HONOR
If you need it defined, you don’t have it.
— Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness
There remains a meaningful distinction between inviting thinkers who challenge prevailing orthodoxies and elevating personalities whose primary currency is provocation.
…the cultural reference points of the American right no longer lie in conservative intellectual traditions or political theory grounded in argument and debate. Instead, they stem from a loose constellation of streamers, influencers, and online commentators whose audiences are predominantly young men navigating an internet grievance culture organized around attention—earned through spectacle and the continual escalation of rhetorical transgression.
Furthermore, figures from these spaces are increasingly finding their way into positions of influence within youth political organizations themselves.
When I praised Mana Afsari’s The Point piece “Last Boys at the Beginning of History” in a newsletter last year, I mentioned my doubts about how far her generous ear-to-the-ground report on right-wing youth could actually go. Sophalkalyan’s piece for The Dispatch above helps explain those doubts.
Afsari’s closing description of young men who “don’t know who they are but know what they’re doing” — this was a tellingly contradictory way to end her piece. At best, she was able to see the good, or desire for good, in them. My fear, though — not an accusation, just concern — is that Afsari was merely participating in the prattle.
Here’s an excerpt from her essay:
These young intellectuals call themselves—like pitch-perfect nineteenth-century Romantics—“sensitive young men.” At the after-parties they discuss metaphysics. Despite this being a D.C. social event, I don’t know where they work. It’s obvious, however, that some of the best congressional offices on the Hill, several conservative magazines and the D.C.-area universities are well represented. I do know, though, what they think about free will and contingency, ancient history and EU regulatory disputes. Among them I’ve heard discussions of twentieth-century espionage and historical intrigues and quotes from Kissinger, Freud, Kierkegaard, Homer, Virgil, Montesquieu and the Federalist Papers. They revive the best parts of their undergraduate curricula and try their best to cultivate serious intellectual lives. They also impose strict rules, among them a complete prohibition against phones on the debate floor.
Outside their meetings, they’ll read whatever they think is honest, real and intellectually meaningful, no matter where it is published. […]
I don’t come for the debates themselves—which can be boring or ridiculous. But like these young men, I’ll go wherever people want to discuss ideas vigorously, however partisan or otherwise faulty. The casual conversations I have here are among the best I’ve had outside of academia. Here one needs no excuses or credentials to be part of grand discussions about history, philosophy and art.
To paraphrase and extend a point from Wendell Berry, Afsari and her boy-Natcons might just be reasonably model modern citizens: affluent sophisticates who want to discuss Freud and Montesquieu and complain about their “oppressed ambition” but who can’t grow a potato or act like responsible adults in the world beyond debate class. They want to discuss “big ideas,” full stop.
(There’s a version of this in the more explicitly Christian world, one that I still feel some shame for: They want to discuss the importance of big theological issues, “but they understand neither what they say nor the things they confidently assert.”)
The young, restless Right still requires, and deserves, a generous ear; what it should not get is a journalistic veneer to hide its widespread sophistry.
To quote Wendell Berry in that same passage: “I believe that the death of the world is breeding in such minds much more certainly and much faster than in any political capital or atomic arsenal.”