The unholy trinity of big-think social commentary—decades analysis, generations analysis, and the analysis of one’s own personal story—are as popular as they are perilous. Together, they’re as reflexively snarked upon by the commentariat as they are relied upon to show us, time and again, who we are and what we’re doing. For a certain sort of person who reached adulthood in the 2000s, it’s as uncomfortable to jettison these frameworks as it is to measure one’s life by them. Many young conservatives—I am one—who were not to the movement born have nonetheless wound up professionalizing their political disposition, in print, on television, online, and in strange hybrids of these media. Our long, late decade has paralleled and reinforced the unscripted character of their lives, in a way persistently at odds with what appears to be the uniform and official quality of the mechanism that often produces pundits on the right. The way these quasi-itinerants have grown up conservative in a disrupted decade is not just interesting; it is important—to our understanding of conservatism and careerism in America. For these unorthodox members of a rising generation, it has never been enough to be conservative and important. On top of these things—and, at times, beyond them—they have insisted on being interesting.
There is no way to get disgustingly rich and famous from being the most interesting conservative you can be. On the evidence of the past ten years, I avow that you can’t make a living at it. You cannot even win a prize. This is a shame, because I have slowly learned, after brushes with stardom as a bad boy novelist and a brooding, indie-glam front man, that there’s no other way I’d find getting disgustingly rich and famous to be worth it. Talking about wealth and fame in this way is unrefined, but studies show that high school seniors and college freshmen want those things together more than everything else combined. And they are being trained to do whatever it takes. Public opinion, alas, is more unsympathetic to my plight than the kiddies’. They, after all, can no longer count on the investment bank or the Internet startup to spirit them into the Promised Land. I and my fellow travelers, on the other hand, never started counting. We were after something different, and we acted like it.
Once alerted to your conservatism, most people do not believe you when you tell them you are interesting. They chalk up your worldly exploits and subtleties of spirit to an unearned luxury—the product of unresolved internal contradictions, lazy hypocrisy, or subterranean false consciousness. Faced with this kind of misunderstanding and disappointment—few celebrities or organization kids can cope with it un-medicated—the dutiful life of a family man offers a refuge of joy and repose that fame and fortune cannot. This is especially the case when you are married, as am I, to a former television actress and brooding trip-hop front woman. Those brushed enough with stardom lose the longing to dip. Even on the DC happy-hour circuit—to the young professional conservative, what the Greyhound bus terminal in Hollywood is to the aspiring actress—the gnarled, attention-grasping sinews relax … the mind unfolds from its customary fist shape … you no longer find yourself thinking of yourself as the Kanye West of the Right-wing blogosphere.
Given booze enough and time, you discover there are interesting conservatives all around you. Most interesting of all, you very gradually discover that many of them stand in ambiguous, unsettled relation to professional conservatism—though their profession, one way or the other, is, indeed, to be conservative … one way or the other.
In a disrupted decade such as the 2000s, the absence of neat and streamlined career paths, even in a city as captive to them as Washington, should surprise no one. But the farm system or pipeline that professionalizes conservatives into “the movement” is so seemingly self-sufficient and self-perpetuating that the deeper story of professional conservatives who are not products of the pipeline goes obscured. The consequent judgment that professional conservatives, as a rule, are more wholly and comfortably committed to their outfit and its practices than the average Marine is to his reinforces the prejudice that professional conservatism is a closed system, a place where people with no outside interests or abilities go to congratulate each other, in business casual over bad gin and tonics, for being more conventional, more upstanding, and, of course, more right—in Nixon-speak, more Orthogonian—than everyone else. Amid the endless disruptions of the ’00s, movement wonkery and punditry attained such a preternatural flatline in their “message discipline” that people who were not conservatives for a living could be excused for mistaking caricature for reality. But even within the industry, the suspicion can no longer be dismissed that some of conservatism’s marquee institutions and personalities are too vulnerable to the sort of contemptuous ridicule enjoyed by regular people who are certain that conservatives—professional conservatives, above all—must be unfit for life off the reservation, unable and unwilling to function in any truly human environment.
Among those of us who have marked out our irregular twenties during this uneven, unquiet decade are conservatives who cannot in any coherent sense be called Orthogonian. We have not lived our lives at Right angles. Nor have we lived them obtusely, jutting out to the Left. Our angles, though a bit off-center, open acutely to the Right. My fellow blogger at Postmodern Conservative, the young math theorist Will Wilson, instructed me once that a curve “whose kurtosis is slightly smaller than ortho” is what’s known as a “leptokurtic” curve. “Presumably,” he concluded, “a leptogonal angle is slightly narrower than an orthogonal one.”
That makes us—Leptogonians.
Conservatives Are People Too! is the name of a book that will probably be written but should never be published. In the best magazine article on the demise of the society-and-politics Web site Culture11—I was its first and last political editor—Washington Monthly editor Charles Homans provoked me to say that the conservative movement could use, and should welcome, more repentant and recovering twenty- or thirty-somethings—freshly minted adults whose look back on their dissolute, dysfunctional, and possibly undignified young lives leaves them ready to raise their expectations. I stand by this remark, but Glenn Beck was not who I had in mind. When it comes to Becks who proffer culture commentary, I prefer my hipster hero Beck Hansen, whose conservative soul distills more wisdom into a few bars than the therapeutic pundit—call him a therapundit—can muster in a whole TV harangue: “This town is crazy/and nobody cares/Baby you’re lost/baby you’re a lost cause.”
Glenn Beck must not have been a lost cause, because here he is, recovering addict and ADHD diagnosée, a professional conservative disgustingly rich and famous. It seems the phenomenon termed “the triumph of the therapeutic” by my nerd hero, Philip Rieff, has outfoxed me once again: in a world where therapy is woven into the fabric of human experience, casualties of the soft bigotry of liberal permissiveness are likely to work as conservatives in the same emotional register as the liberally permissive themselves. If Rush Limbaugh is the Right’s Oprah Winfrey, as Reihan Salam has suggested, Glenn Beck is surely its Tyra Banks.
Possibly I failed to see how the Glenn Becks of the world figured into my vision because Glenn Beck is not at all from the generational cohort I had in mind—mine. Born in 1964, Beck is two years the junior of another therapundit: Chuck Palahniuk, whose immortal Fight Club is nearly as profound an apparent monument to the 2000s as Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater. Palahniuk opened our long, disrupted decade just as Beck finished it out: by imposing an instantly accessible, fully comprehensive worldview onto our national character, and insisting that we have no real choice but to partake of it. Where psychotherapy supplies the patient with an analytical framework that allows him to cope with the pathologies underlying his symptoms, therapunditry makes patients of us all by analyzing the whole world as an inescapable crisis that can never be cured. Only commitment to a certain attitude or approach, to a way of seeing the world, will suffice as a coping mechanism. We are disentitled to make sense of the world as it is and as we are, and to organize our responses accordingly. Whatever it may be, the political upshot of this therapeutic view is ancillary to the personal:
We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives.
As the movie Fight Club made famous: “I can’t get married,” Ed Norton’s character complains to Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden. “I’m a thirty-year-old boy.” Deep thoughts, for the twenty-year-old boy in the audience nursing a vague but powerful urge to be the next Bret Easton Ellis (or is it David Bowie?). But ten years on, that thirty-year-old husband and father laughs. You think that’s depressing? How about “I can’t get married. I’m a forty-year-old virgin.” It’s Judd Apatow, three years younger again than Glenn Beck, who better understands that, for those who came of age within them, the ’00s weren’t about great, epochal depressions but pervasive, low-intensity disruptions. The Fight Club fantasy of creating lives of chaos loses its romance in a decade defined by the unreliability of personal, professional, and political structures and by the unpredictability of events. Though it sounded right at the time—who couldn’t relate to a guy with an all-consuming desire to face-punch Jared Leto into oblivion?—Durden’s credo proved to be a bitter last gasp of nostalgia for a menu of life choices narrowed dramatically by world-historical circumstance.
For millennial spokesmen like Benjamin Kunkel, born 1972, that conditioning isn’t a dream but a nightmare. Indecision, his debut novel released in 2005 (exactly midway between Fight Club and the children’s version of The Christmas Sweater), viewed 9/11 from the perspective of Dwight Wilmerding, a supposedly characteristic ‘00s twenty-eight-year-old. Dwight’s formative experience is the end of the Cold War, which is analogized to his parents’ bad marriage. As, I think, with Beck, coping with parental failure animates the wounded souls of both Fight Club and Indecision. Where Palahniuk responds with a call to orphans to find their solidarity in violence, Kunkel finds them seeking togetherness in the safe space of a structured environment. For Kunkel, the ‘90s embodied just that juvenile fantasy—a post-political redemption of all the ‘80s childhoods ruined by failed marriages, “a permanent future that we can rely on!” Or, because the line is delivered in an ecstasy puddle (during the dawn hours of 9/11), “Warm milk and guaranteed tender safety for all honest mammals willing to work a twenty-hour week!” This is post-politics with the state as genderless parent—one that’s, impossibly, as cool as it is loving. Where the Wild Things Are meets Romper Room meets Nerve.
For Kunkel, the childish ridiculousness of this utopian decade, imaginable up to the minute before the towers were struck, is admittedly self-conscious. But that’s a badge of pride. Its poetry, as liberal philosopher Richard Rorty taught our latchkey coeds, must still be taken seriously—as our only possible source of inspiration. May I present Dwight Wilmerding’s credo:
Everyone sort of being gay! Or lesbian! Free public psychoanalysis for everyone! Lavish state-funded group therapy in the nude! Very colorful umbrellas and no more rain!
Dwight’s is the consummate therapunditry, prescribing our nation of patients nothing more or less than itself. The medium is the message. The self-realized hell on earth of Palahniuk’s transcendent homosexual allegory (a queerness lost on me in 1999) is to be replaced, in the minds of anyone who had ever had hope for the ’00s, with the self-realized heaven on earth of a transcendently pansexual up-past-bedtime story.
Or so we are led to believe. But—Conservatives Are People Too! We Leptogonians had greater hopes for the disrupted decade that dragged us into adulthood! But we have little use for state funding and none for group therapy, and we are as disagreeable about public nudity as we are about twirling umbrellas on a clear blue day.
Though they’re almost of the same generation as we Leptogonians, who entered our thirtieth decade as the twenty-first century entered its second, people like Kunkel are put off by our cultural dispositions. Again, the politics is merely symptomatic: the root pathology is that we’re dreaming the wrong dreams. Kunkel, a founder of the very colorful n + 1 umbrella group, may himself be decadent enough a curator of his vibrant social network to count among his friends conservatives who have written novels and played in real live rock bands, painted a picture or built a house. He has probably even exchanged e-mails with a conservative who has read Indecision.
When I made to Charles Homans the remarks that I did, I had in mind someone less like Glenn Beck and more like Dwight Wilmerding—though even Dwight is hardly Leptogonian material. Dwight has a condition, abulia, a medically treatable inability to make decisions; we Leptogonians have a predicament we decline to medicate, manifest in our habitual excess of decisions. Bands, blogs, books, PhDs, businesses, babies, new lives in new places: over time, at least, these are not either/or propositions. Dwight’s catharsis is the possibility of release from life as a chronic patient; we Leptogonians struggle not over agency itself but over which kind of agent to be, and when, and for how long. Our chronic failure to accept Plato’s dictum, one man, one art, has led us on a sometime goose chase, sometime minotaur hunt more in accordance with the oracular Socratic credo know thyself. Marx was writing bad poetry when he dreamed of hunting at dawn, fishing at noon, cattle-rustling at sunset, and writing essays like this one “after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.” But we have been—and still are and will be—musicians, screenwriters, scholars, artists, or craftsmen, builders and makers of larger or smaller but invariably human-proportioned things. Cosmopolitan boys and girls not quite as high in the culture club as Benjamin Kunkel may not know how to believe it, but it is the truth, written across the years of our Leptogonian lives.
My case is exemplary but unexceptional. Like Mark Hemingway, Washington Examiner columnist and editor, I was in a band before I blogged a word about politics. When Mark meets new people, and riffs on playing the 9:30 Club or sharing a stage with Stellastarr,* “it’s always assumed I’m one of them. When they later find out the same guy goes to the Lutheran church every week and worked at National Review, it just does not compute.” (He calls this “the riddle of Mark Hemingway.”) I put together my band after an upstairs neighbor came down to ask about the noise and handed me her Rolling Stone business card. We had a manager and an attorney before we had a demo, and we filmed a video in Glen Ballard’s High Window studio the day Marlon Brando died in a hospital across town. Nobody asked about my politics. Then again, I didn’t tell. The only exception: my drummer, press man for Consumer Watchdog and longtime volunteer for TreePeople. He was my closest friend in LA. We’re still recording music.
Like Sam Goldman, I left the sweat and the stage for academia. One recent evening I found Sam donning suit and tie to catch a Lincoln Center performance of Webern’s piano music—fat, dark bruise still pulsing from the head punch he had taken the night before in the mosh pit at the Cro-Mags show. At my behest, he reflected on his long friendship, forged onstage and off in the hard-core scene, with crack Lefty pundit Spencer Ackerman. Out of reflex, you might suspect Sam Goldman to be a blogger at Think Progress, or the brainchild of the Vote or Die campaign; but Sam blogs at Pomocon, and he is the brainchild of a dissertation on Spinoza’s theologico-political theory. No, he doesn’t shave his head anymore—nor do I wear eyeliner. But he still considers “the way participants in hard-core create and preserve relations of trust and responsibility—without a party platform or formal institutions” to be a good example “of the kind of organic, noninstrumental association conservatives should respect.” I can add another. LA’s vampirism and gangrene of soul were always poised to corrupt me forever, but that was half the charm of LA as I sought out the girl for me. When she found me, by the grace of God, the spell was broken. A month after we met, my wife-to-be broke up her band, I broke up mine, and soon after that we were gone.
Like J. P. Freire, who came to the Examiner by way of The American Spectator, I came to DC because I knew that was where the movement was. “There’s no way I would have considered going into journalism,” J. P. told me not long ago, had there not been a job “greeting me right out of college.” He would have “gone into management consulting, or taken a job at some Fortune 500 company that was in my hometown or somewhere in New York. I just would’ve started doing the recruiting thing,” he said. “I would’ve met with job recruiters and tried to see where I’d wind up.” Professional conservatism offers a philosophy and aesthetic independent of the American career pipeline, which we Leptogonians characteristically reject. For all the blows Fight Club landed in its assault on the anonymity and ennui of corporate life, Tyler Durden had to send an army of anti-interns to blow up the home offices of the credit card companies. Back then, the system still stood on its own two feet. We Leptogonians have since watched corporate America knock itself down and blow itself up. Handing your future over to the firm was a hard enough sell before the bailouts. Today we’re the ones bailing out.
Naturally enough, we Leptogonians are more concerned than others when we see the movement take on key features of just another industrial complex. In the inevitable way, of course, everything does—we nurse no romantic ideal here, place no faith in professional communitarianism, distributivism, or anarcho-syndicalism. We shudder at the phrase human resources. Instead, we share a guiding understanding that the institutional pathologies that eat away at the integrity of one’s life can be kept at bay if the popular, default vision of a career is dispensed with. This is not without its risks and costs, psychological and financial. But it is the soul of American individualism, and it is quietly coming back.
The cultural ethos shared by us Leptogonians is a badly needed counterweight to the therapunditocratic credo. The ordeal of the ‘00s has shown Leptogonians that we really are competent to chart—and rechart—our own courses, without subserving our souls to a master narrative prescribed to help us cope with a degree of disruption out of all proportion to human resourcefulness and individual responsibility. Leptogonians who are professional conservatives tend to come at their line of work in the recognition that they are wanderers at heart. It’s right there in the grammar: not even seminomads can truly be at home in a movement, no matter how conservative.
It would be wrong, however, to think of Leptogonians as the conservative version of homeless people. The maturity needed to govern one’s peregrinations—a maturity that, at bottom, must be learned—points the wanderer toward the sorts of homes one can carry on one’s back. Last year, Michael Brendan Dougherty, contributing editor to The American Conservative and 2009 Phillips Journalism Fellow, left DC to move close to home, get married, and “start writing fiction again.” Before he came to DC, a certain “dyspeptic conservative thinker from Rockford, Illinois” had warned him “not to stay more than three years at a time” —good advice, he told me. The allure of professional conservatism, he said, “can begin with one unshakeable intellectual conviction in college, like ‘Entrepreneurs are awesome’ or ‘modernity is chaos’ — and suddenly you are part of a movement staffed with other bright, young, idealistic conservatives who think, drink, and talk like you. But the movement’s institutions invite young, talented, idealistic conservatives to do one of two things” —sell out for the movement or against it, defending “whatever the Republican Party does” or “badmouthing fellow conservatives.” Walk the line, and “you’re likely to be accused of disloyalty by the hacks” and “hackery by the principled and aloof.” Faced with the choice between “a secure gig in the movement’s intellectual ghetto” and “a higher-status, but more insecure, job at a respected outlet,” Michael chose neither. “Around the holidays,” he told me, “my family likes to remind me that I’m some Right-winger. Maybe, but I don’t belong to the movement anymore.”
That DC is often a place where careers find you, rather than the inverse, is a bug and a feature. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, another twenty-seven-year-old writer who moved recently to New York, put it plainly. “When I was in DC, I forgot that I had other interests besides politics, journalism, blogging, et cetera.” Once “heavily involved” in theater, dance, and fiction, she “totally stopped” for her three years in Washington. In the hands of us Leptogonians, that kind of focus is a constructive ambiguity—in the way politics would be if representatives, by choice and not by law, term-limited themselves. Like movement conservatism, professional conservatism requires an ebb and flow of gifted amateurs. But what may benefit the Right most of all is what Americans, in politics and beyond, are longing to experience again: an end to hackocracy, with its heinous fusion of celebrity cult and corporate careerism that cuts across lines of party and sector and industry and class. If the Right is to prosper from this groundswell over the next ten years, much will be owed to Leptogonian effort. The hacks and the therapundits have seized the nation’s attention, but they cannot hold its interest.