Daniel Larison implies that RedState may have killed Culture11. Reading the piece on C11′s founding to which he refers, I can’t help but think that the conservative movement as a whole is imploding, and C11 simply got caught in the detritus. Movement status, especially as promoted by sites like RedState that espouse nothing more than ideological litmus tests that are bereft of any linking narrative of values or philosophy, has largely inverted conservatism. Where before you might expect that a conservative would be a staunch defender of the constitution, you have cheerleading for warrantless wiretaps and indefinite detention of American citizens without trial; where you might expect a conservative to stand up for the working man, you have a preference for bailing out banks instead of blue-collar industry; where you might expect a conservative to revere the Legislative Branch, you have them cheering on the Executive essentially legislating from the bully pulpit (while condemning the Judicial branch for the same). It’s a chaotic mess now, with standard bearers like Rush instead of Burke.
Case in point – the newfound “conservative optimism“. Is the following a statement that conservatives are supposed to utter?
We are built – as Rush Limbaugh talks about regularly – to be happy
and to have fun in this world by focusing on what we can accomplish
through Faith, freedom, hard work and self-reliance. This, as opposed
to the liberal – who wants to focus on all that is wrong and bad in the
world, and what government needs to do to “solve problems.”
I think they have this backwards; it’s supposed to be the conservative who focuses on the pragmatic business of improving our society and the liberal who is the slacker layabout focused more on his immediate happiness than any broader social responsibility. Larison wrote at Culture 11 some time ago about how Optimism itself is a destructive force (as far as the conservative is/should be concerned). As the standard bearer for Republicanism, RedState is a glaringly obvious case study in how the GOP is anything but conservative nowadays.
I’ve long thought that the Big Tent philosophy of the Democrats provides for a more genuine debate on policy and issues than the narrow, parochial litmus tests of the Republicans. If conservatism is to prosper it can only do so in a venue where it is permitted to stray off the reservation. Culture 11 was one such haven, but perhaps the Democratic Party is the more natural home. Crunchy and Paleo conservatives like Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison alike are starting to come around to this view as well. Ultimately, the political divide need not straddle party lines but could map onto our existing geographic and social diversity. Debates on policy simply move down to the primary level rather than in the final election.
Perhaps it’s best that C11 went under; the smart voices who wrote for it can do more to advance their cause by working within the existing media rather than trying to create a niche of their own. This paves the way for conservatives to start interacting with the (liberal) world rather than standing apart from it, yelling futilely, “stop!”
Related: the 30th Anniversary of Optimism at The American Conservative, a fascinating piece and insight.
UPDATE: Rod Dreher also weighs in on conservatism’s failure to adapt:
All this makes me wonder how I would see the conservative movement,
such as it is, today if I were a college student. I came to
conservatism as a liberal undergraduate, because in large part
conservatism made sense. If you weren’t there, it’s hard to
convey how stultified and self-deluded 1980s liberalism was, especially
on campus. Coming to it as a sneering liberal, I was taken by how liberating
conservative thought was — something that became even more clear to me
when I graduated and entered the Real World of crime, taxes and
personal responsibility.Mind you, I’ve learned a lot since then, and the kind of
conservatism that engaged my imagination and converted me in the 1980s
isn’t the kind of conservatism that engages my imagination and holds my
loyalty in 2009. The world has changed, and so have I. One gets the
idea that today’s mainstream conservatives have not substantially
changed a thing since the 1980s; I imagine that if I were on campus
today, the conservatives would seem as irrelevant and stiff-necked as
the liberals did in my undergraduate youth.As Claes Ryn put it in a penetrating TAC essay, organized conservatism finds itself wrecked today because it abandoned the culture, and taught itself to see the culture only in political terms.
