Monday, October 17, 2011


Moving right along
A review of Proud to Be Right: Voices of the Next Conservative Generationby Jonah Goldberg
At the kind of parties that talk-show hosts pride themselves on not frequenting, I’m sometimes asked how a nice young fellow like me became a conservative. If I’m feeling mischievous, I tell the truth: In my teens, I was a punk rocker, but when I got to college, I discovered that no one was impressed. Grating noise, outlandish hairstyles, and tattoos were rather the rule than the exception. Confronted with this alarming transvaluation, I decided to adopt the most outlandish, provocative, intolerable attitude that I could think of. You can fill in the rest.
I encourage people in Cambridge or the Upper West Side to consider me a real original. But the truth is that stories like mine are surprisingly common. In Proud to Be Right, the National Review columnist Jonah Goldberg collects the testimony of nearly two dozen young conservatives. Although they range in profession from journalists to physicians, most of the contributors are, in one way or another, misfits. College-dodgers, parents just out of their teens, evangelical homeschoolers, punks, gays, smokers: these writers turned right less to conserve than to oppose a social and intellectual order to which they were unable or unwilling to submit.
The variety of youthful rebellion on display in this volume raises two questions. The first is what the voices of the next conservative generation have in common, beyond a rejection of the cultural and political status quo. In his thoughtful introduction, Goldberg distinguishes two tendencies among his authors. Each looks back to a founder of the American conservative movement.
Young Nockians, Goldberg argues, follow the example of the eccentric libertarian Albert Jay Nock. Like Nock, they’ve given up hope of changing society. Instead, they see themselves as memebers of a cultural “Remnant”: living relics of a dying civilization. The Remnant is not a political movement, let alone a party. At best, it is a hidden community of disappointed but steadfast lovers of the true, the good, and the beautiful. As essays by Helen Rittelmeyer and Nathan Harden show, latent Nockians often hope to find a refuge from philistinism in America’s great universities. They become aware of themselves as rebels in disappointment at the renovated curricula and sexual expressivism they find there.
The other tendency arises from the same experience, which seems especially profound at Yale. But while Nock counseled resignation, his informal student William F. Buckley argued that conservatives should organize to stop modernity in its tracks. The Young Buckleyites share their namesake’s enthusiasm for activism. Their representatives in this volume, including Joseph Ashby and Ashley Thorne, demand lower taxes, less regulation, and a return to the Great Books. Contributions from the Nockians have a more personal tone. While they talk about how they have felt, the Buckleyites describe what they want to do.
The second question is whether the contributors to this volume are properly described as conservative. Indeed, Matt Paterson rejects the term, identifying himself as a “radical republican” in both the Roman and the partisan sense. Other contributors try to reclaim conservatism from the gop. Matthew Lee Anderson defends a brand of social conservatism “more excited about working to end human rights abuses in China and elsewhere than about ending abortion in America.” And Michael Brendan Dougherty tries to rehabilitate isolationism for a generation that remembers the Cold War dimly or not at all. Both are deeply frustrated by the capture of the conservative movement by defense hawks who often seem more interested in spreading democracy abroad than engaging their critics at home.
All of the writers included approach politics from the right, but they’re hardly squares. In this vein, James Poulos makes the provocative suggestion that he and his contemporaries might be described as “Leptogonians.” Apparently, a leptogonal angle is one slightly narrower than ninety degrees. (Full disclosure: Poulos, with whom I have blogged, names me as a Leptogonian. I had not heard the term before reading his essay, however.)
The concept marks a distinction between “those of us who have marked out our irregular twenties during this uneven, unquiet decade” and the middle-class strivers that the young Richard Nixon dubbed Orthogonian, and who provided the base of the conservative coalition into the twenty-first century. The Orthogonians were confident that things would go well for America if taxes were low, laws enforced, and decent respect was shown to traditional religion and morals. Leptogonians aren’t so sure.
One reason is that they grew up under a president who, much more than Nixon, made these commitments the centerpieces of his administration. The results have been mixed, at best. While Leptogonians remain convinced that liberal solutions are misguided, they recognize that the obsession with principle can lead to a dangerously simplistic conception of the nation’s problems. As George Will put it, “Politics is more difficult than you think.”
But Leptogonian ambivalence, Poulos suggests, has a deeper source than disappointment with the fruits of conservative government—the fact is, they are no less marked by post-1960s popular culture than young people of opposing political views. Leptogonians can’t regard rock music, violent films, video games, and the Internet as subversive in the way their predecessors might because these are the features of a world that they have inherited. The result is that young conservatives who don’t want to withdraw into a parallel world of religious faith suffer from serious cognitive dissonance. For them, the high and the low, the sacred and the profane, are jumbled together in a bewildering “mash-up” of practices and values.
Considered this way, the journey from alternative lifestyles to conservatism is not so long. Todd Seavey even argues in “Conservatism for Punks” that bourgeois culture proves it is worth conserving by its “capacity to learn from and incorporate the best aspects of radical subcultures without losing its fundamental stability.” Among the former, Seavey counts the libertarian ranting of Johnny Rotten. (As a Clash fan, I’d argue that the late Joe Strummer’s do-it-yourself communitarianism has a better claim to the honor.)
So is the next conservative generation just another subculture? Given the age of the contributors to this volume, it is too soon to tell. But if the assortment of ideas and commitments they express is representative, the Right of the future will be as fractured, lively, and often incoherent as the country it seeks to guide. A member of that generation myself, I don’t know whether to be alarmed or proud.

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