bad-mouthing makes it easy to condemn. If snark is simply invective one doesn’t like, then every person with an intact personality is against snark. Snark, as it’s used outside of Denby’s book, seems to mean criticism that some party deems too caustic in tone, but anyone who condemns snark in the Denby way, it seems, has to speak as if the whole world shares his preferences for what deserves scorn and praise. This sort of criticism therefore shorts the circuit that criticism is supposed to travel, that is, to convince others of what specific things deserve scorn and praise.

It would be better to leave Denby’s convoluted book behind, and—in drawing the line between the uses and abuses of snark—look at an established classic. Here is a line from a work, which the author described as “an experiment in literary investigation”: “According to the rumors, it was all the work of ex-soldiers (recent ex-soldiers!).”

The author is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who, while advancing west with the Red Army, was arrested by his own government and imprisoned, becoming an “ex-soldier.” When prisoners in one of the camps revolted, government propaganda found it useful to describe the rebels as “ex-soldiers,” implying that they were a ragtag mob of deranged, violent men, long out of the army and lashing out against a reasonable penal system. But these were in fact “recent ex-soldiers,” having been transformed overnight from stalwart defenders of their country into condemned criminals. Ex-soldiers they certainly were—why, just a week ago they were risking their lives for the motherland, and now here they are, being tortured as “fascists”!

But I notice I’m already imitating the tone of the man I’m writing about. It’s a frenetic, contagious style—Solzhenitsyn is the only writer who likes italics and exclamation points more than the editors at Gawker—and it shares with snark the ability to stow an entire worldview between parentheses. (Compression of meaning is something snark also shares with poetry.) Many who have heard of The Gulag Archipelago (1973) but not read it are under the impression that it’s like an encyclopedia with all the light parts cut out and that only a rare surge of piety could make anyone want to read it instead of just gazing at its spine on the shelf. This is a strange reputation for one of the most entertaining books ever written about mass murder to have, but maybe that dour dust-jacket is what’s throwing them off. It couldn’t be the prose, when every other page raises the question of whether, once you’ve found yourself laughing at sarcastic descriptions of torture and brutality, you should feel bad or just go with it.

After some initial frustrations, the Soviet government manages to put down the camp rebellion. Solzhenitsyn, with horrifying specificity, describes just how the military murdered the rebels, and adds:

So busy were they with all this that no one had leisure to open Pravda that day. It had a special theme—a day in the life of our Motherland: the successes of steelworkers; more and more crops harvested by machine. The historian surveying our country as it was that day will have an easy task.

There’s nothing particularly satirical about this style—what it describes isn’t an exaggeration, which is exactly why it holds our attention. It’s sarcastic, snide, irreverent, but most of all, it makes no effort to be objective. It is grounded entirely in the presumption of disdain of the Soviet gulag system. Far from encumbering the prose, the snark illuminates the system’s absurdity. Bereft of its snark, it would read like one of those Associated Press stories that leaves you wondering whether the reporter is withholding something crucial for fear of violating objectivity.

One of the funniest (and snarkiest) passages in the whole book describes how the Tsarist justice system dealt with Lenin before the revolution. After relating, among other things, how under communism entire peasant families were executed for “hoarding” the crops they hoped to subsist on, Solzhenitsyn describes the ordeals of the young Vladimir this way:

…he was merely expelled. Such cruelty! Yes, but he was also banished….To Sakhalin? No, to the family estate of Kokushkino, where he intended to spend the summer anyway. He wanted to work, so they gave him an opportunity….To fell trees in the frozen north? No, to practice law in Samara, where he was simultaneously active in illegal political circles. After this he was allowed to take his examinations at St. Petersburg University as an external student. (With his curriculum vitae? What was the Special section thinking of?)

That dismissive “Such cruelty!” is related to what is one of his strangest rhetorical effects, namely how when describing the remorseless cruelty of the Soviet system, he seems almost, but not quite, to convey admiration for their total lack of scruples. This black humor is just one element of tone that achieves a chord-like complexity, giving the lie to the notion that snark is always simple.

Denby laments the “knowing” tone of snark, which he says implies in-group status. He’s right about that implication. But knowingness can be the appropriate antidote to authorities who insist on playing dumb. During the camp rebellion, the government deigns to negotiate with the prisoners. It offers to involve the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the MVD, but the prisoners refuse this.

“Don’t trust even the MVD?” The vice-minister was thrown into a sweat by this treasonable talk. “And who can have inspired in you such hatred for the MVD?” A riddle, if ever there was one.

The MVD’s record of abuse is well known to the prisoners, and to Solzhenitsyn’s readers. They are an “in-group” in the matter of Soviet torture and their knowing tone is fitting.

To make a great literary work, a writer has to find the best style for his subject. Given his position as a dissident writing in secret, it’s impossible that Solzhenitsyn could have been the objective historian, even if he’d wanted to. There were two remaining options. First, he could have been lachrymose, solemn, and shaken. This is the more obvious way to write about the murder of millions. The second approach would involve bitterness, cynicism, and a resolve not to be duped. By choosing the latter, Solzhenitsyn was able to be more, not less, affecting and honest. Snark stimulates the human attraction to conflict, and this accounts for its currency online. It also helps hold our attention when sympathy alone proves insufficient.

The sad fact about human attention is that it flags even, or especially, when you tell yourself that the subject at hand deserves it. When Roberto Bolano wanted to include in his final novel, 2666, a detailed description of the serial murder of Mexican women, he went about it by listing how they died, their professions, and much other data. Even the most sympathetic reviewers conceded that this was a hard section to get through. The effect was ultimately deadening instead of affecting, for the same reason you feel you know much less about the man whose thick file you’ve read than about a Shakespeare character who has just a dozen lines. Data is nothing; drama is everything.

Take, for example, Solzhenitsyn describing an apparent suicide by hanging: “The bosses were not greatly upset; they cut him down and wheeled him off to the scrap heap.” In this case, snark shows both how easy it is to become inured to cruelty, but also how ineradicable the standards of human decency are to those who haven’t been totally corrupted by the camps. Snark is the tone we adopt when we decide to laugh at something that demands our reverence, and therefore obedience. The invective may be against a puffed-up cultural figure or a totalitarian regime, but the different levels of bravery these two kinds of snark require shouldn’t blind us to their rhetorical affinities.

Some might say that, because of the conditions under which he wrote the book, a cruder, blog-like tone won out. Given a more leisurely environment, the argument goes, the irony would have been refined. But the political oppression which necessitated the tone also necessitated the book, and it becomes obvious quickly that The Gulag Archipelago and its snark are of a piece. In the gulag, subtlety wouldn’t have done the trick and would have sapped Solzhenitsyn’s rhetoric of its moral power. And the trick was shifting world consciousness.

And consciousness needed shifting. Nazism enjoyed some respect from those who were free to choose, but communism enjoyed more and for a longer time. Few intellectuals needed to be shocked into seeing the essential evil of Hitler’s regime. The death camps were able to speak for themselves. Specious stuff about omelets and eggs, though, seemed to constantly hover around the “progressive” dictatorships. The Soviet mass murder required a commentary, which Solzhenitsyn and others had to provide. But how does Solzhenitsyn’s snark compare to the kind currently sloshing around the Internet? The moral vision behind his snark certainly elevates it above the jealous sniping of Gawker and its ilk at the established media, which has as its counterintuitive end the effort to become the established media. But the fall of the Soviet Union hardly heralded the end of political double-talk or of political crimes on so massive a scale that earnestness and sorrowfulness will fail to convey their full injustice. The persistence of these features of political life leaves open a space for snark in our public discourse. One of the greatest books of the previous century was snarky, and it blasted away other apologists for the gulag who posed as “sober,” “level-headed,” and “reasonable.” (”In the USSR, at least they’re trying to forge something positive,” said A. J. Ayer to Kingsley Amis, who had brought up that annoying five million dead.) This teaches us, I think, that we should be wary of entering into any polite rhetorical arrangement when important matters are at stake. We should be wise enough to realize that, exasperating as irreverence can be, the alternative is worse. After all, a figure or institution that crumbles at the first touch of snark might deserve to be targeted. Denby would argue that we—the Correct—should be nice to each other and heap our scorn only on the Incorrect. That would nice if these categories were distinct except in retrospect (or even then). Since life is lived forwards, not backwards, only fanatics know for sure if they’re wrong or right in the present, and this necessitates skepticism and irreverence and, yes, snark.

Nicholas Desai has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and other publications. He lives in Virginia. Art by Katherine Eastland.

Not that Carpenter is slowing down. Her column for the Times, “Hot Button,” is a wide-ranging investigation of politics and media in D.C., Hollywood, and beyond, and has covered everything from the culture wars as they play out on “American Idol” to rapper Eminem’s fascination with Sarah Palin. She also produces a video series for the paper’s website, “The Back Story with Amanda Carpenter,” where she hones her already impressive on-camera skills.

Carpenter is undeniably one of the right’s great hopes, but little in her background would have suggested such an outcome. The Montrose, Michigan native had little interest in politics growing up, and her family rarely discussed such matters. “It’s definitely not the typical church-going, Republican-voting kinda family that a lot of people assume I’m from,” she says, “You know, where we all wear pearls on the weekend or something. There’s no trust fund here, unfortunately.”

Without a Buckley or Kristol pedigree, Carpenter’s path to conservative punditry was far from assured. She entered college on a softball scholarship, but her career as a pitcher—and the financial aid it brought—came to an end when she was sidelined by a shoulder injury. In 2003, she transferred from Indiana’s Tri-State (now Trine) University to Ball State, a significantly larger university in Muncie, where she became an active member of the school’s debate team. Nevertheless, she says, “I was not remotely politically active until my junior year of college.”

To pay for college, Carpenter worked stints at the Gap, 7-11, a country club, and the school library. Writing hefty tuition checks led her to wonder “what tuition dollars are funding.” So she set up a website, the now-defunct bsyou.net, where she scrutinized various administrative expenditures, including a $20,000 speaking fee paid to Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser.

Soon, the entire schools was buzzing about the site, especially after Carpenter fashioned a “Wanted” ad for a professor who had recently been arrested for trespassing. “He said that I committed a hate crime, because I allegedly made him look Arab in the photo, which was just his university photo,” she laughs. “He had a beard.” The beard, she assures, was his own and not something she Photoshopped in. Nonetheless, scandal ensued.

Soon, Ball State’s College Republicans were seeking out the hot new campus provocatrice. Carpenter never officially joined the group—”If I wasn’t at one of my jobs,” she explains, she was at home updating bsyou.net. But her investigations of the university’s spending led her to see the need for fiscal responsibility on a larger scale, which brought the formerly apolitical student to conservatism. “My number-one issue has always been spending, from college to now,” she says.

So Carpenter decided to make a career out of it. Upon graduating in 2005, she got an internship with the Arlington, Va.-based Leadership Institute, which led to a reporting job at Human Events. Not long after, Regnery, the paper’s affiliated publishing house, asked her if she wanted to write a book on Hillary Clinton. “And of course I said yes.”

While too young to have succumbed to all-out Clinton-phobia—”I didn’t live through the whole ‘We hate Hillary’ phase,” she says—Carpenter was disturbed by what she found out about the New York senator while researching her book. She brought Bill Clinton’s speaking engagements abroad, which netted him and his wife over $27 million, to the public’s attention. “All the foreign money that Bill Clinton was getting,” she says, might have funded his wife’s presidential campaign, yet “nobody was worried about this.”

Carpenter’s book won favorable press from conservative outlets such as National Review, but the book didn’t sell as well as it might have a few years back when “Hillary-hate” was at its peak. Still, Senator Clinton’s presidential campaign led to a resurgence of interest in the book: GQ reported that 1,000 copies were distributed, along with “Hillary barf bags,” at a D.C. conservative convention.

After three years in conservative media, Carpenter entered the mainstream during the 2008 campaign, when she was one of five female bloggers—and the lone conservative—contributing to Glamour magazine’s election blog, Glamocracy. “It was a little bit hard for me,” she says, “because everything had to be so women-focused.” And while she’s all for girl power, “I would never identify myself as a feminist,” she says. Inspired by the Independent Women’s Forum, she prefers the word “independent” to describe herself and other hard-charging, conservative women today.

While the outcome of the 2008 election has sparked heated debate among Republicans about a new direction for the party, Carpenter has her sights trained on government spending. “I think the vote for the stimulus is going to end up being for the Republican party what the vote for the Iraq war was for the Democrats,” she says. “Now’s the time for the moderate Republicans who supported that agenda to leave the party.” Carpenter champions a younger set of leaders, such as Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin, who value fiscal responsibility and who will, she hopes, help “rebrand” the GOP.

Yet for all her passion for politics, Carpenter does not see herself running for office now or in the future.

“I’ve never, ever, ever been the student council type. Ever.”

Phoebe Maltz is a doctoral student and writer in New York. She blogs at whatwouldphoebedo.blogspot.com. Photography by Katherine Ruddy.