To me, he is a conservative intellectual. As such, he is hated by most intellectuals for being conservative. And he is hated by populists for being establishment.
I empathize with his plight. What are the choices for conservative intellectuals?
1. Try to win back the Trump supporters. This would make conservatism even more alienated from intellectuals. It would replace principled conservatism with divisive class warfare.
2. Try to win over intellectuals to liberaltarianism. I fear that this is an escapist fantasy. The left neither wants nor needs people who value liberty in the classical sense of the term. I am reading Kim R. Holmes’ book on the closing of the liberal mind, which makes this point forcefully.
3. Accept one’s place on an irrelevant fringe of American politics.
I go with number 3. Political environments can change. Maybe things will suddenly get better for conservative intellectuals. Or maybe the opposite.
Have a nice day.
Conservative intellectuals should finalize the divorce with cultural traditionalists and ally with Libertarians and independents. This means they should hone their message down to limited government and economic growth, and back off on foreign interventionism and bathroom wars.
yes, assume a null impact of say culture. what could possibly be problematic for conservative intellectuals in that?
I don’t think the cultural traditionalists are the cause of political theater and political trolling tit-for-tat. I think it is the two party system that makes each side take increasingly pointlessly stupid positions mainly to troll the other side. Democrats just are late to figuring out their side takes equally stupid positions and over extends on them as well. To expel one faction would just shift the trolling to another issue and with less votes on your side.
#3 is the situation we’re pretty much stuck with unless someone can figure out how to substantially alter the ideological diversity of the intellectual class. GMU seems like a nice project aimed at such, but at this point, it’s a drop in the bucket. You need a bunch more of these to really have an impact, and truth be told, you’d probably run out of quality students before that, anyway.
4. Figure how to increase the power of intermediary institutions especially the church. Right now the goals of large corporations (Tech especially, but even Wal-Mart) are not aligned with church goals. Ryan is strong Catholic and Kemp follower but no witnesses his church influences.
How does one bring them together?
The conservatism to which I’m inclined is exactly the kind that finds value in intermediate institutions and laments the current war on those institutions in favor of the Individual taken care of by the Omnibenevolent State. Building those institutions in an adverse environment is, as you say, extremely important.
Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.
William E. Gladstone
We have neither conservative nor liberal parties in the US. Just parties of special interest who use differing mixes of conservatism and liberalism to obscure their real controlling factions. They and the ignorant press use the terms conservative and liberal to obfuscate their true natures and newspeak a linkage to the definition of those terms from the past.
By Gladstone’s definition, both parties are conservative in that they distrust the people and, as we see in the reaction to Trump, are driven by fear of same.
Conservative intellectuals need to change the game. The left thrives in the areas of society protected from market competition – Education, Government, and the like, and in areas where oligopolies reign, such as Labor, Media and the new tech overlords.
Force them out into the market space. No, none of them will become conservative, but their power and influence will be reduced enough so that they’ll have to engage the right in a contest of ideas. Then we’ll have a true market place for ideas, which is all any conservative intellectual should hope for.
He’ll get through it. Trump is so dumb, insecure, and reactionary, all he had to do was meet with Ryan et. al. in a room and then they come out arm-in-arm “in agreement” that the progressive democrats are the real establishment threat to tru-Americans.
It is like trying to choreograph a professional wrestling match with an orangutan.
Depressing….
Not sure what was either conservative or intellectual about rolling over and giving the left everything they wanted in the last budget/continuing resolution.
perhaps when your caucus overthrew one speaker for non extreme tactical moves you don’t have room to operate as you like. how much room did ryan think he have and how much did dems think he have? you need to answer that question before we can honestly evaluate the deal.
and it may be a horrible deal in the end it’s just not so obvious as i think you think
Not even putting up a fight after so many promises to the base tells the base a lot.
I don’t think #2 is *entirely* a fantasy. Many progressives would like to see the drug war scaled back. Some are receptive to arguments against heavy-handed state occupational licensing, for example, and against regulations that unnecessarily drive up the cost of housing in some of their favorite cities (here in Ann Arbor, we’ve had a long-running feud between older preservationist and younger pro-density factions — both are very much lefty but the split is still there. Still other progressives would like to get the state out of harassing food trucks or people selling raw milk. I even think it’s possible that some on the left are ready to recognize the nasty ‘bootleggers and baptists’ cabal involved in clamping down on e-cigarettes (harming public health in the process).
That doesn’t mean conservative/libertarian intellectuals becoming part of the progressive coalition, but it also doesn’t necessarily mean irrelevance — there’s no reason in principle that some shared ideas can’t take root.
Check out, for example, how many of the lefties in the comments at at the Huffington Post oppose the new e-cigarette rules (and even grasp understand how this would work to the benefit of big tobacco companies):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nancy-brown/fdas-latest-move-against_b_9867896.html
Most intellectuals lean left because they are besotted with the salvationist fantasy that a collective rational management of human affairs, with themselves in charge of course, can perfect the human condition and abolish tragedy and contingency from our lives. Traditional conservatives (not neocons) have a more realistic understanding of human fallibility and a degree of epistemological humility. They have a philosophical depth that is quite missing from the shallow optimists of the left.
I think he is hated by intellectuals for not being one, but still, the best the GOP has to offer. An oxymoron for a politician.
That’s the same reason I hate most intellectuals!
What is a conservative intellectual?
What kind of society is he trying to bring about?
How does he plan to get there?
Traditional conservatism I can understand. You are trying to conserve values you’ve already lived and experienced. I need only think of my own childhood to be a conservative. What is a a conservative intellectual trying to protect? Whom does he love? Are there any concrete individuals whom he holds dear?
If he’s smart, he’ll realize he is in a position of real power, and he will let his accomplishments define what he represents. The reason the republican party is in the position they are is they have let the gap between their rhetoric and their actions become ridiculous.
Given the results of the last few years, the base is no longer listening to what they say and only looking at what they accomplish.
4) Try to understand how Milton Friedman was so successful and replicate.
In the 70s, even mainstream economists thought it was natural for the government to set a wide variety of prices using price controls. (At least, that’s what I hear people say. I was a young child then, so I don’t really remember.) By the 90s, right and left basically agreed with Friedman’s economic views. (That I do remember.) Of course, Friedman was helped by a gifted politician communicator in Reagan. The Left has also been helped by a gifted communicator in Obama, but their ideas are not gaining widespread acceptance, except among themselves, because the ideas themselves are so flawed.
The right confluence of conservative intellectuals and politician communicators can win over both intellectuals and non-intellectuals. Of course, this will probably not happen in the presidential contest, but Paul Ryan could still be very influential as House Speaker. His advantage is that he is both an intellectual and a politician so he does not necessarily need to wait for the right partner to come along. One positive sign for Ryan is that he was able to become Speaker, and effectively leader of the Republican Party, without campaigning for it.
A major – and perhaps the key – strength of progressivism is the ability to make right-wing ideas socially unfashionable with elites and create a perception of them being unpopular and held only by loser morons or clever fraudsters and other non-respectably characters, thus permanently placing those ideas ‘on the fringe’. And most people want to avoid fringes.
Now, is Paul Ryan actually a conservative intellectual politician, or just a booster of Republican ideas, parroting the higher-brow justifications from the usual academic sources? What insights have we learned from him that compare to the output of, say, a Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
Yglesias recently wrote, “Paul Ryan is demonstrably brilliant at suckering credulous journalists into testifying to his own brilliance, but he’s not much of a poker player,” and I’ve got to say, I have a similar impression of the man. I’m happy to be proven wrong, however.
As for what Ryan and other conservative intellectual politicians should do, the first principle must always be political survival or one is not doing the other principles any good. And that means compromise with – and embrace and defense of – the desires and interests of the not-always-respectable or litmus-test-passing voters. That’s exactly what didn’t happen on the road to Trump’s nomination.
I guess realistic pragmatism is too much to expect.
Conservative intellectual? With a budget proposal that borders the absurd? When was the last time unemployment hit 2.5 percent?
I like your contrarian take on many issues, but this one just doesn’t make sense. Is Bernie Sanders an intellectual too? (A progressive one, that is).
Respectfully disappointed,
R
I think he represents more the conservative version of “good government” wonk than intellectual, but that may be splitting hairs.
The Trumpistas it’s are mistaking anything that is respectable for elitism. We’ll just have to muddle through it.