The Closing of the Conservative Mind - The Bulwark - 0 views
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Trump was aggressively anti-intellectual and routinely displayed a contemptuous indifference toward the ideas to which many intellectuals on the right have devoted their lives: small government, free markets, fiscal responsibility, moral character.
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You could interpret this one of three ways: That nobody ever really listened to the right’s intellectuals; that the intellectuals never really believed their own supposed ideals; or that there was some hidden weakness on the part of conservative intellectuals that made them vulnerable to Trumpism.
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if we were going to have a new generation of compelling, interesting, and successful conservative intellectuals, both in the academy and out of it, he would have been involved in producing them. If there is such a wave, I haven’t seen it. Instead, conservatism has become more lowbrow and ideologically depleted.
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We could discuss some of the reasons behind this devolution: the longstanding conservative suspicion of “ideology”; the failed attempt to dress up religious traditionalism in a veneer of intellectualism; conservative intellectuals’ indulgence in populist “anti-elitist” rhetoric that has since been turned against them.
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Some years ago, Ben Domenech perceptively identified this as the post-apocalyptic culture war, driven by an “increasingly large portion of evangelicals who believe the culture wars are over, and they lost.” This makes them “a lot more open to the idea of an unprincipled blowhard who promises he’s got your back on political correctness.”
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auerlein is presenting us with this same notion of a “post-apocalyptic culture war”—but for intellectuals and academics.
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Bauerlein’s approach is not a strategy for victory. It’s a counsel of defeatism. He is not merely claiming that the contest of ideas has been lost, but that it cannot be won.
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Back in the old days—and by the “old days,” I mean five years ago—it was commonly accepted that if a foolish or unworthy politician lost an election, it was probably his own fault, for not making a good enough case to the public. But all hope was not lost because the contest of ideas would go on.
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But what happens when you give up on the contest of ideas? Then the political leader on your side at any given moment has to win, whoever he is and whatever his flaws. He has to remain in office and win re-election, because you have given up on winning converts and adding to your coalition.
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In this view, the crudest kind of partisanship remains as the only means conservative intellectuals have for achieving their ends.
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If we give up the “contest of ideas,” we give up the task of defining what our goals are, and we are much more likely to achieve the opposite of what we originally set out to do
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This cultural defeatism means passing up real opportunities. Consider, for example, that some of the strongest responses to the distorted, anti-American history of the 1619 Project have come from “progressive” intellectuals and the Worldwide Socialist Web Site.
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the political right as we know it was formed in the middle of the 20th century by intellectuals who came out of the Red Decade of the 1930s. Many conservative intellectuals were former communists who had seen the light.