by Nate Hochman
INWhen TS Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably did not have American conservatism in mind,” begins the opening paragraph of Sam Francis’s seminal 1991 essay: “Beautiful losers.“
“American conservatism,” Francis wrote, “is a failure, and no amount of think tanks, magazines, direct mail barons, inaugural balls, and campaign buttons can hide or change it. Virtually every issue to which conservatives have committed themselves over the past three generations has been lost, and the tide of the political and cultural battle is unlikely to turn anytime soon.”
The reasons for this were many and varied, but the basic thesis was this: “The Old Right,” Francis wrote, “failed to understand that the revolution had already occurred.” The conservatism of William F. Buckley Jr., Frank Meyer, National Reviewand yes, even Ronald Reagan championed an ideology intended to defend the elderly, established order that was now gone. The doctrines of this ideology – constrained government, federalism, a capitalist “economy of privately owned and operated companies” and a mixture of Protestant moral traditionalism and entrepreneurial individualism “in politics, economics, art, religion and ethics” – were constructed by and for the “institutions and beliefs of the elite” bourgeois” that ruled from the Civil War until “until the dislocations of the 20th century technological and organizational expansion created a new managerial elite that took power in the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal,” Francis argued. “These reforms constituted a revolution… in the construction of an entire architecture of economic and cultural power, based on bureaucratized corporations and trade unions, increasingly bureaucratic universities, foundations, churches and mass media, linked directly or indirectly to the centralized bureaucracy of the state.”
More than 30 years later, the right still hasn’t grasped this insight. The transformation of American society from a republic – with a constitutionally constrained government and a genuinely private civil society and economy – into a bureaucratized mass democracy presided over by a managerial elite that moves fluidly between public and private spheres continues to defy explanation. the strength of the elderly conservative ideological doctrine. Indeed, the elderly ideology is not like that capable explaining these dynamics because they were constructed for a world in which they did not exist.
With the huge apparatus of what has come to be called “civil society” at its fingertips, the left has no need for direct state suppression of dissent. (Though it is often content to pursue its cultural goals through government coercion as well, ranging from persecution of Christian businesses and charities to Justice Department efforts to crack down on parent-led school board protests.) The genius of this approach is that it relies heavily on the exercise of “soft” rather than “hard” power. Large social media companies — which flood the market with certified “fact checkers,” flag right-wing “disinformation,” and favor content moderation practices that serve leftist ideological goals — intersect with a phalanx of credentialed expert DEI consultants generously funded by activist groups and foundations and a willingness of time-honored media to change the way Americans receive and process information.
These tools of contemporary mass society are directly contrary to the ethics and character of the elderly American republic – an ethic that, as Francis noted in his separate essay“consist[ed] less in moral purity than in personal and social independence”:
By owning and running his own farm or shop, usually producing his own food and clothing, managing his own family and his own community, and defending himself with his own weapons in the company of his own relatives and neighbors, the citizen of the classical republic had no need for any and did not want the leviathan state to wage wars around the world in the name of democracy, nor pretended to protect him and his home. He didn’t need or want a job at someone else’s company, a retirement plan, health benefits, paid holidays, or a five-hour workday. He didn’t want to shop in gigantic shopping malls, where nothing is worth buying and nothing purchased will last a year. It did not occur to him to enroll himself or his children in therapeutic courses or sensitivity and interpersonal relations clinics to learn how to get along with his neighbors, and he did not seek any instruction or guidance from the mass media that might entertain him or indoctrinate him with current clichés and slogans of public discussion, or persuade him to buy even more garbage that he had no utilize for and inclination to buy, if a citizen succumbed to such temptations, he became addicted to someone or something other than himself and his extensions in the family and community . People who are dependent on others cannot govern themselves, and if they cannot govern themselves, they cannot maintain a republic.
None of this can describe today’s American society, which has become so dependent on mass organizations (of one form or another) that the republican way of life exceeds the wildest limits of their – our – imagination. Major brands and companies, mass media, education systems and government bureaucracies shape the way they think and behave, often in ways they don’t even fully understand:
The unholy marriage of leftist activist groups with mega-investors like BlackRock is one of the most critical stories of our time. It is a form of political power that challenges some of the right’s most basic ideas about government, free markets, and economic freedom. https://t.co/YrAy0zAMv5
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) June 12, 2024
All of this calls into question the way conservatives should think about the scope and function of leftist ideology. For example, LGBT activism – which is a particularly hotly debated topic now, during the most critical holiday of Pride Month – is usually considered a set of right-wing doctrines or ideas. He is rarely thought of as a father system. (Many conservatives oppose thinking in systemic terms at all – perhaps a hangover from the Cold War aversion to anything that might smack of Marxism). But if they are to understand it at all, they must understand it in these terms.
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Nate Hochman is a writer at American viewer. Follow him on X at @njhochman.
Photo “Equality Parade” by FULBERT CC BY-SA 4.0.
