Since the major news outlets are run by the Cult, all of the focus has been on how the Cult is dealing with the calamity of November 8, 2016. Even two months on, members of the Cult are throwing tantrums in order draw attention to their grief. For example, two degenerates had to be removed from a plane because they objected to Ivanka Trump riding on the same plane. Unfortunately, the plane was still on the tarmac when they were removed. Then there are the daily hoaxes, which are part of their grieving process.
Less noticed is the ongoing collapse of the Conventional Right into irrelevancy as it copes with the sudden realization that no one cares what they think. National Review, for example, has seen its traffic collapse since they went NeverTrump. The ridiculous person they have running the joint these days is out begging for money to redesign the site again. The implication is that bad technology is the reason no one reads National Review. The fact that they publish nonsense like this gets no mention at staff meetings, I bet.
While it is amusing to watch silly people like Charles Cooke struggle with the reality of his situation, there are some intelligent and thoughtful people in the Conventional Right trying to make sense of things. They correctly see the rise of Trump, and the emergence of a counter culture on the Right, as a dire threat to their thing. After all, why bother consulting the grovelers at National Review when they are always wrong and there are alternatives out there getting it right?
This long piece by Matthew Continetti the other day is a good read for a number of reasons. Continetti is married to a daughter of Bill Kristol and he is a true believer in the neo-conservative faith. Take that however you like. This is the first bit of interest.
I have been thinking about Gavin lately because his life and thought so perfectly capture the conservatism of Donald Trump. When you read Gavin, you begin to understand that the idea of Trump as a conservative is not oxymoronic. Trump is a conservative—of a particular type that is rare in intellectual circles. His conservatism is ignored or dismissed or opposed because, while it often reaches the same conclusions as more prevalent versions of conservatism, its impulses, emphases, and forms are different from those of traditionalism, anti-Communism, classical liberalism, Leo Strauss conservatism in its East and West Coast varieties, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol as well as the neoconservatism of William Kristol, religious conservatism, paleo-conservatism, compassionate conservatism, constitutional conservatism, and all the other shaggy inhabitants of the conservative zoo.
Like most of the box-tickers in the managerial class, Continetti is largely unaware of what constitutes conservatism in English speaking countries. For men of the Conventional Right, conservatism is a list of policies and poses that define their relationship with Progressives. The idea that conservatism is a temperament, rather than a laundry list of policy proposals is alien to these guys. They are men of the multiple choice exam. Their options are always bounded by the number of choices provided to them.
Moving along, this bit offers a glimpse into the mind of the neo-cons as they face the dustbin of history.
Trump has always been careful to distinguish himself from what he calls “normal conservative.” He has defined a conservative as a person who “doesn’t want to take risks,” who wants to balance budgets, who “feels strongly about the military.” It is for these reasons, he said during the campaign, that he opposed the Iraq war: The 2003 invasion was certainly risky, it was costly, and it put the troops in a dangerous position, defending a suspicious and resentful population amid IEDs and sniper attacks. The Iraq war, in this view, is an example of conservative writers and thinkers and politicians following trains of logic or desire to un-conservative conclusions.
One of the things that never gets discussed is just how spectacularly wrong the Conventional Right was about the response to 9/11, particularly Iraq. Everything the neo-cons said about the Muslim world in the Bush years turned out to be wrong – disastrously wrong. There was a prohibition on pointing this out for a while, but Trump said it, in South Carolina of all places, and paid no price for it. Pretty much the only refuge for the neo-cons is to pretend that everyone was wrong and that Trump was just lucky in his opposition to the “invade the world” portion of neo-conservatism.
This bit is comical because it highlights the foreignness of the neo-cons and the Conventional Right.
The conservatism of Donald Trump is not the conservatism of ideas but of things. His politics do not derive from the works of Burke or Disraeli or Newman, nor is he a follower of Mill or Berlin or Moynihan. There is no theory of natural rights or small government or international relations that claims his loyalty. When he says he wants to “conserve our country,” he does not mean conserve the idea of countries, or a league of countries, or the slogans of democracy or equality or freedom, but this country, right now, as it exists in the real world of space and time. Trump’s relation to the intellectual community of both parties is fraught because his visceral, dispositional conservatism leads him to judgments based on specific details, depending on changing circumstances, relative to who is gaining and who is losing in a given moment.
What he is alluding to here is the deeply held belief, among Conventional Conservatives, that the true leaders of society are the men who manipulate ideas, not the men who manipulate other men or manipulate things. The great revulsion for Trump among our betters is they see him as a man that makes his way managing people things. He is not a man who operates in the realm of ideas. Therefore, he is disqualified from leading society. Continetti sees himself as Trump’s intellectual and moral superior.
This bit is laugh out loud funny.
His is a blunt and instinctive and demotic approach arrived at after decades in the zero-sum world of real estate and entertainment contract negotiations. His are sentiments honed by immediate, knee jerk, and sometimes inelegant reactions to events and personalities observed on Twitter or on “the shows.” And the goal of his particular conservatism is not adherence to an ideological program so much as it is to prevent the loss of specific goods: money, soldiers, guns, jobs, borders, national cohesion.
Guys like Continetti would not last five minutes in the world of real estate or the world of fast food, for that matter. If he were to get a job with Trump’s organization, it would be as a doorman or desk clerk. Maybe in a decade or so he could be in a position to make a decision, like selecting a cleaning contractor or a building maintenance vendor. The reason the Conventional Right is in crisis is that normal, conservative people, have grown weary of the smug condescension from useless know-it-alls like Continetti.
In fairness to Continetti, he does seem to be figuring it out a bit.
It is this specificity of attachment rather than adherence to a program that explains the divide between street corner conservatives and their political brethren. Many of the conservatives in Washington, D.C., myself included, arrived at their politics through study or experience at university, by encountering a great text, the coherence of natural law, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or the economics of Smith, Ricardo, Friedman, and Tullock. That is not the case for the street corner conservatives.
Continetti cannot bring himself to contemplate how the people he labels “street corner conservatives” arrived at their positions. That would require a degree of self-awareness that he lacks. He is far too concerned with distancing himself from these people, because Conventional Conservatism is nothing more than a buffer between the dominant ideology of Progressivism and the rest of us. In their heads, they are standing athwart history yelling “stop”, but in reality they are standing in front of you yelling “stop.”
I’ve gone way too long so I’ll circle back to this another day, but the whole vibe from the Conventional Right is of a collection of middle managers after a takeover. They are still wrapping their heads around the fact that the guys coming in are now in charge. The old company men will have to demonstrate their worth or be tossed out like obsolete furniture. In the end, they will come around, because they have no choice, but there will be plenty of moaning and complaining along the way.
Interesting that Continetti and others boast of their earnest search through the literature to arrive at their very principled positions. My conservatism started at 22 when I saw the mine fields and guard towers on the East German border (from the good side). It was reinforced a few weeks later when I experienced the no-man’s land and wall from the bad side. I assume others on this board had similar encounters with political reality. Having said that, the worst mistake made by the Weekly Standard crowd is about the same one as the lefty climate fanatics; they believe that their… Read more »
They yell at history to stop, but what have they actually stopped? It’s just empty, self-serving, virtue signaling. It doesn’t matter that we have to live in the world that they failed to protect, as long as they can feel superior.
i posted a comment on DailyCaller (maybe Breitbart) “congratulating” the conservatives for preserving our freedom of association, and it was too funny. a bunch of pinheads jumped all over my comment, and it was pretty clear they had no idea that freedom to associate also means freedom to not-associate. so of course they had no idea how much the conservatives had given away. i am collecting all the numb skull replies and will go back in for a laugh tonight.
Heh heh heh. “[Continetti et al] arrived at their politics through study or experience at university, by encountering a great text, the coherence of natural law, the philosophy of Plato…” Would that be the Plato who urged a dictatorship of philosopher-kings? And who tried to practice what he preached in Syracuse, with predictable results? Just out of curiosity, what’s the body count up to in regimes with eggheads in charge? 100 million? 150? Tl;dr: Blow it out your cassock, Your Holiness, I’ll take real world experience every time. There’s less genocide, for one thing….
Z-man, I’m confused. In the link you provided, Charles Cookie says that:
“We’ve had record traffic to the website since January, with both October and November representing the two busiest months in our history.”
I also looked at the Alexa graph but I don’t understand it. Please elaborate a bit on NRO traffic.
Charles can say he is a unicorn, but that does not make it so. The Alexa data is useful because it is relative numbers. In an election, political sites should see a spike in traffic. In the case of NRO, they did not get much of a bump at all, while other sites saw a big upward swings in traffic. The collapse of NR has been disguised a bit by the fact they had an active comment community until they nuked it and put Facebook in charge of their comments. The fact is, their print circulation evaporated years ago and… Read more »
I was going to comment on the Alexa graph anyway. The top graph indicates that NRO’s global site ranking has fallen from ~#3800 in January to ~#5600 today. They have far fewer visitors than they did before going full never-Trump. What I was going to add is that the graph a little further down the page shows the percentage of clicks coming from search engines has nearly doubled. For a regular small-time business, that would likely be a good thing, indicating that search engine optimization was proving effective. For NRO, when combined with the plummeting page ranking, it means they’ve… Read more »
Dead cat bounce?
dead cuck bounce
I can’t really elaborate on what Cookie was trying to say there. He could’ve just been lying. More likely, he was using some arbitrary metric to exaggerate how “busy” their site has been. By “traffic,” he may very well be citing the number of search engine clicks they have gotten. According to Alexa, the number of articles their visitors look at in one visit is down and the amount of time one reader spends on the site in one visit is down. Again, they’re losing the loyal readers. Loyal readers don’t care about the site appearance, or else they wouldn’t… Read more »
Sorry to spam like this, but one last thing. Checking on Breitbart’s site statistics, it’s obvious what’s going on here. A ton of old NRO et al. readers have migrated to Breitbart. Especially look at the uptick July-October. That’s where NRO’s readership really took a hit. The uptick doesn’t look as big for Breitbart as the downtick looks for NRO, but higher-ranked pages have far more visitors, skewing the ranking stats. Take into account that Breitbart’s loyalty metrics are generally up whereas NRO’s are down and the picture becomes crystal-clear. A lot of factors contributed to this. To me, the… Read more »
I see the Alt-Right as an insurgency of thinking and as a zeitgeist as responsible in part. Many facets of the Alt-Right is what conservatism could have evolved into and conserved.
You call them the “Conventional Right”. The writers at VDare.com have been calling them “Conservatism Inc.” for years. I think the second one hits the nail on the head better than the first. Than, again, Sundance coined the term “GOPe” which is pretty good as well. Continetti fancies himself as a “young gun”, Cooke as the snotty oh-so brilliant Brit as the “conservative” import telling us what to do from afar with his foreign (yet always fetching) accent. Then there’s that worthless Piece Of Shit Williamson writing a column the other day equating Trump with the murderous sons of Saddam… Read more »
I’ve used Conventional Right, Professional Right, Official Right, Conservative Inc., Buckley Right and maybe some others. It just depends upon my mood at the moment.
There are not words I know of adequate to exemplifying the meaning and scope of the great fuck you, the revolution which has begun, and the subsequent disgust I have for the scale of derision showered upon us dirt people for our audacity and rightful primal right of resistance in defying the estabilshment. It lays bare the corruption and arrogance of these mandarins and perfumed princes. To me, that is political science of profound proportions, and that not a single voice in the realm of political science of the day has risen above the collective and the cathedral in defense… Read more »
Left or right, it doesn’t matter. Their loyalty is to the cathedral, not the people voting for them.
Yes indeed, the actual bitter clingers.
It is difficult to convey something here. You are right, their allegiance is not to the governed. But there is something here that outweighs everything. It is betrayal. It is exactly because we as dirt people are not represented is what is at stake, it is the first thing. That it goes far beyond absence of representation, that have been played for suckers, our vulnerability as we trusted these self appointed gate keepers of the conservative faith, and systematically disenfranchised by such traitors via their use of guile and malice to shine us on and sirupticiously lead us down a… Read more »
Continetti is writing comedy, right? He and his kind arrived at a conservative philosophy “through study or experience at university, by encountering a great text, the coherence of natural law, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, or the economics of Smith, Ricardo, Friedman, and Tullock.” Few things are truly jaw-dropping stupid, but that conclusion certainly is. Calluses on hands? Not for him. A shovel handle? Ditto. Marching through dust, rain and snow? Oh, no! His take is scripted liberal/progressive – You street corner people are too dumb to know what is good for you.
That is the same impression reaction I had to that passage. My conservatism didn’t come through any of those texts. My conservatism came by growing up in a family of working class Eastern European immigrants who watched every penny that came in like a hawk, were mostly religious (though not necessarily church-going) and had an abundance of common sense!!! In other words, real life!
Continetti is selecting his life the way he selects an automobile, by reading the dealer brochure. I select my next automobile, by looking at the vehicle and taking a test drive. Actually, I think Continetti gave a very good description of the line and the barricade, In that sense he got it exactly right, he just took his stand on the wrong side of the issue. Growing up, I was a Goldwaterite before Goldwater.and later I have read many of those ethereal Conservative ur-documents. I was brought back to instinctive conservatism when I returned to grad school after Viet Nam,… Read more »
Don’t fall for it. All the faux “naval gazing” and finger pointing is just a distraction to 1) take any edge they can off the Trump win, and 2) plan and begin implementing their Plan B agenda to push back, defeat, delay, any advances that Trump and the Deplorables might intend to rack up. These vermin never quit. They might cry in their Chardonnay or Pinot Noir for awhile, but they will come after us with a vengeance. They are many. They are legion. They are despicable. But we are the Deplorables and know how to get shit done.
For the first time in their pathetic careers they got a real fight on their hands. In some ways I can’t but help have the suspicion they are fighting back against their own denial they are toast as much as any aspect of the bumrush of their irrelevancy and illegitimacy the election of Trump signifies.
Political irrelevancy served up cold by consent and withdrawal of our dirt people consent is tantamount to political assassination, aka impeachment, that Benjamin Franklin said was far more effective a political device against treason and tyranny than physical assassination.
that’s why they need to be expelled from the country.
You need never worry about going too long . Great post as usual.
I have a very dear friend that is a flaming liberal. Karma, the universe, Oprah, yada yada. As a rule we try to avoid politics and religion, but I couldn’t help myself. Her remarks were, unkind at the very least. I had to ask if she had felt the same about Trump when he was a democrat. Of course she did not have a lot to say.
Will they eventually fall into a wait and see mode, or will lifetime friendships just fall apart?
It’s a pity.
No, it is not a pity. It’s a cleansing that is long overdue. For far too long, upper-class and upper-middle-class Goodwhites have embraced liberalism in no small part because there have been few economic or social consequences to them. Stated otherwise: Goodwhites have successfully shifted the economic and social costs of liberalism onto working class whites. Last I checked, they are still not building Section 8 housing in Chappaqua. Your “very dear friend” is not a very dear friend in any meaningful sense of the term. She maintains the pretense of a friendship, but she will cheerfully throw you and… Read more »
Right now they are still following their old training. They expect everyone to say, “we’re sorry” for following Trump. They think the world will go back to what they’ve always experienced. They are the dogs whose master has died. No one is coming to pet them or tell them good boy. Their world has fundamentally changed they just don’t know it.
Pavlovian Dogs returning to their own vomit?
“The Iraq war, in this view, is an example of conservative writers and thinkers and politicians following trains of logic or desire to un-conservative conclusions.”
This is either dishonest or an example of cathedral doublethink. Logic? Absurd. Desire? Euphemistic at best. Perhaps there was a small nation in the Middle East that cares nothing for our conservatism whose interests were served by our destabilizing the region? A small nation with a big lobby?
I’m looking forward to watching the company men adjust to the realization that Trump better represents some of their interests better than anyone.
there is no future for people like Kristol and Contteneti; they have been passed by. Not that they were ever effective, but at least they could get a few sheckels from their masters by doing cute writer tricks.
Are they Lennin’s useful dupes? Or just how interrelated is the cathedral and it’s cucks to the cultural marxists? That old saying politics make for strange bedfellows comes to mind. How much of this unholy axis serendipity and how much conscious malicious treason against the natural and born conservative America of us dirt people? Did Alynski’s marxist’s strategically infiltrate the conservative after McCarthy’s purge, with the intent of never again? Looking back, what is the pivotal event that signifies the corruption of American conservatism politics? Is there even a defining event act or moment?
These guys are the right wing of liberalism. The fatal flaw of liberalism, in the classical sense not the modern usage, is they believe every problem can be solved intellectually. In particular, they believe evil can be reasoned with, like when Neville Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler.
Having the right ideas only goes so far, you have to make them real.
It’s the law of the lowest common denominator which makes such a fatal ideology possible, or is that collective insanity. Hard to differentiate sometimes, maybe that is because of the similarity between the two.
Something I forgot to add to the above: every time liberalism(this included official conservatism) tries to negotiate with or reason with Marxism or the modern left, they lose. It doesn’t work.
Can’t reason with something and it’s collective that isn’t based in reason to begin with. It’s purpose is to destroy reason so it can as we see every day destroy us dirt people.
You have to destroy it, before it destroys you.
That is interesting. Because when I read a piece by someone like Continetti, I’m often struck by how disconnected from real life they seem. It is like I am reading a New York Times book review, or an academic article in that has been peer-reviewed. I have better things to do than to push myself like a pretzel thinking about and writing about conservative theory like these people do. Does any of it matter? I think the answer they are getting lately is that it does not matter. It doesn’t matter because it doesn’t resonate with people anymore.
That’s because when you get down to the crux of it, they are degenerate liars who have made a career and industry out selling lies.
“They are men of the multiple choice exam. Their options are always bounded by the number of choices provided to them.”
With all the derision multiple choice exams get, don’t they more closely mirror how real life operates? You are given a series of options and you choose the most correct option, often by means of deductive reasoning. Decisions in life usually don’t get made by giving an essay answer to an exam question.
This is GREAT! Snark at it’s finest! Included are a lot of the cast of characters Z is talking about.
http://takimag.com/article/the_16_most_annoying_people_of_2016_jim_goad/print#axzz4U4DxgLAZ
A must read…
I recall a Z-essay around the summer of ’15 about the inevitability of Jeb and Hillary. I drew my Peacemaker and shot those two critters right out of the saddle, although further experience showed I was too confident of killing Hillary. But a foretelling of a Trump Presidency would have knocked me down with a feather. This has been a long process of learning Trump, of Trump himself learning, of generally keeping up with things we little knew and did not anticipate. It;s been fun, it is fun. This is the first site I visit to get my thoughts in… Read more »