In fact, the American Right is brainy and certainly enormous, considering that the majority of citizens identify with conservative principles. If conservatism fails then America fails. Period.
Steven Hayward of The Washington Post thinks conservatism has an intellectual problem:
Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.
That’s a lot of famous names to be mentioned! Of course, nobody denies the vast influence and foundation laid by great conservatives Buckley and Kristol. After all, William F. Buckley, Jr.’s many books, columns, and founding of National Review continue to drive the conservative movement and probably maintain to be required reading for anyone applying a job at a conservative or libertarian think tank. And Irving Kristol, the grandfather of neoconservatism, shaped the public policies of the latter 20th century, and gained much profile during the George W. Bush years.
But what about Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter, two of the most followed and sharp-tongued conservative personalities? There are others, of course, the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michelle Malkin, and Laura Ingraham, all of them darlings of conservative media. Have these people contributed nothing intellectual to the conservative movement?
The best-selling conservative books these days tend to be red-meat titles such as Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption,” Glenn Beck’s new “Arguing with Idiots” and all of Ann Coulter’s well-calculated provocations that the left falls for like Pavlov’s dogs. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these books. Politics is not conducted by Socratic seminar, and Henry Adams’s dictum that politics is the systematic organization of hatreds should remind us that partisan passions are an essential and necessary function of democratic life. The right has always produced, and always will produce, potboilers.
Conspicuously missing, however, are the intellectual works. The bestseller list used to be crowded with the likes of Friedman’s “Free to Choose,” George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty,” Paul Johnson’s “Modern Times,” Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground” and “The Bell Curve,” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man.” There are still conservative intellectuals attempting to produce important work, but some publishers have been cutting back on serious conservative titles because they don’t sell. (I have my own entry in the list: a two-volume political history titled “The Age of Reagan.” But I never expected the books to sell well; at 750 pages each, you can hurt yourself picking them up.)
On the contrary. Just as books, magazine, and newspapers were the prominent method of dissimilating ideas and philosophies pre-1990, today’s audience prefers information delivered on a computer screen or mobile phone. Some people don’t even have a television or landline anymore, but they will have at least one computer attached to the Web. The new breed of what Hayward calls “populist” conservative (and liberal, for that matter) personality comprise of folks who’re tech savvy, quick thinkers, and concise. And perhaps photogenic, too, as they often appear on TV shows or Internet videos.
And we should be glad that the content these conservative celebrities provide can be consumed through multiple channels: TV shows, email newsletters, blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, the-next-big-thing. Of course, as The New Ledger‘s Ben Domenech argues:
Washington is full of organizations on the Right that raise buckets of money from conservative donors because they repeatedly say they are training, enabling, and encouraging the creation of more activists online and more investigative journalists. They send out thousands of letters to little old ladies across the country making these claims. Yet when you take a closer look at most of these organizations, you’ll find they spend most of their time claiming credit for things going on at the grassroots level that they in reality had nothing to do with — and in some cases, wouldn’t know how to do even if they tried. Donors say that investigative journalism and online activism training is what they want to support? Very well, they say, let’s repackage something we wanted to do already around that idea, even if it’s not our area of expertise — a new box for an old shoe.
Though some of them are quite well-meaning, the people at these organizations are not just not part of the solution — they are a part of the problem. They are assisted by wallet grabbers for hire, people who will lie on their behalf, rewrite any proposal to make their organization eligible for any grant on any subject, credit-claim to donor after donor (who usually doesn’t know any better) to continue to fund their inefficient, pointless, and irrelevant work. The organizations stay alive as the walking-dead they are, committing annual highway robbery of their ideological friends at their banquets.
These populist conservatives serve us via multichannel media outlets, but that also increases their visibility to attract money as opposed to the “little guys” — you know, the amateur blogger with a full-time job and raising a family, who only started blogging so he (or she) could vent about the P.C. school classes and ever expanding government. Is that really a problem?
As any pro-market conservative would tell you, the free market offers equal opportunity to all. The same applies to the Rightosphere. Why should Web surfers pay more attention to your content when you haven’t formal education and experience in journalism, TV show production, political science, or writing? Obviously for such an amateur, he (or she) would have to work much harder to rise to the top. Want to make money blogging? Better quit the day job and start living on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
I don’t mind the way the money is flowing among the Rightosphere. The think tanks, speakers, researchers, etc. deserve their share of the big money for their proportionally larger influence. What they do, say, and write also becomes food for thought among the second tier bloggers and pundits in the Rightosphere anyway, many of whom makes a reasonable income from their online ventures. Just like the free market, there are the Bentleys then the Mercedez then the Toyotas then the Kias — everybody can make a profit, but not everybody can enjoy the same brand recognition.
Conservatism hasn’t changed and nor has the conservatives. It’s the world that’s changed around us. The technological advancements, the shorter attention spans, the viral videos attacking liberalism. Undoubtedly we have much to thank the great predecessors of conservatism for their work in laying the cornerstones, and with those cornerstones as sturdy foundation we — amateurs and professionals, populists and intellectuals alike — can do our part in fighting the Good Fight. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing it for money or as a hobby, just remember to study the past, absorb the present, and stay passionate about a better future.
