For more than half-a-century, American "conservatism" has been a ménage à trois of Christian traditionalists, libertarian accelerationists, and pragmatists exiled from the coalition of the Left because these pragmatists cared most about preserving and extending American hegemony. The most "conservative" party in this arrangement has never actually "worn the pants" in the relationship.
Arguably, there really isn't much of a coherent tradition of conservativism in America. We just continue to misleadingly use political terms. This somewhat absent political tendency is consistent with the history of a multi-ethnic country (even when mostly English there were four distinct cultural groups) being recently founded in revolution. Many in the previously described coalition harken back to Burke (a Whig) as an attempt to reconcile the natural tension among the coalition and reconstruct an intellectual tradition. However, these attempts are mostly just laying claim to a specifically constrained liberal vision.
American conservatism has always been distinct from European conservatism for many of the essential reasons you outlined. We’ve gone through 6 party systems since the Constitution was ratified, and each one has produced 2 major parties that are an amalgamation of various regional, economic, and ethnic interests. Any ideological coherence is retconned after the fact.
It’s clear that we’re in the process of establishing the 7th party system, and it looks like adolescent techno-libertarianism will be one of the pillars of 21st Century “conservatism”. If the Republicans can manage not to completely alienate the working class that took a shot with Trump this cycle, hopefully some old fashioned common sense can rein in the worst impulses of the Silicon Valley transhumanist billionaires.
Either way, the only thing a real conservative should feel about it all is a sense of bemused melancholy.
"...whatever the age of its individual members, there can be no question but that we are now living under the dominion of a pack of giddy whelps, most of whom were born yesterday..."
No better illustration than the antics of 'Lil X' in the Oval Office the other day, allegedly telling prez to 'shush your mouth... you're not the president' (it's all quite subjective if he was really saying that, as people hear what they want to hear -or say- but in any event the antics were an embarrassment). Musk's attempt at discipline was to put the boy on his shoulders, only to get a 'noogie' from his four-year-old. At that point I think everyone -POTUS most of all, judging from the look on his face- would've liked to have seen Musk put Lil X over his knee to get a full-throated spanking, but no... it was just too cute. As you say, the little runts are the sovereigns now.
I go out on the balcony to get away from the noise for a moment. It’s the brights, vapes and cigs, abusing the open night air with equivalent of intellectual pickle ball.
The narrator confesses a poor track record in prediction, proceeds nonetheless to divine the future like coughing up tea leaves. Effortless. Certainly elegant. Hand waved, a trend discerned — the confidence of a ChatGPT.
What LARPs as detachment from the cultural absurdities examined, really, is thirst. To define oneself only against, never toward, is not to sail the waters but to drift closer to the source of that siren song. This species of baroque situational assessment is just another identity game for souls lost on the internet.
As I noted elsewhere, in a link, I have been making notes on the issues and ideas herein expressed for what would have been my next Substack screed. Having read this essay, I realize I have little to add, other than an acknowledgment of responsibility for much of this, laid on the shoulders of my generation, which dumped the toxically oxymoronic "Youth Culture" into the Petri dish that has now disgorged the comically infantilized world in which we find ourselves.
I pollarded our oak tree yesterday. Magnificent trees and primeval forests became subjects for art during industrialization, when the trees could be easily made into boards. I had a romance for nature but I think it ends in very little. Before pollarding and coppice farming there were browsing animals that ate all the trees. The human necessity for nature to be beautiful or even to be called nature is the way out.
What a wonderful essay. Your reference to “decline” at one point woke me to the already rumbling sense that your (lol) positionality has traces of that soon to be remembered conservative who himself had little to no regard for official conservatives - and called himself a Prussian Socialist.
Hey thanks, Simon, that’s great to hear from you. I’ll be enjoying your compliment as I continue to try to figure out who this Prussian Socialist might be!
I got about 1/2 way through this before I stopped looking, with the writer, for the lost point of the article. I think I supposed that I should feel ashamed to be commenting on an article that I couldn’t continue reading, but then I realized that the point of the article was that points are pointless, and so, having found what was lost, I declared openly (to myself originally and of course, now, in the comment section) that I had found what was lost, and, with that I stopped looking. Because, as you know, it’s always the last place you look…
'If a Democrat miraculously comes into power the next time around, you can be sure this will be a decidedly new-model Democrat, who sits cross-legged and barefoot on the Oval Office couch, live-hologramming her emotional-support pig as it circles around her and shits.'
Misogynist much? Caricatures are the best you can do?
This is what counts as principled, intellectual conservatism? (My apologies, I forgot, with conservatives we always have to grade on a steep curve.) You marinate in bigotry, and traffic in shallow stereotypes. (French in the footnotes, so you must be smart, and definitely not a fan of fascism, right?)
'No true conservative could stand the shame and indignity of being affiliated with the Trump 2 regime, and with all that it represents.'
You own everything the fascist regime does, chief, even if it suits your sensibilities to try and distinguish yourself from it, because your casual bigotry betrays just where you feel at home in this big scary woke world (but hoo boy what a slog though unmitigated pretension and verbosity in your attempts to camouflage it).
I'm glad to read about Chateaubriand in this context -- I'd never encountered him, since usually the conservative whom we usually reference for the Revolution is Burke (someone I do wish the current administration would heed rather than its preferred, so-called luminaries). I guess I haven't heard much of the royalists from the Revolutionary to Napoleonic period, though they're clearly the conservatives who best exemplified that doomed conservative spirit.
Any ideas on how the existential melancholy you mention corresponds to the Romantics who bloomed around this same time? I can never tell if they were genuinely disappointed in this world, or if it was only their passing passion. (Side note: I read recently that when Goethe met Napoleon and discussed drama with him, he apparently didn't come away from that encounter disappointed by the Emperor's ideas or intellect.)
Of Fumaroli, I've only ever read Quand l'Europe parlait français. I had not thought of him as a Chateaubriandian, but I can definitely see it now. Thanks!
So, a couple of undergraduates—likely in their late teens or early twenties—challenged you, as undergrads have done throughout the history of higher education. And somehow, that’s just part of the same historical process that led to the world’s richest man and his friends casually dismantling the government? Fascinating.
I’m honestly astonished at the lengths taken to ignore the actual power dynamics at play. But sure—Gamergate was just some harmless internet episode, just a bunch of passionate and naive young people. Nothing to do with misogyny, of course. Because if misogyny were real, how could those students possibly be allowed to ask such ‘woke’ questions?
This is an excellent piece and the first of yours I've read. This line stood out to me: "But the transfer of the activity of surveillance and control from nosy neighbors and 'concerned citizens' to artificial intelligence and ubiquitous security cameras is hardly going to constitute a blow to tyranny."
I recently wrote about this exact thing, framing it along the divide between self-styled populists like Steve Bannon and their techie rivals who are led by Elon Musk. Bannon has already lost, and I don't think he was ever very serious to begin with. But more to the point: it is simply delusional to believe that a man with deep ties to US military and intelligence agencies--a man who is right now constructing the most powerful panopticon in human history--will save us from tyranny. We might miss the old regime because although it was bad, it was incompetent in a way the new overlords might not be.
Nobody does despair like JSR.
For more than half-a-century, American "conservatism" has been a ménage à trois of Christian traditionalists, libertarian accelerationists, and pragmatists exiled from the coalition of the Left because these pragmatists cared most about preserving and extending American hegemony. The most "conservative" party in this arrangement has never actually "worn the pants" in the relationship.
Arguably, there really isn't much of a coherent tradition of conservativism in America. We just continue to misleadingly use political terms. This somewhat absent political tendency is consistent with the history of a multi-ethnic country (even when mostly English there were four distinct cultural groups) being recently founded in revolution. Many in the previously described coalition harken back to Burke (a Whig) as an attempt to reconcile the natural tension among the coalition and reconstruct an intellectual tradition. However, these attempts are mostly just laying claim to a specifically constrained liberal vision.
American conservatism has always been distinct from European conservatism for many of the essential reasons you outlined. We’ve gone through 6 party systems since the Constitution was ratified, and each one has produced 2 major parties that are an amalgamation of various regional, economic, and ethnic interests. Any ideological coherence is retconned after the fact.
It’s clear that we’re in the process of establishing the 7th party system, and it looks like adolescent techno-libertarianism will be one of the pillars of 21st Century “conservatism”. If the Republicans can manage not to completely alienate the working class that took a shot with Trump this cycle, hopefully some old fashioned common sense can rein in the worst impulses of the Silicon Valley transhumanist billionaires.
Either way, the only thing a real conservative should feel about it all is a sense of bemused melancholy.
Thank you. I admire the clarity, relevance, and elegance of this essay.
"...whatever the age of its individual members, there can be no question but that we are now living under the dominion of a pack of giddy whelps, most of whom were born yesterday..."
No better illustration than the antics of 'Lil X' in the Oval Office the other day, allegedly telling prez to 'shush your mouth... you're not the president' (it's all quite subjective if he was really saying that, as people hear what they want to hear -or say- but in any event the antics were an embarrassment). Musk's attempt at discipline was to put the boy on his shoulders, only to get a 'noogie' from his four-year-old. At that point I think everyone -POTUS most of all, judging from the look on his face- would've liked to have seen Musk put Lil X over his knee to get a full-throated spanking, but no... it was just too cute. As you say, the little runts are the sovereigns now.
Le petit Dauphin!
Indeed... Musk, knowing he is ineligible, is priming his son for the office, some 30+ years from now...
I go out on the balcony to get away from the noise for a moment. It’s the brights, vapes and cigs, abusing the open night air with equivalent of intellectual pickle ball.
The narrator confesses a poor track record in prediction, proceeds nonetheless to divine the future like coughing up tea leaves. Effortless. Certainly elegant. Hand waved, a trend discerned — the confidence of a ChatGPT.
What LARPs as detachment from the cultural absurdities examined, really, is thirst. To define oneself only against, never toward, is not to sail the waters but to drift closer to the source of that siren song. This species of baroque situational assessment is just another identity game for souls lost on the internet.
An extraordinary piece.
As I noted elsewhere, in a link, I have been making notes on the issues and ideas herein expressed for what would have been my next Substack screed. Having read this essay, I realize I have little to add, other than an acknowledgment of responsibility for much of this, laid on the shoulders of my generation, which dumped the toxically oxymoronic "Youth Culture" into the Petri dish that has now disgorged the comically infantilized world in which we find ourselves.
I pollarded our oak tree yesterday. Magnificent trees and primeval forests became subjects for art during industrialization, when the trees could be easily made into boards. I had a romance for nature but I think it ends in very little. Before pollarding and coppice farming there were browsing animals that ate all the trees. The human necessity for nature to be beautiful or even to be called nature is the way out.
We use the word "nature" in order to separate ourselves from it, an error.
due to this piece I have to go back to subscribing and actually pay for the privilege. I'm glad that someone else has noticed what I've looked at in miniature from a more technical perspective in writing of nex-gen bureaucratization: there's no going back. https://open.substack.com/pub/tjelliott/p/next-gen-bureaucratization?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=a5da
Hey thanks, that's great to hear -- and thanks for the link too, I'll read it with interest!
What a wonderful essay. Your reference to “decline” at one point woke me to the already rumbling sense that your (lol) positionality has traces of that soon to be remembered conservative who himself had little to no regard for official conservatives - and called himself a Prussian Socialist.
Hey thanks, Simon, that’s great to hear from you. I’ll be enjoying your compliment as I continue to try to figure out who this Prussian Socialist might be!
Great piece.
I got about 1/2 way through this before I stopped looking, with the writer, for the lost point of the article. I think I supposed that I should feel ashamed to be commenting on an article that I couldn’t continue reading, but then I realized that the point of the article was that points are pointless, and so, having found what was lost, I declared openly (to myself originally and of course, now, in the comment section) that I had found what was lost, and, with that I stopped looking. Because, as you know, it’s always the last place you look…
Pretty clever, my friend!
'If a Democrat miraculously comes into power the next time around, you can be sure this will be a decidedly new-model Democrat, who sits cross-legged and barefoot on the Oval Office couch, live-hologramming her emotional-support pig as it circles around her and shits.'
Misogynist much? Caricatures are the best you can do?
This is what counts as principled, intellectual conservatism? (My apologies, I forgot, with conservatives we always have to grade on a steep curve.) You marinate in bigotry, and traffic in shallow stereotypes. (French in the footnotes, so you must be smart, and definitely not a fan of fascism, right?)
'No true conservative could stand the shame and indignity of being affiliated with the Trump 2 regime, and with all that it represents.'
You own everything the fascist regime does, chief, even if it suits your sensibilities to try and distinguish yourself from it, because your casual bigotry betrays just where you feel at home in this big scary woke world (but hoo boy what a slog though unmitigated pretension and verbosity in your attempts to camouflage it).
You own it.
At least try to be more honest about it.
😴
I'm glad to read about Chateaubriand in this context -- I'd never encountered him, since usually the conservative whom we usually reference for the Revolution is Burke (someone I do wish the current administration would heed rather than its preferred, so-called luminaries). I guess I haven't heard much of the royalists from the Revolutionary to Napoleonic period, though they're clearly the conservatives who best exemplified that doomed conservative spirit.
Any ideas on how the existential melancholy you mention corresponds to the Romantics who bloomed around this same time? I can never tell if they were genuinely disappointed in this world, or if it was only their passing passion. (Side note: I read recently that when Goethe met Napoleon and discussed drama with him, he apparently didn't come away from that encounter disappointed by the Emperor's ideas or intellect.)
You know Marc Fumaroli as a Chateaubriand conservative?
Of Fumaroli, I've only ever read Quand l'Europe parlait français. I had not thought of him as a Chateaubriandian, but I can definitely see it now. Thanks!
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Marc-Fumaroli/dp/2877064832
So, a couple of undergraduates—likely in their late teens or early twenties—challenged you, as undergrads have done throughout the history of higher education. And somehow, that’s just part of the same historical process that led to the world’s richest man and his friends casually dismantling the government? Fascinating.
I’m honestly astonished at the lengths taken to ignore the actual power dynamics at play. But sure—Gamergate was just some harmless internet episode, just a bunch of passionate and naive young people. Nothing to do with misogyny, of course. Because if misogyny were real, how could those students possibly be allowed to ask such ‘woke’ questions?
This is an excellent piece and the first of yours I've read. This line stood out to me: "But the transfer of the activity of surveillance and control from nosy neighbors and 'concerned citizens' to artificial intelligence and ubiquitous security cameras is hardly going to constitute a blow to tyranny."
I recently wrote about this exact thing, framing it along the divide between self-styled populists like Steve Bannon and their techie rivals who are led by Elon Musk. Bannon has already lost, and I don't think he was ever very serious to begin with. But more to the point: it is simply delusional to believe that a man with deep ties to US military and intelligence agencies--a man who is right now constructing the most powerful panopticon in human history--will save us from tyranny. We might miss the old regime because although it was bad, it was incompetent in a way the new overlords might not be.
I rarely post my articles in the comment section, but it is here in case you are interested: https://www.readcontra.com/p/bannon-musk-maga