By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
May 22, 2023
After I wrote the last page and showered and ate lunch and feel calmed
down now. Heard a song on the radio though—was turning away from rock and roll
music which only wasn’t me and got a conservative station with a girl singing ‘Go ahead and hate your nabor, go ahead and
cheat a friend’—but
I heard, at the time, ‘Go and kill (or shoot) your nabor,’ which disturbed me
greatly.
… Hurrah! Hurrah! Great day for democracy and capitalism! A 50 percent
voter turn out is expected: Now THAT’S confidence in America.
Diary of Arthur Bremer,
would-be assassin of George Wallace
(Errors in original.)
(Nixon won a 49-state
landslide)
About
that other Bobby Kennedy: When William F. Buckley Jr. was
asked why Attorney General Kennedy refused to appear on Firing Line,
Buckley’s television show, he answered: “Why does the baloney reject the
grinder?”
Anno
Domini 2023: So much baloney, so few grinders.
Buckley
had some notorious opinions over the course of a controversialist’s career
lasting from the publication of God and Man at Yale in 1951,
when he was in his middle 20s, until his death in 2008 at age 82. Some of those
views touched on obviously serious matters, most notably his early,
wrongheaded, and, happily, soon abandoned sympathy for white-supremacist
politics in the South, an opinion he voiced infamously in the 1950s but
abandoned by the 1960s, when he became an important opponent of George Wallace.
A seemingly less serious matter—but by no means an unserious one—was his famous
antipathy toward the Beatles, “the crowned heads of anti-music,” as he called
them in a 1964 column. Buckley’s treatment of the Beatles was harsh but
scrupulously fair: When John Lennon was being lambasted for declaring that the
Beatles had become “more popular than Jesus,” Buckley wrote that the statement
was “certainly untactful and indubitably accurate.”
By the
time Jimi Hendrix was burning guitars on stage in 1967, the Beatles and their
mop tops and their recycled Chuck Berry riffs were positively quaint, but it
was the Beatles’ music that stuck in Buckley’s head as the soundtrack of the
’60s counterculture.
You say
you want a revolution?
There
were three main constituents in the ’60s counterculture: first and most
prominent, its Dionysian ecstasy-cult aspect, typified by Woodstock and
the Acid Tests and ultimately following a
predictable path as the Merry Prankster LSD-and-rock-’n’-roll weekends of the
’60s followed the boomers right up the socioeconomic spectrum and the corporate
ladder to become the moneyed Hollywood cocaine orgies of the ’70s; second, its
totalitarian nihilism, typified by the Manson Family’s homicidal spectaculars,
the cult-adjacent apocalyptic element that eventually left its idyllic retreats
in Big Sur and the communes to return to the cities in the ’70s in the form of
the urban antihero ethos personified by Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle
and his real-world inspirations, of whom Arthur Bremer, mentioned above, was
one.
The
first two tendencies evolved and mutated and in some ways merged in the ’80s:
The cocaine stayed, the orgies were mostly reduced to soft polygamy, the world
of Taxi Driver became the world of American Psycho,
criminal anti-heroes were supplanted by cop anti-heroes (Dirty Harry, Charles
Bronson playing the same character both in the later Death Wish movies
and in non-Death Wish movies), while the boomers, growing more
affluent by the year and having got a lot of their ’60s rebelliousness out of
their systems by finally vanquishing the demon Richard Nixon in spite of the
1972 landslide reelection that had so cheered Bremer, settled into various
degrees of relative conservatism, the political bookends of the era being
Ronald Reagan, with his hardened and Hollywood-ized version of Buckleyite
conservatism, and Bill Clinton, with his “New Democrat” corporate
progressivism.
What
remained of the counterculture was simply the culture, having
outlived so much of that to which it was counter.
The
third major constituent of the ’60s counterculture was its serious left-wing
political element, which was at times highly disciplined Leninism, at other
times ecstatic Maoism, and at still other times leaned into Manson-style
nihilism—all three tendencies can be seen at various stages of the career of
the Weather Underground, whose leading lights eventually were absorbed into
respectable academia and mainstream Democratic politics, as was that tendency
of the ’60s counterculture as a whole. The hard left either merged entirely
with the institutions it was marching through, producing 10,000 miserable deans
of students and human-resources directors, or else disappeared up its own nose,
vanishing into its own jargony intellectual refinement. That produced a lot of
radicalized comparative-lit grad students in the ’80s and ’90s. But
deconstruction and all that stuff was hard work, and graduate school meant
something like a vow of poverty, and so the voguish intellectual pursuits of
Foucault and Derrida eventually were supplanted by the less-demanding pseudointellectual
pursuits of identity politics, the ever-mutating and ever-expanding world of 2SLGBTQIA+, “white privilege,” and the like,
which promised easier and more lucrative career paths to college-educated white
progressives.
The
counterculture was the great toxic product of the ’60s. Its triumph ultimately
was more significant than other ’60s products such as the anti-war movement
(the United States ultimately prevailed over the Soviet empire, no thanks to
the flower children) or the period’s main domestic national-policy developments
(if we consider that LBJ-era Democrats were parasites on the civil rights
movement rather than champions of it), because it swallowed so much of American
society and so many of our institutions, from the mainline Protestant churches
to the universities to the professional associations. In our time, the great
press for radical social transformation comes not from the gutters or the
margins or a few addled crazies out in Big Sur or filthy Catskills communes but
from the very centers of power and from the commanding heights: the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, the Ivy League, the most powerful corporations, mainstream institutions from the
pulpits and the editorial pages.
That
being so, it is natural—inevitable—that rightists who are opposed to radical
social transformation of the sort currently on offer from elite institutions
and centers of power should find themselves at odds with those institutions and
centers of power. I write rightists rather than conservatives because
the people I mean here are not conservative—they have internalized, embraced,
or cravenly aped the main elements of the ’60s counterculture, from its
ecstatic primal-scream crowd scenes to its murderous nihilism to its political
authoritarianism. Steve Bannon was not kidding when he described himself as a
“Leninist.”
These
rightists do not oppose radical social transformation as such, and they do not
oppose its imposition by a combination of state, corporate, and civic power;
they oppose only the radical social transformation that their cultural rivals
on the left—in the centers of elite power—would impose with the considerable
social, legal, and economic resources at their disposal. The right is
politically incoherent in part because its regnant authoritarian tendency is at
odds with its historical libertarianism and in part because it is rent by
competing authoritarian visions: the nonsensical “integralism” of right-wing
Catholics who fantasize about having real political power; the parallel tendency
among certain Reformed and Evangelical sects; the jackboot nationalism of the
various new paramilitary expressions of the current right-wing ethos; the
unserious grab-bag populist opportunism of Fox News and talk radio and of
institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, which today is Fox News with a
master’s degree; the New Deal-adjacent rightist progressivism of the born-again
right-wing believers in central planning and industrial policy and their
romantic neo-agrarian brethren; those physical-culture enthusiasts on the right
who have come to believe, with their German antecedents, that authentic
nationalism is built in the weightroom; and, of course, the vast galaxy of
professional and semi-professional trolls, con-trepreneurs grown adept at
relieving terrified old white people of their
Social Security checks, and would-be media personalities whose only interest in ideas are as
tools for making money and “owning the libs.”
The
stage for a right-wing revival of the counterculture having been set, who
should wander into the scene but Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenging Joe Biden
for the 2024 Democratic nomination and – weirdly enough – capturing hearts and
minds on the right while he is at it?
***
Consider
this strange encomium to Kennedy and his new book, The Real Anthony
Fauci, in National Review, the conservative magazine
founded by William F. Buckley Jr. where I spent 15 very productive years as an
editor and writer. It is written by Matthew Scully, who once was the magazine’s
literary editor and who has had a notable, though not altogether happy, career
as a speechwriter: He wrote Sarah Palin’s 2008 acceptance speech and did so
before he knew who the vice-presidential nominee was going to be or that he was
writing for a woman; another woman he wrote a convention speech for was Melania
Trump, who did not like his draft and had it reworked, in the process
introducing the much-ridiculed plagiarism from Michelle Obama. Scully is known
to many conservatives as an occasionally cranky animal-welfare advocate (he at
least rejects the idea of “animal rights”) and author of Dominion: The
Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. As far as I
know, he has only two legs, but he manages to have a lot of feet in a lot of
camps, some of them wondrously non-adjacent.
He has
found a hero in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is, among many other things, an
anti-vaccine conspiracy crank, a Kennedy-assassination-conspiracy crank
(the other one: “Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill my father”) and a thoroughgoing authoritarian
who has called for the imprisonment of those with views on climate change at
odds with his own—on charges of ranging from “reckless endangerment” to
“treason” or as “war criminals”—along with the legal abolition of conservative and
libertarian-leaning organizations ranging from the American Enterprise
Institute to the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. (He also has
called for the forcible dissolution of the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
where I work as a writer covering the climate movement and other subjects.) The
editor of National Review magazine, Ramesh Ponnuru, is an AEI
fellow, as is writer Michael Brendan Dougherty, and, presumably, the magazine’s
historically skeptical line on climate change would be enough to get the entire
editorial board dragged off to the Hague along with Charles Koch and whomever
else. That being the case, RFK Jr. seems like something less than a natural fit
for the National Review set.
Please
do not think that I am here engaged in the tedious business of pretending that
anything published in National Review or the New York
Times or The Dispatch necessarily expresses the
sensibility of the publication as a whole—much of my own work for NR over
the years was way outside of the editorial consensus or the magazine’s corporate
line, and the magazine traditionally has sought a genuine diversity of opinion
in a way that many other publications only pretend to do. What I mean to
highlight here is the very great distance between what conservatism has been
and what conservatism—or the rightist movement that still calls itself
“conservatism” for marketing purposes—is.
Scully’s
diagnosis of Kennedy’s situation within the Democratic Party and the
progressive movement is that he would remain in good standing “if only he
didn’t have so much integrity.” That isn’t true. But there is much in Scully’s
encomium to Kennedy that isn’t quite right—or quite honest. He argues that
Kennedy is being marginalized for opinions that ought to be commonsensical or
at least non-controversial. Scully:
Among his many provocations: Kennedy claims that pandemic lockdowns were
calamitous for working people and for children; that citizens should choose for
themselves whether to receive vaccines; that corporate influences on government
are pervasive and corrupting; and that censorship contrived by the state is
intolerable. Worse even than these outrages, during the pandemic this man
called into question the conduct and veracity of Anthony Fauci. And this
offense — challenging Doctor Fauci! — is still regarded as the most shameful
assault on science since the persecution of Galileo.
Scully
insists that it is for these reasons that Kennedy is being targeted by that
hammer of the establishment, the Washington Post.
Scully
is correct that these should be non-controversial opinions. In fact, they are
non-controversial opinions, or at least opinions that the Washington
Post is happy to see debated in its pages, as are many other
mainstream organs. Is Kennedy being punished because he opposes vaccine
mandates, believing that “citizens should choose for themselves whether to
receive vaccines”? No, he isn’t. Leana Wen has argued against vaccine
requirements in the Post, on more than one occasion, as have others. The Washington
Post has reported on COVID-shutdown learning losses, its editorial board considered the possible virtues of
the Swedish model,
it has published very pointed criticism of Fauci’s “credibility gap,” etc. These supposedly verboten ideas
are commonplace in the pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times and other mainstream
newspapers. Nobody is being punished for criticizing vaccine mandates,
lamenting the educational and economic effects of COVID shutdowns, or for
attempting to de-canonize Anthony Fauci. Kennedy’s problem is that he is
intellectually dishonest.
Scully’s
problem is that he is willing to go along with that.
Kennedy
is a marginal figure in part because he is a hysteric, but in greater part
because he traffics in specific claims that—and this part still matters!—are
not true. For example, Kennedy has long been a champion of the conspiracy
theory that vaccines cause autism. There isn’t much evidence for that claim.
There was a famous 1998 study suggesting a link between vaccines and autism;
the study later was retracted and the author’s medical license revoked because he
had falsified data.
Kennedy’s own attempts at journalism on the subject have fared no better: Salon and Rolling
Stone both retracted his shoddy work, which was filled with factual
and analytical errors, based on manipulated and manufactured evidence
characterized by “flaws and even fraud tainting the science,” as Salon’s
editor at the time, Joan Walsh, put it, producing claims that were, as she
said, “misleading.” Rolling Stone is, of course, infamous for publishing made-up junk that accords with its
half-educated political sensibility, but Salon is no great
Olympus of journalistic excellence, either—and Kennedy’s work was insufficient
for meeting the exceedingly modest standards of these outlets.
What
Kennedy trades in is salacious insinuation, and so Scully in his National
Review piece does the same, writing:
An industry with annual revenue in the hundreds of billions of dollars
is protected in law from liability for any ill effects of products that are
mandated in law for public use. We’re supposed to be aghast at the suggestion
that sound medical judgment might at times have given way to motives of
self-enrichment at the expense of public health? Many television, print, and
online outlets subsist on pharma-advertising revenue. That cannot possibly
influence coverage? And in a country so heavily reliant on costly
pharmaceuticals, why do we find so much persistent sickness, more than in
European nations and even among children? I leave it all for others to argue,
except to observe that such questions are plainly valid and necessary. The most
scandalous feature of all here is the absolute prohibition on them. A less
timid, herdlike generation of journalists would realize that books like
Kennedy’s are exactly the kind of work that they themselves ought to be doing.
It is
entirely plausible that a media outlet might back off of
aggressive coverage of a pharmaceutical company or another advertiser. But
plausibility is not fact. Does Scully have an example of this he would like to
share? A name he would like to name? Scully is, in theory, a journalist—does he
have some journalism to contribute here? Of course not. The rightist
counterculture doesn’t do journalism—it only does media criticism. And even in
that it is not particularly scrupulous with the facts: In spite of Scully’s
claim above, it is not the case that pharmaceutical companies are “protected in
law for liability for any ill effects of products that are mandated in law for
public use.” They have some protections in some situations, but this is far
from categorical or absolute. There are, in fact, two different federal
measures dealing with such liability, with COVID vaccines being covered under
the narrow emergency “countermeasures” program while ordinary vaccines, such as
the tetanus vaccine are covered under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation
Program, which exists because of the utterly uncontroversial fact that vaccines
sometimes cause injuries, for instance, in the form of allergic reactions. No
one in any official capacity denies that this is the case; what is
denied—because it is untrue—is the nonsense put forward by figures such as
Kennedy. One could invent any number of utterly discrediting explanations of
this sloppy and misleading work that would meet Scully’s plausibility standard,
if one were so inclined.
(One
would think that National Review would be especially sensitive
to this, given that a handful of rightist-counterculture propagandists have
made it their lifework to discredit it, charging that National Review is
bought off because the magazine has … advertisers! … and that it is attached to
a nonprofit that has … donors! Angels and ministers of grace, defend us.)
There
are plenty of people out there who have trenchant criticisms to make of COVID
policy (National Review has published some of the best ones), who
have substantive accounts of corruption in media and in academic life, who have
interesting and useful insights into institutional capture and institutional
distortion (Yuval Levin being the most important of these), etc. Why settle on
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a champion? Why do so many otherwise intelligent and
thoughtful people end up ensorcelled by charlatans, grifters, and liars: Robert
F. Kennedy, Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, etc.?
The
answer to that mystery is that people are attracted to such figures not in
spite of their dishonesty but because of it—people choose charlatans, grifters,
and liars because they are charlatans, grifters, and liars.
***
Again,
past is prologue: The ’60s counterculture was positively infested with risible
and pathetic guru-messiah figures, Charles Manson being the most important of
them. But there were many others, generally more anodyne. “I have seldom read
any book while feeling such respect for its author,” Scully writes of Kennedy,
and if that seems naïve to you, consider that no less a figure than Buckminster
Fuller was bowled over by mystical grifter and Rolls Royce enthusiast Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi, saying: “You could not meet with Maharishi without recognizing
instantly his integrity.” (Please do not confuse the Maharishi with the Bhagwan
Shree Rajneesh, that era’s other notorious quasi-Vedantic, long-haired,
luxuriously bearded Rolls Royce enthusiast.) Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta
Prabhupada brought kirtan chanting to the United States while
dabbling in Nazi stuff (“They were financing against Germany. Otherwise
[Hitler] had no enmity with the Jews”), and, seeing how well the bona-fide
Indians were doing, enterprising Americans began taking Hindu names and getting
into the guru racket: Joyce Green of Brooklyn became the cult leader Ma Jaya
Sati Bhagavati, Timothy Leary associate Richard Alpert became Ram Dass, who had
a very simple slogan—“Be Here Now”—and a rather more complicated sex life. It is not very difficult to locate
in the rightist counterculture similar figures whose cultural valences are Evangelical
(or consensus-Protestant) rather than hippie-Hindu: Joel Osteen, Gwen Shamblin
Lara, Paula White, Jordan Peterson, etc. My friend Glenn Beck has a little bit
of the cult leader about him, though so far he has shown just enough horsepucky
resistance to forgo becoming one.
Venerable
right-wing institutions such as the Washington Times have
direct cult connections (the Times was founded by the Moonies,
who still control it), while many parts of the right have turned partly away
from politics and toward such traditional cult enthusiasms as physical culture,
exotic diets, and sexual hedonism; these enthusiasms, in turn, are inescapably
wrapped up in quackery, from “neuro-linguistic programming” (a favorite of
Russell Brand, another beneficiary of strange new respect from the right) to
the pop evolutionary-psychology of pickup-artist seminars to, of course, the
anti-vaccine crankery. Turn on any rightist talk-radio program and you will
hear almost as much talk about vaccines as you do about “woke”-ism, and more
than you will hear about, say, Joe Biden’s tax ideas. It is impossible to miss
the increasingly cultic character of a movement that once thought of itself as
being mainly about low taxes, reduced regulation, and beating back the
Russians. (Russians: Another case of strange new respect!) If you had asked a
conservative in the 1980s what would define conservatism in the early 21st century,
his answer would not have been AI-generated homoerotic Donald Trump pin-up
pictures. But the
journey from right-wing misogyny to right-wing homoeroticism has never been a particularly long one.
The
transformation of the right from political movement to counterculture would
have been difficult to imagine because the old conservatism was, in a
word, conservative. It did contain within it the seed of today’s
anti-institutionalism and anti-establishment libertarianism, as in Buckley’s
famous formulation:
I will not cede more power to the state. I will not willingly cede more
power to anyone, not to the state, not to General Motors, not to the CIO. I
will hoard my power like a miser, resisting every effort to drain it away from
me. I will then use my power, as I see fit.
But
Buckley’s anti-establishment mode was a means toward conservative ends rather
than revolutionary ends, ends defined and limited by considerations generally
held in contempt by the rightist counterculture. Buckley’s conservatism was
republican and mildly anti-democratic but populist when convenient, rooted in
tradition but also transcendent, as in the sentences that immediately follow
the ones above:
I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient
to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths
arrived at yesterday at the voting booth. That is a program of sorts, is it
not?
Indeed,
it is a program of sorts.
But whose program?
***
Like the
’60s counterculture that birthed it, today’s rightist counterculture parts with
the likes of William F. Buckley Jr., T.S. Eliot, and Russell Kirk on one issue
above all: hierarchy. The old right assumed the validity of
hierarchy even as conservatives assumed that their natural place would be at
the top of it. The new right (and, as Jonah Goldberg notes, this is the fifth
or sixth “new right”) rejects hierarchy, because its members feel that they are
at the bottom of the hierarchy or trending in that direction in a world ruled
by Davos Man, and because, in consequence, its
aims are revolutionary and radical and, as such, incompatible with the organic
life of society. Kirk thought enough of the relationship between hierarchy and
natural social life to list it as his fifth conservative principle:
[Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of
long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from
the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For
the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive
orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of
inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment
and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must
lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able
leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed,
presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of
inequality.
Just as
the ’60s counterculture sought to obliterate the difference between high art
and popular entertainment and to subjugate all expert distinction, from that of
the physician to that of the art critic, to the judgment of “the People,” so
does today’s rightist counterculture take as its main enemy so-called elites
and, in particular, experts in fields that require a high degree of specialized
technical expertise. Hence the hatred of Anthony Fauci above all other
available hate-totems.
Fauci
is, of course, an insufferable, sanctimonious, self-aggrandizing bureaucrat—but
it is his insufferability, his sanctimoniousness, and his self-aggrandizing
that makes him more like a Fox News host or a talk-radio
mouthhole than any other aspect of his character. The partisans of Donald Trump
can hardly say that they reject the insufferable, the sanctimonious, or the
self-aggrandizing. What distinguishes Fauci from a Sean Hannity or a Dan
Bongino isn’t his unappealing affect—which is their affect, too—but his relatively
high level of education and his professional accomplishments. Belittling that
kind of education and the institutions that provide it is one of the main
activities of such figures as Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Tucker Carlson
(La Jolla Country Day School, St. George’s School, Trinity College), and Lou
Dobbs (Harvard), while National Review’s in-house college-hater,
George Leef, holds a law degree from Duke.
Hierarchy
is on the outs: The New Criterion, a magazine where conservatives
used to go to read about the ongoing relevance of Clem Greenberg or the New
Criticism, today publishes the silliest and most disreputable kind of beer-hall
rants alongside Jay Nordlinger’s excellent classical-music criticism. T.S.
Eliot chose the name of that journal’s spiritual successor, The
Criterion, for a reason: He took the view that, “Qua work of
art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we
can only criticize it according to standards,” and that it was the job of the
critic to apply and illuminate these standards in an inevitably hierarchical
way. But what did T.S. Eliot know? After abandoning America for England—where
he sometimes wrote poems in French!—the effete old snob published
proto-feminists such as Virginia Woolf, impenitent elitists such as W. B.
Yeats, and even a “groomer” in the person of E.M. Forster. We can be sure that such
abominables would be made to feel entirely unwelcome at Mar-a-Lago today.
And that
is the essential countercultural question: What gives a snoot like Eliot—or
anybody else—the right to say what the standards are going to be? In a world of
populist billionaires, why consult a poet, of all irrelevant
things?
Poetry,
Eliot argued, “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know
what it means to want to escape from these things.” A parallel observation from
Michael Oakeshott finds modern individualism something that only a certain kind
of person is able to “enjoy as an opportunity rather than suffer as a burden.”
Many writers about culture and politics over the years have assumed that one
joins a mass movement, participates in a march or a riot, or gives oneself over
to the Dionysian ecstasy of a psychedelic rock show—or a political rally—in
order to escape the loneliness of individualism and the
responsibilities of individualism.
“The
responsibilities and uncertainties of an autonomous existence weigh and prey
upon him,” Eric Hoffer writes in The True Believer. “He longs
for certitude, camaraderie, freedom from individual responsibility, and a
vision of something altogether different from the competitive free society
around him—and he finds all this in the brotherhood and the revivalist
atmosphere of a rising movement.” But I wonder if it isn’t Eliot who has it
more correct here: that the true believer joins the counterculture not to escape his
personality to acquire one? An enemies’ list is not a terrific basis for a
life, but it isn’t nothing. From that point of view, we might understand why
the ecstasy of the mass event (Woodstock, Trump rallies, January 6) goes
hand-in-hand with nihilism: shame. The failed individual, Oakeshott argued, was
forced to live with “his resentment of the moral superiority of individuality,”
that resentment being the only truly shameful aspect of his
otherwise unremarkable character.
That
kind of resentment is expressed in the countercultural urge to tear down, to destroy, to level, to lower, to ridicule, to profane. The January 6 rioters who left feces in the
Capitol halls are the spiritual brethren of Andres Serrano, though without
their sights set quite so high: Serrano’s “Piss Christ” was sacrilege,
while the January 6 cretins produced only vandalism as the
actual coup d’état was being attempted by men in suits
elsewhere.
***
The
assault on a particular set of elites or institutions very quickly becomes an
assault on elites and institutions per se, on the principle of
hierarchy and on the principle of organization toward ends beyond the immediate
gratification of We the People. The assault on some particular aspect
of higher education becomes an assault on higher education as a whole, or on
education as a whole. Criticism of the captains of high culture becomes
abandonment of high culture. Romantics have always believed that man is closer
to perfection in his natural state than when he has been taught algebra and
made to memorize a few lines of Shakespeare or, Heaven forbid, taught a little
bit of Latin or even Greek. Who needs Harvard-educated doctors when there is
hydroxychloroquine and Ruff Greens and Dinovite and Balance of Nature? And who
really needs J.S. Bach in a world in which “Heart Like a Truck” exists? Who
would study Talleyrand when there is Twitter?
The
rightists feel themselves shut out from the centers of power and from the
commanding heights of culture—which, of course, they are, partly through their
own lowmindedness and incompetence, partly through the bigotry and chauvinism
of the people who run such institutions as the New York Times,
Harvard, and Facebook. This is not the first time we have heard this tale told:
from Catiline to the French Revolution, the bitter and resentful people on the
outside looking in have sought to overturn the existing order in the hopes of
creating a new one that would welcome them inside, where they imagine warmth
and comfort await them. (The better kind of outsider has always been the one on
the outside looking out, willing to forgo comfort when necessary.)
Sometimes, these revolutionists are the poor and the miserable, but often
enough they are from the middle classes and from downwardly mobile well-to-do
families, who believe that they have a basic moral claim on something that has,
for some explicable reason, evaded their grasp. Tucker Swanson
McNear Carlson did not rise from the lumpenproletariat—what
could be more comfortably American than a well-scrubbed right-wing demagogue
succored by the splendid TV dinner fortune?
When
Flower Power climaxed in the Tate-LaBianca murders, a great many
sentimentalists asked: “How could this happen?” The better question would have
been: How couldn’t it? When chaos is your program, chaos is what you get—and
chaos is a package deal: You don’t get John Lennon without Mark David Chapman,
Ram Dass without David Koresh, no Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada without
Jordan Peterson, no Bill Ayers without Timothy McVeigh. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is from the same category of things as Alex Jones and Lyndon LaRouche, who are
the silly versions of the type, as Kennedy is. But the ignorant and excitable
counterculture always has its more serious ideological backing: It is less easy
to laugh at Alfred Rosenberg or Mikhail Suslov, respectively prominent
ideologists of German National Socialism and Soviet Communism. Suslov, at
least, would have understood that conservatism has always been about ordinary,
bourgeois things: property, process, order, decency, tradition. Revolution has
no time for any of that.
The
problem for conservative institutions in 2023 is that there isn’t much juice
in conservatism—all the action is in revolutionism and the rightist
counterculture. For certain kinds of institutions, that counterculture has to
be coddled, at least for the moment, in return for access to money and power.
The big donors mostly do not want buttoned-down conservatism: They demand Kulturkampf;
in the political realm, Mitt Romney is a minor figure in a Republican Party
dominated by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene. It is possible to try to keep
a foot on both camps: open to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his crankery, and open
to criticism of such idiocy. There is a place for point-counterpoint. But I
wonder if that is really good enough. I do not believe that Ronald Reagan
launched his career with a speech titled “A Time for Not Quite Choosing.”
In 2016,
I argued that conservatives had to choose whether theirs was going to be a
movement of cranks and quacks and conspiracy-peddlers or a movement of
meaningful conservatism. They made their choice, and I suppose they
are learning to live with it—standing athwart history, barking at the moon with
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all the filth, waste, and imbecility for which he
stands. Maybe they will choose to be something else, someday. Maybe not. The
’60s counterculture did not choose to reform itself—it was simply absorbed into
the body politic, like a virus, hijacking the healthy organic processes of
infected cells and organs.
Economics
for English Majors
Regime, as I have written before, is a
funny word: It is a variant of regimen, and it doesn’t necessarily
mean something wicked or scary—you can have a strict exercise regime, a liberal
tax regime, etc.—but, in politics, especially in U.S. politics, regime is
used as though it means bad, generally authoritarian government.
From
Robert Higgs (author of Crisis and Leviathan and much else) we
get the term regime uncertainty, which does not refer to a wobbly
state but to a form of economic risk in which property owners fear that their
property rights are insecure, that there will be some change in the underlying
legal or constitutional regime that will alter their property rights in some
unwelcome way.
I’ll let
Higgs explain:
In a 1997 article in the Independent Review (“Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression
Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”) I argued that a major reason
for the incomplete recovery of private investment during the latter half of the
1930s was “regime uncertainty.” By this, I mean a pervasive lack of confidence
among investors in their ability to foresee the extent to which future
government actions will alter their private-property rights. In the original
article and in many follow-up articles, I documented that between 1935 and
1940, many investors feared that the government might transform the very nature
of the existing economic order, replacing the primarily market-oriented economy
with fascism, socialism, or some other government-controlled arrangement in
which private-property rights would be greatly curtailed, if they survived at
all. Given such fears, many investors regarded new investment projects as too
risky to justify their current costs.
… Over the years, some economists have urged me to forsake the term
“regime uncertainty” and to use instead an expression such as policy
uncertainty, rule uncertainty, or regime worsening. I have rejected these
suggestions because the idea I seek to convey encompasses more than simply
policies or rules. Moreover, regime uncertainty does not necessarily signify
only apprehension about potential worsening as a central tendency.
Regime uncertainty pertains to more than the government’s laws,
regulations, and administrative decisions. For one thing, as the saying goes,
“personnel is policy.” Two administrations may administer or enforce identical
statutes and regulations quite differently. A business-hostile administration
such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s or Barack Obama’s will provoke more
apprehension among investors than a business-friendlier administration such as
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s or Ronald Reagan’s, even if the underlying “rules of the
game” are identical on paper. Similar differences between judiciaries create
uncertainties about how the courts will rule on contested laws and government
actions.
One of
the many reasons that Ron DeSantis’ attack on Walt Disney has been so wrongheaded
and destructive is that it introduces a new source of regime
uncertainty into our economy. Businesses’ ability to make long-term
plans and to deploy their own capital are limited and mediated in all sorts of
ways by government. To take one example, planning and zoning laws limit what a
company can do with real estate that it owns, from what kind of building can be
built on a particular site to what kind of activity is permitted at that
location. There isn’t anything necessarily wrong with that, though the example
of Houston, which thrives in spite of its general lack of meaningful zoning
laws, does suggest that many cities use too heavy a hand in such matters. But
ordinary laws and administrative powers can be used in tyrannical ways: If the
powers that be in New York decide that they don’t like something the New
York Times has printed and reinterpret the local zoning rules in
Queens to shut down the Times’ printing press there, everybody
would see that for what it would be: censorship by other means. That doesn’t
mean that zoning laws are unjust—it means that they can be abused, like any
law.
The
arrangement that the Walt Disney Company has long enjoyed with the Reedy Creek
Improvement District in Florida may or may not be good policy. If the state of
Florida decided that it wanted to revisit the improvement-district concept and
amend the relevant laws, that would not necessarily be wrong or unwise. But
what Gov. DeSantis has done is to use his power over Reedy Creek to punish
Disney for political speech that he does not like. I do not much care for
Disney’s cultural politics, but DeSantis’ use of state powers to sanction a
private firm for political speech is a serious abuse of power.
It is
also a precedent.
Disney
is using its economic power to fight back. As DeSantis prepares to announce his
presidential bid, Disney has canceled a $1 billion office-park project in
Orlando, taking some 2,000 six-figure jobs off the table in the process. But
while Disney may be able to secure its own long-term interests, other American
businesses do not have that kind of clout. And if they have to worry about
having the legal arrangements upon which they have built their businesses
yanked out from under them every time a politician has a fit of pique, that is
going to impose real costs on the economy. It will, over time, fundamentally
change our economy in ways that will make it more corporatist, more
cartelized—a more cronyistic kind of capitalism in general.
I could
stand to hear a good deal less from corporate social-justice activists. But
I’ll take private-sector jackassery all day over government using economic
power to try to manage political speech. There are a lot of good things about
DeSantis’ administration in Florida, but this matter should be a source of serious
reservations for anybody who cares about genuine economic liberty.
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