I Told You So...

Assholes

Self-quotation is a terrible habit in a writer, combining the vices of vanity and sloth. So is the related crime of telling people, “I told you so.” But we live in vicious times, and I have never made claims to virtue, authorial or otherwise. I’m about to tell you how I told you so. It will be mercifully brief, because I’m currently indulging in another writerly peccadillo: settling a score through a literary review.

I can’t help but smirk again at this irony. Christopher Rufo, a Manhattan Institute made man, is complaining again about the deplorable conditions of discourse on the right.—

This is quite rich considering Rufo made his bones in the movement as a vulgar propagandist, doing things like spreading lies about Haitian cat eaters in Ohio or suggesting that scammers in Minnesota have been funding Al-Qaeda offshoots in Somalia, a claim that even the Trump DOJ rebuts. While decrying the suddenly rampant racism and antisemitism on the right, Rufo routinely demeans the intelligence and moral worth of Somali-Americans. Or acts as a sophist for a White Nationalist up for a Senate-approved post in the administration.

Is this hypocrisy, stupidity, or unabashed malevolence? Try all three: it’s politics. Specifically, it’s the politics of the American Conservative Movement. People cry out for a new William F. Buckley. Give the title to Rufo, I say; he’s doing the job already.

This is the pattern of conservative movement intellectuals for, not the past 20, not the past 40, but the past 70 years. It goes back to the very beginning when Buckley and Bozell offered their rationalization of McCarthyism. As I wrote for The New Republic in 2020:

The fact of the matter, then as now, is that ideas on the right are not so much irreconcilable as they are irrelevant. More than principle, the presence of threat and an enemy is the most important driver of right-wing energy, and since the end of the Cold War, the hunt for enemies has become ever more desperate. That’s especially been the case from the moment since the wars on terrorism and Iraq failed to coalesce the movement—let alone the country—into any viable political coalition for any sustained interval beyond the moment they launched.

Still, the struggle continues. The conservative intellectual has traditionally achieved his greatest cachet as an apologist of just this sort of existential combat. Ever since the height of the mid-century anti-communist frenzy, the right-wing intellectual’s charge has been to lend the imprimatur of cultural seriousness to political confrontations and mass movements not of his own making. It was only after the ebbing of Joseph McCar­thy’s highest point of power, in 1954, that William F. Buckley Jr. and L. Brent Bozell published McCarthy and His Enemies. In that faux-daring apologia, the authors admitted the abundant weakness of McCar­thy the man, and even called his actions “reprehensible,” but argued fiercely for the cultural-therapeutic value of McCarthyism as a movement. Here, Bozell and Buckley insisted, was an idea born out of political conflict—and a valuable “program of action against those ... who help our enemy.” Warming to their subject, they also hailed Tail Gunner Joe’s unhinged crusade as a “weapon in the American arsenal” against Communism, alongside the atom bomb, and called for men of “good will and stern morality” to “close ranks” around it.

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.

These patterns repeat themselves over and over in elite circles of conservative opinion-making.

Over and over and over and over. They promoted Sarah Palin and then acted shocked at Trump’s vulgarity. They summoned hell with Trump and then acted shocked that a demon like Fuentes is running amok in their ranks. They promoted the Lite Nationalism of National Conservatism and now are nervous about their “Nazi Problem”—Laura Loomer’s words, not mine. Will they ever learn? No, this is what they do. They are professionally unself-reflective. They are alternately cynical and gullible as their careers demand. They want to ride in the storm and direct the whirlwind, but may well find themselves knocked on their ass. What they never seem to remember is that it’s much easier to whip up the mob than to hold it back—especially when it starts to turn on you.