I’ll Pass on This Glorious Revolution

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, November 07, 2022

 

Tomorrow is Election Day, and as Americans prepare to go to the polls—or not!—it is worth spending some time thinking about the fact that the characteristic quality of politics in our time is not populism, nationalism, socialism, illiberalism, or anything of that nature: It is immaturity.

 

Depending on how you do the math, the United States may boast of having the world’s oldest continuous democracy or its oldest codified constitution. (San Marino will complain, but I think the United States has the better claim.) But countries that have been around for a long time act the fool periodically—being long-lived is not the same as being mature. I am 50 years old, and during the course of my relatively brief years on this Earth, a lot of countries that we think of as being utterly normal—Spain, Portugal, Greece—were in thrall to some variety of fascist dictatorship or another: Francisco Franco ruled Spain until 1975, António de Oliveira Salazar kept Portugal under his heel until 1974, the Colonels’ junta ruled Greece until 1974. And just as those European countries were emerging from dictatorship in the mid-1970s, India—the world’s largest democracy—was sliding into dictatorship under Indira Gandhi and the “Emergency.” Liberty has been the exception: 16 million Germans lived under a brutal dictatorship until 1989, the “perfect dictatorship” ran Mexico until 2000, etc. If you take the span of my late father’s life rather than mine—84 short years—then you’d have an easier time counting the European countries that hadn’t been under some form of dictatorship at some time during that period than adding up the ones that had. And it wasn’t just the Nazis and the Soviets: If Charles de Gaulle wasn’t a dictator, then the words “rule by decree” have no meaning. 

 

The English-speaking countries and a couple of small outliers (happy Switzerland) have enjoyed a run that is, in the historical context, very, very unusual. If you want to know what it is that American conservatives have conserved and mean to conserve, it is those aspects of our national life that have ensured that even when they achieve some measure of electoral success, such figures as Huey Long in days of old—or Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in our own time—do not succeed in their revolutionary ambitions. Even Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, each of whom took advantage of crisis and war to assume the closest thing to practical autocratic powers wielded by an American president, saw the most radical of their ambitions thwarted and many of their advances reversed. (FDR’s program has proved more durable than Wilson’s, in part because many conservatives ultimately embraced it.) The Anglophone world has a particular liberal mojo, expressed more intensely in the United States than elsewhere but obviously present in some considerable degree in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. And that is worth conserving. 

 

Which is to say: You can count me out of the right-wing revolutionary talk. 

 

I concur with Jonah Goldberg in his response to the such recent talk on the right as “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” Basically: “Your proposal is acceptable.” I think these idiot children should stop calling themselves “conservative” too, and they would be saving me some trouble. No, not everyone engaged in that “revolution” talk is an idiot child, but the non-idiot-children should stop calling themselves “conservative” too. And many in that camp have: Sohrab Ahmari, the secular-Muslim-socialist-atheist-turned-neocon-turned-Trumpy-ultramontane-Catholic-whackadoodle-turned-New-Deal-Democrat—seriously, the guy has maintained an unlikely series of exotic positions that would have exceeded the capacities of the Yogi Coudoux and Stormy Daniels combined—wants to be known as a radical, and currently is operating a “radical American journal” with a likeminded Marxist, thereby melding the cutting-edge progressive ideas of the 1930s with the freshest revolutionary thinking of the late 19^th century. I’ve gone back and forth with Ahmari on this stuff for a while (we did an event at Yale in 2019) and my impression of his rather diagonal progress has not changed very much: He seems to me a smart, unserious guy without anything particularly interesting to say. I take it he’s calling himself a “pro-life New Dealer” these days, perhaps with a touch of irony. My understanding is that most of the original New Dealers were pro-life, too, pro-abortion sentiment having been a much more Republican thing in those years. (About half of the domestic politics of the first third of the 20^th century can be understood by keeping in mind that the Democrats were the anti-black party and the Republicans were the anti-Catholic party.) This ascendant social-democratic tendency on the right is what some of the political-“science” types describe as “welfare chauvinism,” a combination of redistributionist economics with rightist-to-reactionary social posturing, the kind of thing associated with such figures as Marine Le Pen. 

 

(Of course it’s posturing: I’ll believe these people are serious social reactionaries when they start repealing no-fault divorce laws and bringing back lawsuits over “criminal conversation.”) 

 

Radical is just the right word in many of these cases. For one thing, the word radical refers to roots, and most of these guys talk and think like they have been chewing on some very choice roots from deep down in the Amazon basin that go for about $600 a bundle if you know a guy in Austin. (I used to know a guy in Austin—strange times out there on Bart’s Landing.) But the metaphoric sense obviously is at play as well: They believe that there is something wrong with our society at its root, and that what ails us must be dug up by the roots. 

 

So, reform is out. Bipartisanship and consensus definitely are out. In with the revolution. 

 

No, thanks. 

 

The revolution talk is fundamentally unserious and fundamentally immature. It is partly the result of marketing necessities in the social media age, in which an exceedingly childish understanding of consistency and its flipside—an exceedingly childish understanding of hypocrisy—push all politics into an all-the-way attitude. We always understand that this is stupid when it comes from somebody who disagrees with us: You’ve all met the sandal-wearing imbecile who insists: “You like the interstate highways? You like public schools? Then you’re a socialist, just like me!” (I believe it was none other than Ludwig von Mises who stormed out of a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society denouncing the sundry Milton Friedman types gathered there as “socialists.” No pleasing some people.) We have the expression, “Give him an inch and he’ll take a mile” precisely because inches and miles are different things. 

 

This is part of a more general valorization of rebelliousness in our culture, something that probably is inevitable in a society that 1) was founded in a revolution; 2) invented the “teenager” as a social category; and 3) invented rock ’n’ roll.

 

(The insistent conservatism of rock music is a theme of mine that I’ll have to explore at some length. Short version: Early rock was full of conservative myth-making, from Horatio Alger-type stories such as “Johnny B. Goode” to odes to domesticity such as “You Never Can Tell,” both by Chuck Berry, while punk was mostly a musically reactionary reversion to 1950s pop forms, and by 1978 you have bands as different as the Clash and Dire Straits releasing nearly simultaneous “Kids These Days”-type songs, “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” and “Sultans of Swing,” respectively. It’s a long argument.)  

 

That youthful rebellion-as-national-ethos stuff makes for a pretty good story, and some of it is even true. But a lot of it is marketing, too. Those early Silicon Valley idealists building the future in California garages? Yeah, that really did happen, but it mostly involved a lot of well-heeled Ivy League types backed by dad’s money—which is great! That’s what family money is for!—and a lot of the heavy lifting was done by pillars of the establishment: bankers, tenured professors, and serial entrepreneurs reinvesting the proceeds of earlier successes. For some reason, the political pages have been full of “Why Is Generation X So Republican?” stories in the past few months, but the real question is: Why wouldn’t they be? They watched prosperity emerge from the wreckage of the Cold War while most of what is best in the modern world was built by swaggering capitalists backed by grim-faced bankers and rapacious Wall Street types. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked. One might more reasonably ask why the Republican Party isn’t as Republican as it used to be. 

 

The American Revolution—that thoroughly bourgeois, elite-led revolution based on property rights and Anglo-Protestant liberalism—is the great exception to the revolutionary rule. Normally, revolutions produce only damage, or mostly damage. They leave societies poorer, more fragile, more vulnerable, and less able to access longstanding and familiar modes of dealing with the complexities and challenges of modern life. The American Revolution in many ways begat the French Revolution, which was a disaster; the French Revolution inspired the Russian Revolution, which produced one of the most inhumane regimes every to disgrace this planet; the Russian Revolution provided inspiration for the Iranian Revolution, which the Iranian people appear ready to shake off even as the Biden administration continues to legitimize the tyrants in Tehran. 

 

People learn. Rock stars love to talk about revolution, but even the Beatles figured out the problems with that, and Bono, bless his heart, is out there singing the praises of “entrepreneurial capitalism” as the “off-ramp out of extreme poverty.” Of course, he is correct. 

 

The off-ramp from what ails the United States in 2022 is not revolution. It is—nothing surprising: free enterprise, investment, trade, hard work, thrift, prudence, economy, rule of law, good citizenship, community, family, and, where it cannot be avoided but may be properly limited, democracy. 

 

Adolescents talk about revolution. Adults go to work.