From Shitpost to Bullshit

The Function of Conservative Intellectuals

In a post last week, I discussed Erick Erickson’s j’accuse about the Nazis lurking on the American right. I sketched a theory about the function of conservative intellectuals: they are not leaders of their movement; they do not set the agenda or advance ideas; their role is rather to mediate and to justify, rationalize, and euphemize. They sometimes understand themselves as guiding the debate, but in fact they have a subaltern position. Whatever authority they have comes not from setting the party line, so to speak, but from trying to smooth its rhetorical contours into something more socially acceptable.

It occurred to me that this problematic—just what are conservative intellectuals?—is one of the central things I’ve tried to tackle in my work over the past decade. The idea that they don’t have a leading or even guiding role is something I landed on pretty early. In a piece I did for The New Republic back in 2020, I already had something like an early version of this theory:

While dramatizing the practical political irrelevance of ideas, the McCarthy legacy on the right also highlights the second rule governing the modern conservative movement: the indispensability of the mob and its demagogues. Again and again, conservative intellectuals have fastened themselves like barnacles onto demagogic movements such as the ones led by McCarthy or Trump; if they don’t, they risk cutting themselves off from mass politics entirely. That specter always means doom for right-wing intellectuals, since it effectively dispels what small amount of influence they can have, as well as their subscribers, viewers, and donors.

Then speculating on what the function of Twitter would be under the Musk regime back in 2022, I wrote:

An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters.

In my piece on Erick Erickson, I borrowed the useful if not exactly beautiful term “conjunctural intellectual” —as opposed to Gramsci’s concept of an “organic intellectual”—from Carley via A.J.A. Wood’s great The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy book. Basically, a conjunctural intellectual is a kind of ideas-entrepreneur who opportunistically integrates themselves into an existing movement or party during a particular crisis and makes a name and career for themselves from it, creating its rhetoric, slogans, concepts, and programs. On the one hand, that sounds polemical and suggests a little bit of cynicism on my part—and it’s meant to—but on the other, they are doing actual intellectual labor and filling a real political need.

As it so happens, there was another great illustrative moment this past week. Bo French, the Republican nominee for the Texas Railroad Commission, posted a photograph of Desi students celebrating a University of Texas football victory and suggested that the image showed how many Americans had been “displaced by foreigners.” This caused a fracas inside the Republican Party: John Cornyn and other Texas Republicans condemned it, while Karl Rove went so far as to say he would vote for French’s Democratic opponent. French, however, doubled down. Meanwhile, the right-wing internet went wild. Some people said the outrage was because the students “weren’t assimilated,” but more astute commentators, as we must now call anybody with a moderately functioning brain, pointed out that what they were saying was exactly what it was: a plainly racist post. Some said this approvingly and encouraged the right to finally drop its hypocrisy and replace its mask of respectability with a Klansman’s hood.

A few days later, Christopher Rufo and Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman devoted an episode of their podcast to what they pretentiously called “The Indian Question.” Their own chapter headings give a good sense of the discussion: beginning with the “Bo French Tweet” and the backlash to Indian immigration, they move through H-1B visas and assimilation to “Race, Class, and the ‘Indian Question,’” “Homogeneity, Diversity, and American Identity,” and finally immigration reform.

You will probably be aware of who Rufo is: he’s the “CRT” backlash guy and a member of the “respectable right” in good standing; he became a City Journal contributing editor in 2019 and joined the Manhattan Institute as a senior fellow in 2021. Tony digs for a seedy guy. Lomez, aka Jonathan Keeperman, is a character you have to be more online to recognize. He’s a longtime anonymous racist troll on Twitter who crawled out of the digital gutter recently to set himself up as a public figure and publisher.

This whole encounter gives us a molecular-level snapshot of the metabolic process of the conservative movement in action. This is how the sausage is made, if you’ll forgive the cliché. You can see how they try to massage the issue into something more respectable and legitimate. The racism is not really repudiated; it is treated with sympathy, as something with an understandable root, but expressed in an embarrassingly crude form. The intellectuals’ task is then to rescue the “rational kernel” of grievance and paranoia from the language in which it first appeared. “Too many Indians” becomes a discussion of H-1Bs, assimilation, social trust, cultural cohesion, and national identity. Some of the vulgarity is thereby stripped away through abstraction.

Rufo is a conjunctural intellectual: a political entrepreneur who became prominent by identifying conflicts developing on the right and translating cultural controversies into politically usable concepts and then into institutional campaigns. But Lomez is an organic intellectual: he’s the real deal; he comes from the mob; he represents the rabble and provides his cachet of subcultural authenticity. Shitposter, meet bullshitter.

Needless to say, this is a highly pernicious process: What was merely an irrational outburst of mob sentiment becomes workable material for an organized political movement: potential rhetorical tropes, policy programs, and talking points. The entire exercise is, “Here’s how to be a racist in a smart and polite-sounding way.” It’s intellectual work that’s actually harder to do in the internet era: When there’s so much hardcore freely available out there, how are you gonna get them to subscribe to Cinemax? It’s meant to socialize and civilize and make this stuff more palatable to more people than the real perverts. As for themselves, they’ve accomplished something that the medieval alchemists never could, though: a formula for turning excrement into gold.