From what I’ve seen, young conservatives are poorly prepared for the conflict at hand. They aren’t as well-read as they should be (in a particular direction); they overdevelop certain skills and neglect others; they misconstrue their adversaries; and they apply the wrong ethics to their own designs.
Here’s what they should do instead:
First, less debate, more tactics. Thirty, 40, 50 years ago, the battle of ideas raged. Conservatives fought it through books, essays, periodicals, and open-house debates. Liberals pushed the ‘60s agenda, while William Buckley, Irving Kristol, Russell Kirk, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, Milton Friedman, Bill Bennett, and others pushed back.
Liberals thought they had all the momentum in 1975, having conquered the Democratic Party, the news media, Hollywood, the art world, academia, the public schools, fashion, and so forth. But there were a handful of conservatives (of various kinds) showing up on TV and on the best-seller lists poking holes in the liberal vision with empirical data, patriotic/religious faith, and unexpected wit.
Those heroic acts, however, are no model for conservative youth today. The past 15 years prove that those wins didn’t stop the steady descent of America into identity politics and grievance attitudes. The broken windows theory undid progressive approaches toward crime for a time, but it hasn’t stopped the rise of Soros-backed prosecutors. Books by Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball laid bare the noxious political correctness of the campus in 1990, but “woke” correctness in 2023 is three times as watchful and punitive.
It isn’t that conservatives failed. They did exactly what was needed and did it superbly. But the left was fighting a different war: not a war of ideas but a competition for office space. Maybe they couldn’t answer the points in “The Naked Public Square” and “Losing Ground,” but so what? As long as leftists got jobs in institutions, that biting op-ed by William Safire meant nothing. For leftists, it was a turf war, not an intellectual or cultural war.
To help the conservative movement today, then, rising conservatives should skip debate club and study field tactics—less Edmund Burke and more Gen. Wellesley. Study the control of institutions. We must have rising conservatives who welcome such battles and accept that it isn’t always going to be a clean fight.
Second, understand your adversary. Too often, conservatives have assumed that the left wants constructive outcomes but pursues bad ways of achieving them. They grant to the other side good intentions. One can understand a 23-year-old who prefers to believe this of his fellow man.
Not any longer. The vindictiveness of the left is blatant, as is the sweeping nature of its goals. When they speak of “transforming the United States,” we must take them seriously, along with the ruthless plans that transformation necessitates. They really mean it, and if it requires the cancellation of every social and religious conservative in the country, so be it.
When Herbert Marcuse laid out the case in “Repressive Tolerance” for shunning and exiling all conservatives, for taking away their speech rights and platforms, he exhilarated leftists everywhere, whose thirst to assail a group they regarded as the source of all social problems welcomed any academic argument in its favor.
Reread that powerful essay and take its guidance to heart. There, we see the real action laid out. The high ideals of diversity, justice, equity, and inclusion sounded by progressives have little relation to the vengeful designs at work.
Be aware, young conservatives: They want to get rid of you. Your beliefs strike them as vile. Victory isn’t enough. They want to break and humiliate you.
Third, read Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. I mean it, yes, read “The German Ideology” and “Discipline and Punish,” the Marx and Foucault who describe how rulers and ruling institutions exert power, enforce compliance, and serve themselves. Their descriptions don’t, in fact, apply well to societies operating on classical liberal principles, but they do apply well to institutions that have been captured by leftist personnel.
Is there any better characterization of today’s journalist profession than Marx’s outline of how rulers enlist a group of writers, intellectuals, and clerics to rationalize the system that sets those rulers at the top? Aren’t the efforts to create ministries of disinformation perfect models of Foucauldian surveillance? (The French title of the book is “Surveiller et Punir.”)
If young conservatives contain those critiques to the woke university, the Deep State, the Democratic Party, and other leftist strongholds, the dynamics of those institutions will become transparent.
Finally, stop worrying about the ethics of this kind of battle. Many talented young conservatives have passed through institutions as a minority group, sometimes harassed and always suspected. Mentors have told them that the best defense, the safest course, is to advocate for intellectual/political diversity. It’s a modest appeal, a plea for a little space in the arena. Conservatives, they say, should insist on a seat at the table but take no one else’s seat away.
Don’t promote actual conservative ideas, materials, and personnel too aggressively. Don’t assert that liberal ideas are wrong and leftist policy pernicious. Stay nonconfrontational. Make your demand neutral and nonpartisan, fair and just, applicable to every responsible party.
Needless to say, it doesn’t work. Calls for intellectual diversity go back more than 20 years, and they haven’t curbed political correctness one bit. Leftists laugh at the request, knowing it has no teeth. They maintain that progressivism is right and should prevail now and forever. To face an antagonist that won’t say the same of its own outlook, that won’t insist on its superiority, is a pleasure. One can always take the offensive.
I’ve heard conservatives mutter at the prospect of treating the left as they treat us, “Oh, we can’t do that, that would make us just as bad as them”—which sounds to me like the old Robert Frost quip: “Liberals are people who are so broad-minded that they can’t take their own side in a quarrel.”
It doesn’t seem to occur to these diversity conservatives that one reason why the left has triumphed over conservatives and liberals both is precisely this diversity-tolerance posture, which creates a moral vacuum into which leftists enter like stampeding cattle. I’ve watched identity politicians take this feeble request for intellectual-political diversity and trash it with a simple question: “Why should we give one inch of ground to abhorrent people?”
The only effective response to that is equally personal: “Yes, correct, which is why you need to be expelled.”
The formation has to change. The cancel tactics of the woke give conservatives no choice. We don’t need any more symposia on “What Is Conservatism?” No more defenses of the right against charges of racism and extremism, no more efforts to differentiate good conservatives from alt-right Nietzscheans, and no more angry letters from Republican politicians objecting to the latest Democrat infringement.
We need young conservatives to envision ways of gaining institutional power, to join the fray with Lenin’s prime question in hand: “What Is to Be Done?”
