Everyone knows that liberals are dumb. From social security to Sorkin, their endless harebrained schemes and subversive plots to corrupt your innocent children are eating away at the very foundation of our great nation—a nation that will eventually collapse because of their corruption, greed, and monstrous stupidity. The world would be a more wholesome place if liberals would simply give up their wicked ways and become good conservatives.
Right? Well, no, although, to hear many of the most popular conservative spokesmen, you might think so. It’s a sad thing when an intellectual movement inspired by such high-caliber scholars as Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman is publicly reduced to the name-calling, overgeneralizations, and erroneous accusations represented above. If conservatism’s future leaders would return to the old shared texts that so defined their forebears, we’d see not only a more effective group of activists but also a more viable movement—a movement with the potential to win not only short-term policy battles but also the hearts and minds of the American people. As it is now, I do wish more of my liberal friends would become conservatives, but I don’t think the world will magically become a better place if they do. In fact, though I disagree with them, I have liberal friends who are decidedly more rational than some of my conservative friends. If liberals are stupid and wicked, they are no more so than a lot of the conservatives I’ve met.
When I was a teenager working in Washington, DC, I was surprised by how little many of my coworkers’ lives differed from those of their liberal counterparts once the workday ended. You’d think that a day spent pondering and fighting for such treasures as the lives of unborn children, traditional marriages, and freedom of speech might change a man’s habits once he’s at home—and often it does. But not often enough.
For example, it’s been frequently said that there are two kinds of people in Washington: those who get drunk and those who don’t. It still strikes me as odd that this is true even within a movement so foundationally centered on the virtues of moderation and personal responsibility. There is nothing wrong with drinking, in and of itself, but drinking more than one can handle is at best irresponsible, and is arguably opposed to conservative ideals. That doesn’t keep many conservatives from doing it. The same is true of other vices. Marital unfaithfulness is certainly opposed to the pro-family values many conservatives claim to espouse, but divorce rates are high across the board, and conservative public figures have definitely had their share of sex scandals. If anyone should know better, conservatives should—but if numbers are any indication, they don’t.
Of course, there are major exceptions. Many fine people do great work in Washington, and I was privileged to spend time with a number of them. Morton Blackwell and then-Congressman Jim Ryun particularly stood out to me as good examples of the sort of humility and integrity one hopes to find among those who help determine our nation’s future. I spent several months working for Congressman Ryun on Capitol Hill, and I quickly discovered that you can learn a lot about a man by watching the way he treats the people who can’t do anything to further his career. I was just a young intern, but Congressman Ryun never failed to treat me with the same dignity and courtesy he offered everyone who came into his office. Not everyone was so welcoming, and the contrast was stark. One afternoon, as I walked through the tunnels underneath the Capitol, Congressman Barney Frank came barreling through a corridor, crashing into me so that I dropped what I was carrying and nearly fell over. It was only an accident, but I will not soon forget the furious glare I received at having been in his path. There are good people in Washington, but there are also a lot of decidedly unpleasant characters.
I remember watching one young volunteer eagerly pass out literature about a candidate’s excellent qualifications—his rock-solid marriage, fiscal record, voting record, etc. At first I was impressed with my friend’s energetic efforts to do all he could to help the candidate. Then he admitted that he was really working only because he couldn’t wait to get drunk on the free booze that would be served at the campaign headquarters at the end of the evening—besides, there would be girls there.
Another acquaintance boasted to me once that he’d make a terrific candidate when he was older, because he really was a conservative, “not like those guys in Washington.” Besides, he hadn’t made many of the mistakes that would help his opponents make him look bad—just “that one orgy in the backyard that one time.” A phone call interrupted his boasting. He answered and spent a few moments protesting to the woman on the line that he’d never heard of her. When she persisted, he finally admitted that he must have been drunk when they’d slept together. She was upset; he finally shouted, “Hell, I don’t remember it. Was I good?” and hung up. He turned back to me and laughed— “One night and it’s like they think it means something.” He went back to telling me how ardently conservative he was. I couldn’t help wondering, as he described his love of freedom and his wish that “those libs” would take more responsibility for their bad decisions, how he managed to justify his own actions. I didn’t ask—he wouldn’t have understood the question.
Drawn by the excitement generated by a popular candidate or policy, many of my peers accepted conservatism because it had been presented to them in an attractive way, not because they understood why the principles it promotes are true. Promises of “babes and beer” may help win elections and increase numbers in the short term, but they’re a poor way to build up future leaders. They’re also one of the most effective ways to get a young recruit’s attention, especially when that recruit is ill-equipped to tackle ideas and arguments.
Organizations like the Leadership Institute, where I interned for several months, do an admirable job training young conservatives to be effective activists; however, they are necessarily limited by the quality (or lack thereof) of the education their young protégés received while growing up. There’s a lot of value to the sort of training and mentorship available from places like the Leadership Institute, but it’s difficult to undo the damage done by the kind of instruction most young activists receive in school.
Take my promiscuous conservative friend, for instance. He’d graduated from a good university, and he was intelligent. In a way, he was right—he had the potential to be a good candidate. He’d been well trained for the job, and his political philosophy was sound. Unfortunately, he’d been taught to assume that his moral philosophy could rightly be kept separate from his other beliefs and actions. He understood that ideas have consequences, but only partially—he didn’t realize the extent to which the consequences of his ideas about morality were relevant to his political aspirations. Worse, he assumed that his personal virtue should have little to do with his career goals. He seemed to have no idea how internally fragmented he was, or how completely his education had failed to unify his beliefs. He had a good mind, but it was so enslaved to his appetites as to be almost useless to both him and to the movement he wanted to endorse.
He wasn’t the first to be so fragmented, nor was he the last to let his appetites overrule his reason. That’s part of why the “babes and beer” recruiting my other friend so appreciated is common—people use it because it works.
It’s also part of why so many of the movement’s spokesmen are stuck on the overly simplistic “Liberals are dumb” meme—it’s the closest thing my generation has to a shared text. Our parents grew up with National Review, but we grew up with Sesame Street—and, as a result, radio, TV, and the Internet have had a much bigger impact on most of us than any book has. Since none of these mediums are particularly suited to the time-consuming give-and-take of a thoughtful, honest dialogue, most of us simply don’t know how to confront an opponent’s ideas fairly. It’s easier to conclude, with the talk show hosts, that “liberals are dumb,” and to rally the troops to action with the assumption that our nation is in constant danger of being overtaken by unthinking morons.
To be fair, I suppose some of this is to be expected. Every successful movement has—and needs—its thinkers and its doers, and these are not always the same people. Most individuals become one or the other, not both. The conservative revolution of the 1960s was unique in that it was made up of a group of people who could both think well and act effectively—a formidable combination. This was no accident; these leaders had to be cultivated. The Right can’t rest forever on the backs of the Buckleys and Blackwells, who so successfully matched philosophy and action; if the movement is to grow and thrive in the coming years, my peers and I must learn to duplicate their integration. This much-needed balance was not an accident of earlier times, but rather the result of intentional efforts to keep ideas and actions in an appropriate tension. Future leaders must learn to cultivate this balance, but most are not very well equipped to do so.
My generation’s forebears were fortunate in that their elders were willing to tell them when they were ignorant—but for our entire lives, our elders have been too busy trying to emulate us to even realize how poorly they taught us. Students are no longer given a sound grounding in the liberal arts in school, so it’s no wonder they don’t know how to grapple with difficult ideas properly. Like so many other young people throughout history, they fail to think through their decisions and end up fighting fiercely for something they cannot always fully define.
It doesn’t have to be this way; after all, most of the very best texts in the Western canon are still readily obtainable in good English translations—thanks to the Internet, more are available than ever before. I was fortunate to discover this fact at the same time that I was learning how to be an effective activist. While working in Washington, I accepted an invitation to study at the Torrey Honors Institute, a Great Books program at Biola University. I had no idea that I’d stumbled upon one of the most rigorous classical education programs in the country—and one of academia’s best-kept secrets.
Once in California, I dove into volume upon volume of Homer, Dante, Locke, Augustine, Shakespeare, and many other members of the great Western Canon. I loved my studies but was eager to get back to work in Washington—Plato and Aristotle were exhilarating and life-changing, but weren’t there also elections to be won and jobs to be had? Hours spent in the library during the 2000 election left me frustrated and feisty. What was I doing locked up in an ivory tower when the future of the free world was at stake? I loved school, but I also missed the constant sense of urgency and the sort of “battle spirit” I’d felt in Washington.
My political training and my college classes didn’t seem to have much in common at first. At the Leadership Institute, I gathered a lot of practical “nuts and bolts” knowledge about how to be an effective conservative activist, and at the Torrey Honors Institute, my professors were eager to teach me how to think well, how to argue fairly and effectively, how to love God and country, and how to live an upright life. I eventually discovered that not only did these two very different educational emphases complement each other beautifully, but each really needed the other. People who are eager to act must first learn to think well and to love the right things well. Likewise, thinkers must learn to resist the temptation to gorge themselves on knowledge without turning that knowledge into useful action.
This realization didn’t always keep me from feeling restless, but halfway through college I stumbled upon a passage in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov that made all the difference. The passage describes Alyosha, a young man who was so serious about a cause that he was willing to sacrifice his life for it; yet even with all his fervor, he was unwilling to do the hard intellectual work that would train him to think well and thus defend his cause most effectively. This describes so many young activists who are eager to represent a good cause but are unwilling to make the most important sacrifices. After a lot of thought, I decided I’d be more useful in the culture wars if I slowed down, stopped trying to get back into the election-cycle workforce, and instead spent more time trying to understand Dante’s vision of Paradise, or even Hume’s skepticism. This life-altering approach has always been difficult for young people, but it is especially rare now—and it is precisely the sort of long-term investment conservatives absolutely must make if they wish to have a serious impact. Conservatism would benefit tremendously if today’s young activists would spend a little less time networking and a lot more time allowing the West’s best foundational texts to change their lives.
Now that I’m out of college and have a family to think about, I still haven’t made it back to Washington as I’d always planned—but this doesn’t mean I can’t have a place within the movement. To start with, I’m a mother and a homemaker, and this obviously means I have a hand in shaping the next generation. This is invaluable, but thanks to the Internet, I can also be active in more immediate ways. The digital revolution is enabling parents to keep their family life centered in the home while also earning a living, and this is good news for conservatives who want to have both a healthy family life and a larger cultural impact. For example, I edited a couple of books a few years ago, and was home to watch my daughter take her first steps while I sat working at my laptop. It made no difference to the authors or publishers that I worked on their books at my kitchen table, but it made all the difference in the world to my family. These days, I do nearly all my writing from my home. My audience can’t tell the difference, and my daughter has no idea that such work is typically done in an office while the children are in daycare. She’ll grow up knowing that a woman can have both a successful career and enjoy the traditional conservative ideals of home and family. That’s as it should be, and more conservative families should take advantage of these opportunities.
They should also take advantage of the wealth of intellectual resources available to them when teaching both themselves and their children. My generation is stilsl young—we still have time to learn how to become the sort of productive, intelligent, and virtuous people whose talents and influence the conservative movement so needs, and we’re certainly young enough to ensure that our children are better educated than we were. If young, politically savvy activists will revive the old shared texts and moral ideals in a winsome, open, intellectually honest way, we will be uniquely able to bring the movement into a renaissance with the power to shape not only public policy but also the future of the very Western culture we strive to protect.