Class war, populism and Republicans

I was formed politically in a time in which the liberals and their party had ossified around a set of ideas that no longer seemed relevant to the times in which Americans lived. But they clung to those ideas, and seemed to think that defending them meant having to demonize Reagan and all conservatives as the evil Other. I know this because I used to be part of that while in high school and college. As I've written before, I would go home from school and lecture my father, a Democrat, on his false consciousness and stupidity for being an admirer of Reagan. It never once occurred to me to listen to him, and to ask myself why people like him liked Reagan, and had started to vote Republican. I consoled myself with self-pity and contempt, e.g., "They're all idiots and probably racists too."

Well, I was foolish for doing so. When I later started reading what smart conservatives had to say -- I was doing so just to keep up with the appalling things the enemy was writing -- I found myself engaged by writers who grappled with ideas that connected with the world in which I lived. They persuaded me that they were worth listening to. I came to see that my own side was so trapped inside its resentments and ideology that it had no good answers for the conservative intellectuals. I was won to the conservative side by ideas and intellectuals.

Now things are different. Now it's the conservatives who have ossified, and who have become largely defined by retrenchment around resentment. When I wrote "Crunchy Cons," I was gratified by the fellow conservatives who wrote to say how much they identified with my message, and how we on the Right needed to rethink our position in light of changing times and our traditionalist intellectual heritage. But I was even more dismayed by the knee-jerk hostility the book and its ideas engendered from many on the right. It almost all took the form of nasty bashing of "elitism." Mind you, the book was flawed, and its proposals are absolutely up for debate. But more often than not, the criticism was along the lines of, "You're a damn RINO elitist who hates normal people." End of story.

How is that any more respectable, honest or useful than thoughtless liberals who dismiss any religious person's point of view and ideas as being "fundamentalist" and "Taliban"? But that's what we do on the Right today.

A healthy populism would entail a healthy suspicion of elites, naturally. But it can never hate and reject ideas and intellectuals, and can never -- at least not if it's authentically conservative -- be so given over to egalitarianism that it holds intellectual elites in contempt. Ideas do have consequences, and the rejection of ideas, and of intellectual debate and discourse and excellence, has consequences too.

All of which is to say that Sarah Palin, who has many admirable qualities and a scintillating political talent, would be perfectly positioned to lead the next conservatism if she had "prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking." But she has not. To say that a politician has to have either the common touch or be conversant with ideas and intellectual discourse is to accept a false choice.

One last point: one reason I stayed away from religion for as long as I did is because I accepted this false choice theologically. On my college campus, the Christians who seemed to me to take their faith seriously were fundamentalists who disdained the life of the mind, from my point of view. The intellectually engaged folks who still identified with churchgoing and Christianity believed in such an intellectualized, cosmopolitan and watered-down version of the faith that it struck me as hardly worth getting out of bed for on Sunday morning, much less giving your life to.

And then I read "The Seven Storey Mountain," and Kierkegaard, and Percy, and Flannery O'Connor, and started to see that it is possible to be a serious committed Christian and a thinker. That intellectual excellence and serious, countercultural religion were not enemies, but necessary allies. It opened up a door for me, and built a bridge to a new life. What I'm trying to say here is that conservatives and Republicans do not want to be a party and a movement that puts smart people, especially smart young people, in the position of believing that they have to sacrifice their minds to be a part of it. Again, I came to conservatism because in the 1980s, there was so much intellectual excitement on the Right. There no longer is. There can be again, and there must be again.

There is a rich treasury of conservative thought waiting to be mined, contemplated, reinterpreted and adapted for our particular time and culture. Read Nash, then read further. We need to think hard within our own intellectual tradition. We need to understand why it is that we're losing people, especially the young. To disdain intellection and intellectuals is a dead end. It's a culture war in which we on the Right have turned our guns on ourselves.

UPDATE: Daniel has one of his typically intelligent, dissident observations on populism, Brooks and the Right. Excerpt:

Populism without policy substance is almost entirely worthless; it is not really populism. To reduce populism to a style or a reflex, one in which intellect and knowledge are derided, is the most vicious anti-populist trick, because it associates advocating policies that benefit the commonwealth and the broad mass of the people with ignorance and visceral reactions. It leaves the people exposed to whatever abusive policies members of the political class see fit to impose. It allows progressive globalists of both parties to flatter themselves that the policies they prefer, those that happen to serve a few entrenched interests at the expense of the many, are also the best informed and held by the best educated. The derision heaped on populism, which Palin makes so easy when she is identified wrongly as a populist, is another way of evading accountability for the misguided policies favored by all those who seem to regard representative government itself as a kind of populist excess. Naturally, these are also the same people who seem to be most serious about duplicating the "successes" of our managerial democracy around the world.

Brooks is essentially a right-ish technocratic Establishmentarian. I don't say that as a criticism, just as a definition. What bothers me is the reflexive instinct among some on the Right to denounce him as "not a real conservative" because he doesn't reinforce one's prejudices. He is a different kind of conservative than many, and he's not my kind of conservative. But he's a smart man, and to dismiss his ideas without engaging them is to succumb to the sort of mindless tribalism that has gotten us into this mess. Far better is it to do as Daniel Larison does, and engage Brooks.

Also, see this comment from JLF in the thread below:

Whether by accident or by design, redefining class warfare as Joe SixPack vs the educational elite is a master stroke by Republicans who certainly want to avoid the traditional definition of class warfare as a struggle of economic classes at all costs. The problem this redefinition brings for Republican leadership, however, is keeping the populist chain reaction contained and controlled. Let Palin be Palin and turn out the vote, but for God's sake don't let her and those she represents at the controls. She needs to follow W's example, accept the bridle and saddle, and all will be well. She can go to church and speak in tongues and complain about abortion, ya betcha, but don't scare away investors in biotech engineering, or interfere with the symbiotic relationship between government oversight and corporate boardrooms, or think that simplistic nostrums of foreign policy can replace Realpolitik.

UPDATE.2 Great stuff from Will Wilson at Culture11. Excerpt:

No movement; not even a movement which is somehow in direct communion with the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and which thereby has all the right answers; can survive without ongoing intellectual foment and vitality. In the first half of the 20th century, real conservatism was largely dismissed in the United States for just this reason. "The Stupid Party" is what we were called, and occasionally with some reason. Were we less correct back then? Absolutely not! In many ways, the modern GOP could learn a thing or two from the Old Right. The fact remains that nobody will buy something that isn't being sold well, and that the first rule of being a good salesman is knowing your audience. Intellectuals have played a huge role in shaping public opinion over the last few centuries, and if we want our movement to succeed, we need to know the language with which we can sell our ideas to the idea-mongers themselves. My secret hope is that in doing so, we'll necessarily engage in a little housecleaning, a little introspection, and a little intellectual honesty.