I read across the political spectrum. I would say I read religiously across the political spectrum, but that is using the term in a secondary and impoverished way, which is part of my point in this particular post. When an author has no clearly defined thesis there is a tendency to ramble, or to fall back on form in the absence of content, or to play to the expectations of the audience through deliberate obscurity.
It is by a chance intersection that I encountered two ideologically conservative pieces that suffer from this tendency in the same week, but it could also be that everyone on the right is exasperated by the often vacuous—and always narcissistic—current happenings within the political parties that represent them. I sympathize with them if that’s their defense, and will also agree that the far left can be equally exhausting.
It has become de rigueur for the right’s commentariat to claim that this is not what they expect from the Party of Lincoln or, given a spat with National Review, that the magazine lacks the heft of Bill Buckley’s original ideals. If all of conservatism has become tainted by reactionaries and semi-populists, the very idea of intellectual conservatism huddles against an ever-present and threatening cloud.
So we start with Andrew Sullivan’s rambling in New York Magazine. Sullivan likes to praise the intellectual heft of those he argues against. Maybe he just likes to be pleasant and this is his way of signaling a commonality of purpose, or perhaps it’s to gird his own rejoinders as having equal weight. In this piece, it’s hard to discern why. The entire argument is a typology or map of what a center-right conservative is and is not. A Sullivan Conservative (SC) believes in women’s rights, but is cautious to also accept there might be biological differences between men and women. An SC thinks immigration might be happening faster than the people can accept in America and Europe, is sympathetic, but is not a reactionary who wants it stopped. An SC thinks marriage equality is a great idea while reactionaries don’t. An SC thinks the left’s language about wokeness might be a bit inflated, and that social upheaval by radicals is less attractive than a more steady hand on the tiller. There are natural limits to social change for an SC, which seems to invoke natural law style arguments that haunt other conservative intellectuals like George Will. An SC thinks the New York Times is preachy (or something) for a slideshow about the role of slavery in pre-1776 America (I doubt he would argue against the role of religion in the same intellectual history). An SC is wary of indoctrination of young people; they are swallowing the wrong pill and should be more skeptical!
It’s 1968 all over again. The radicals are at the gates. The witch hunters on the left and the right all have torches. The ground might split open at any moment. Oh how we long for some stability. Is Eisenhower tanned, rested, and ready?
But then there is David French’s National Review ramblefest. French has some things in common with an SC. Most critically, he’s willing to defend religious faith as an institution without actually addressing the content of the claims, as I previously accused Sullivan of doing. “There is something fishy, here” is the gist of French’s thesis, but it painfully morphs into the idea that this Australian (now, formerly) Christian singer has been worn down by a secular society. Odd, a conservative seeing a fallen individual broken by society. The singer seemed to be asserting that the specific claims of the religion he was a part of are not valid. The reason that French can’t take on those claims, but must, initially, fall back on a rambling society-did-it-to-him, is that the Australian dude has good justification for his rejection of belief and faith both with respect to the details, and with respect to the failing of the final line of French’s essay: “but the blame [lies] with a person who didn’t, ultimately, have the courage to believe.” The notion of courageous faith in unknowables that can’t be tested by reason is, itself, a failure warranting a serious reconsideration of the ideas in question. A French Conservative (FC) seems to align with an SC that the institution of Christianity has some stabilizing value to modern society against radicalism, but defense of the merit of the institutional claims is left to someone else who perhaps has the intellectual power to realign the fallen.
I’ll give it to both of these august minds that they can fulfill their job requirements without much effort. Still, the most diminishing aspects of both essays is that they are either weak tea (the SC typology teaches us nothing new) or they are persuasive about the intellectual failures of their subject matter.