The limits of politics

I've mentioned before having been in the audience at a conservative panel discussion last year when someone put to the panelists a question about prospects for conservatives. Phyllis Schlafly talked about the need to reform the judiciary and the public school system. I didn't disagree with her, but she also sounded so ... yesterday. Meaning that conventional political engagement of the Right sounded so insufficient to the core problems conservatives face today. Tom Hibbs of Baylor made a lot more sense, at least to me, when he observed on that same panel that conservatives have been paying too much attention to politics, and not enough attention to the long, patient, unglamorous work of building up the kinds of institutions that inculcate a traditionalist/conservative worldview. Claes Ryn made a similar observation in The American Conservative:

Modern American conservatism has been enthralled by politics. It should be obvious to all by now that this has been a debilitating preoccupation. Society’s long-term direction is not set mainly by politicians. It is set by those who capture a people’s mind and imagination. Conservative politicians and policy wonks have failed to reverse any of the main deleterious social trends of the last half-century not because they have lacked financial resources but because efforts like theirs have limited efficacy in the first place. While they have gobbled up millions and millions of donated dollars, the activities that shape the deeper sensibilities and desires of Americans have continued to be dominated by people trying to dismantle what remains of traditional American and Western civilization.
[snip]
To recover, American conservatism would have to reorder its priorities and most especially put politics in its place. America’s crisis is at bottom moral-spiritual and cultural. Though a new alliance of homeless political groups is desirable, a realignment would be unavailing in the long run unless the old obsession with politics were also broken. The issues most needing attention will make the eyes of political junkies glaze over.

Ryn goes on to state that the error modern conservatives have made was assuming that if they only got control of the political discussion, everything else would take care of itself. This comes from a failure of moral imagination:

Persons move according to their innermost beliefs, hopes, and fears. These are affected much less by politicians than by philosophers, novelists, religious visionaries, moviemakers, playwrights, composers, painters, and the like, though truly great works of this kind reach most minds and imaginations only in diminished, popular form.

Yet the conservative movement did not direct its main efforts toward a revitalization of the mind, imagination, and moral-spiritual life.

In other words: it's the culture, stupid.

Daniel Larison speaks powerfully to this point today, tearing into a George Will aside praising a Republican member of Congress for wising up and leaving academia to become a professional politician. Larison:

If anyone wants an explanation for why the academy is dominated by the left and why the youngest cohort of voters has gone even more overwhelmingly for the Democrats than usual, you need look no further than precisely this sort of professional cop-out, giving up on educating the next generation for the sake of the easy, cheap and ephemeral victories of politics. Every conservative out there complains about the declining standards of education, the ruin of the academy, the politicisation of the classroom and on and on, but what happens when it comes time to step up and do some of the educating themselves? They go to law school to get a “useful” degree, or go into politics or some other field where the “prospects” for the future are better, and then wonder how the media, academia, the arts and cinema have all been taken over by people who loathe everything they believe.

When I am occasionally tempted by the political road (however ludicrously impractical such a road would be), I am often reminded of that quote from Max: “What would you rather do: change how people see or how they pay their taxes?” The poverty of so much of conservatism today is a result of way too many otherwise decent and sane people opting for the latter goal rather than the former. Nowadays, it seems that they can’t even do that part very well. Perhaps it would be better if more conservatives turned to teaching, cultivating and creating things rather than running uninspired electoral campaigns.

I don't believe we can abandon the field of electoral politics, and I don't think Larison does either. But we on the Right have to make a sober accounting of the condition we find ourselves -- and our families -- in, and redouble our efforts at shaping the worldview of the next generation. To do that will require, as Ryn and Hibbs suggest, engaging in extrapolitical activity of the sort that doesn't offer the immediate excitement and rewards of politics. It will require building institutions in which a love for the Permanent Things can thrive and be passed down intact. It will require a Benedictine mentality. But you knew I would say that.