Mencken Day Two
At an event like Mencken, you can see why conservatism failed. Way back when the founders of Buckley conservatism were plotting their way forward, they started with the assumption that the majority of Americans agreed with them. The two problems they faced were that the Left would claim the intellectual high ground, thus bullying enough people into going along with liberal reform ideas. They also faced the problem of getting their people out to vote. They needed to mobilize the majority.
The solution was an effort to build a movement that would do three things. One it would raise money from wealthy white people. Then it would use that money to build out an intellectual framework from which to confront the Left on intellectual terms. Then it would use the ideas cooked up by those think tanks to rally conservative people in support of those policies. The Right would have better ideas and better mobilization.
This strategy always had an internal conflict. On the one hand, the Right was going to cut through the Left’s heated rhetoric with facts and reason. You still see that today when Ben Shapiro puts on his Spock ears and tries to sound like an intellectual. The central claim of his act is that you must put aside your passion. The trouble is, that directly conflicts with mobilization efforts, which are always going to be an emotional appeal for people to put aside reason and act on their passions.
The resolution to this conflict was to sublimate emotional appeals to the intellectual arguments of the Right. At a conference like Mencken, which is still rooted in the conservative habits, the speeches are all recitations of facts, empirical examinations of the Left’s arguments and appeals to the reason of the audience. The only place you see emotion is outrage at the excesses of the Left. There’s a pride in not allowing that outrage to infiltrate the arguments made on behalf of conservative issues.
That was an effective approach, in a country that was close to 90% white, which was America in the 20th century. The conservative movement turned the GOP from a minority party into the majority. By the 1990’s, even Democrats like Bill Clinton were ready to declare big government dead. Then the effects of demographic replacement started to show up at the ballot box. That overwhelmingly white majority began to decline, so those appeals to reason had a shrinking audience.
That is why Buckley conservatism is dead. It turns out that there are no sound empirical reasons to defend your homeland, at least not ones that will cause men to sacrifice for the effort. Those arguments need passion, not four color graphs with supporting tables and citations. The answer to the Left’s demand for immigration was not a tweedy intellectual, but a man with passion for his people and his way of life, willing to rally his people to do what must be done to defend those lands…
An odd thing I just noticed this weekend is the difference in how academics do public speaking versus the private sector. Academics read their prepared remarks, usually looking down at the lectern. In the corporate world, speakers memorize their speeches, maybe using some notes to jog the memory, but otherwise look at the audience as they are speaking. You’re taught to scan the audience to match the cadence of you speech, so it looks like you are talking to each person directly.
Now, the issue may simply be that in the corporate world, speakers tended to be trained to speak by professional public speakers. In my time in that world, I went to plenty of classes on speaking, interviewing, presenting and so on. My guess is few academic take a public speaking course. Instead they just do what all the other academics do, so it has become the custom. Maybe the audience drives it. Academics may prefer to hear speeches read from text, so that’s why it is done…
At the after-party, I was reminded why right-wing resistance to the Left has always fallen to pieces on contact with the Left. Even in a crusty fringe crowd like at Mencken, there is a weird pride in no one toeing the company line. The Left never tolerates free thinkers, which is why they can maintain disciple. The Right has always assumed that the ideological discipline of the Left is a vice, so they have made sure to have a diversity of opinion. The sperg army will never be a match for the Left.
This is, of course, the result of generations of conditioning as to what it means to be right-wing. Instead of being a stand-alone, positive set of beliefs and aspirations, it is a laundry list of complaints about the Left and a determination to be the mirror image of what is understood to be left-wing at the moment. To be a right-winger is to never impose discipline on the ranks, so everyone is free to be an army of one. The Left, of course, is then free to pick them off one by one…
The main reason to go to these events is the social aspects. In my case, it is an opportunity for readers and listeners to meet me. Given the interactive nature of this form of media, I’m just as curious to meet readers, as I have interacted with many of them for years now. The thing I was thinking about on the way home is that I’ve never met a reader who is less interesting in person than their on-line character. It speaks to the superficiality of internet culture. On-line, we’re two-dimensional.
That is why the Left works so hard to keep us from meeting in real life. When like-minded people get together, socialize and talk about the issues, it raises morale and it builds social capital. That’s the force multiplier the Left fears most, because they lack it in their own ranks. Their discipline is fueled by rage and self-abnegation. Social capital is like a fuel that creates more of itself as it burns. That’s why they work so hard to keep us as atomized strangers living in our bespoke silos on-line…
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