One of biggest problems with the kind of conservatism in the US that is stuck somewhere between being intellectual and popular is this: it recycles its cultural criticism in a way that tries to convince you that now is the worst moment ever and if we don’t do something about it now everything will be lost. One result of this ahistorical recycling of ideas is that the intellectual heritage of US conservatism gets ignored. And this result more and more seems to be an intentional one.
For instance, as I’ve written many times, the critique of the university and academia that is presently in vogue has been in circulation since at least the 1950s when Buckley’s God and Man at Yale came out. The “timely” crisis of the university from popular US conservative voices is pushing at least 70 years old. Bloom’s repetition of similar themes in Closing of the American Mind from the 80s was already dated by 30 years.
Jordan Peterson’s present tough-guy self-help act was the all the rage of talk radio and daytime television quite some time ago (e.g., Drs. Laura and Phil). None of this means that one cannot repeat something — iteration is important and salutary on the whole — but repeating something as if it has not been echoing for ages is a problem. A deeper problem, as I’ve indicated, is when this autoamnesia is essential for the viability of an intellectual and popular movement.
Another problem is that the sources that get ignored are sometimes better than the imitations. At the very least, treating one’s prior ideas as nonexistent has the same negative effect as treating them all as equals. For instance, Peterson’s philosophically incoherent (while, like Dreher before him in The Benedict Option, trying to use philosophers to boost his own authority) 12 Rules for Life cannot touch the clarity of Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes of 1985 which also drives at a conservative self-help critique in a similar vein of the titles mentioned here. There can be improvements as well, relatively speaking; I would consider Bloom’s book an improvement on Buckley’s.
As I’ve noted twice already, what makes this phenomenon quite different from other recycled ideas is that conservatism is at least semantically supposed to be about conserving something, and one would at least expect that to come equipped with a memory of its own ideas. If conservatism cannot conserve conservatism then what is it for exactly? An appeal to the authority of the generic canonical past and its preservation is hardly a new thing but, in this case, conservative thought in the US seems to not merely forget its own track record, it seems to need this forgetting in order to get all juiced up again and again about the brand new apocalypse at hand. Conservatism is deeply and even absurdly built on a premise of forgetting and losing its own ideas to repackage and re-sell them as new again. This may be common in many areas of intellectual life, but it seems especially self-defeating by the loose and intentionally vague principles of US conservatism.
In other words, I am not only saying that US popular and intellectual conservatism suffers from a profound and self-refuting autoamnesia, I am also saying that this pathological condition is essential for its own survival — it counts on people not checking the conservative receipts and browsing the conservative history of the past few decades, it bets on people not wondering how the exact same problems that are so new today could be almost identical to the “brand new problems” of the recent past. US conservativism depends on this ignorance. To be fair, I think the older forms of conservatism were often less guilty of this and even immune to many of the present degrees of nonsense. I also find, as with Adler (picture above), that they are far less insultingly stupid, albeit not without their own significant problems. (That a book like 12 Rules for Life could ever gain any traction amongst conservatives is an insult and a sad test of the present state of the collective conservative mind and imagination.)
I have made this basic critique in many forms, both in print and in person, to many self-identifying conservatives from the US — fans, for instance, of Peterson — and they have yet to produce a single direct rebuttal of it. Instead, they quibble over the word ‘conservative’ or say that the left is identical to this. Those are not rebuttals. But here’s to trying things again (and again)!
