by Nate Hochman
When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism,” begins the opening paragraph of Sam Francis’ seminal 1991 essay, “Beautiful Losers.”
“American conservatism,” Francis wrote, “is a failure, and all the think tanks, magazines, direct mail barons, inaugural balls, and campaign buttons cannot disguise or alter it. Virtually every cause to which conservatives have attached themselves for the past three generations has been lost, and the tide of political and cultural battle is not likely to turn any time soon.”
The reasons for this were numerous and varied, but the fundamental thesis was this: “The Old Right,” Francis wrote, “failed to understand that the revolution had already occurred.” The conservatism of William F. Buckley, Jr., Frank Meyer, National Review, and yes, even Ronald Reagan championed an ideology designed to defend an old established order that had already disappeared. That ideology’s doctrines — limited government, federalism, a capitalist “economy of privately owned and operated firms,” and a blend of Protestant moral traditionalism and entrepreneurial individualism “in politics, economy, art, religion, and ethics” — were constructed by and for “the institutions and beliefs of the bourgeois elite” that had ruled from the time of the Civil War up “until the dislocations of 20th-century technological and organizational expansion brought forth a new managerial elite that seized power in the reforms of the Progressive Era and the New Deal,” Francis argued. “These reforms constituted the revolution … in the construction of an entire architecture of economic and cultural power, based on bureaucratized corporations and unions, increasingly bureaucratized universities, foundations, churches, and mass media, and fused, directly or indirectly, with a centralized bureaucratic state.”
More than 30 years later, the Right has yet to grasp this insight. The transformation of American society from a republic — with a constitutionally limited government and an authentically private civil society and economy — to a bureaucratized mass democracy, presided over by a managerial elite that moves fluidly between the public and private spheres, continues to elude the explanatory power of the old conservative ideological doctrine. Indeed, the old ideology is not capable of explaining these dynamics, as it was constructed for a world in which they did not exist.
With the vast apparatus of what used to be called “civil society” at its fingertips, the Left has no need for direct state suppression of dissidents. (Although it’s often happy to advance its cultural goals via government coercion as well, from the persecution of Christian businesses and charities to the Department of Justice’s efforts to bully parent-led school board protests.) The genius of this approach is that it is largely seated in the exercise of “soft” rather than “hard” power. Large social media companies — which flood the market with credentialed “fact-checkers,” flag right-wing “misinformation” and favor content-moderation practices that advance left-wing ideological ends — intersect with a phalanx of credentialed experts, DEI consultants, lavishly-funded activist groups and foundations, and a willing legacy media to reframe the way Americans receive and digest information.
These tools of modern mass society are directly at odds with the ethic and character of the old American republic — an ethic that, as Francis noted in a separate essay, “consist[ed] less in moralistic purity than in personal and social independence”:
Owning and operating his own farm or shop, usually producing his own food and clothing, governing his own family and his own community, and defending himself with his own arms in company with his own relatives and neighbors, the citizen of the classical republic neither needed nor wanted a leviathan state to fight wars across the globe in behalf of democracy nor to pretend to protect him and his home. Nor did he need or want a job in someone else’s company, or a pension plan or health benefits or paid vacations or five-hour workdays. He did not want to shop in vast shopping malls where nothing is worth buying and nothing bought will last the year. It did not occur to him to enroll himself or his children in therapy courses or in sensitivity and human-relations clinics in order to find out how to get along with his neighbors, and he sought no edification or instruction from the mass media to entertain him continuously or indoctrinate him with the current cliches and slogans of public discussion or trick him into buying even more junk for which he had no use and no desire, if the citizen succumbed to such temptations, then he had become dependent on someone or something other than himself and his extensions in family and community. Men who become dependent on others cannot govern themselves, and if they cannot govern themselves, they cannot keep a republic.
None of this could describe the American public today, which has become so dependent on mass organizations (of one form or another) that the republican way of life is beyond the wildest reaches of their — our — imagination. The major brands and businesses, mass media, education systems, and government bureaucracies shape the way they think and behave, often in ways that they themselves do not even fully understand:
The unholy marriage between left-wing activist groups and massive investors like BlackRock is one of the most important stories of our time. It's a form of political power that challenges some of the Right's most basic ideas about government, free markets, and economic freedom. https://t.co/YrAy0zAMv5
— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) June 12, 2024
All this challenges the way conservatives should think about the reach and function of left-wing ideology. LGBT activism, for example — a subject of particularly energetic discussion now, on the high holy holiday of Pride Month — is usually thought of as a set of doctrines or ideas on the Right. It is rarely thought of as a system. (Many conservatives remain resistant to thinking in systemic terms at all — perhaps a hangover from the Cold War-era aversion to anything that might smack of Marxism). But they must understand it in those terms, if they are to understand it at all.
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Nate Hochman is a Writer at The American Spectator. Follow him on X at @njhochman.
Photo “Pride Parade” by FULBERT CC BY-SA 4.0.
