Dr. Malherbe of Natal University said to Field Marshal Smuts as he left a political meeting, “Why were those two hecklers at the back so bitterly hostile?” Smuts replied, “I understand the feelings of one of them very well indeed. He and I were brought up together in the same small town in the Western Cape. I got him his first appointment—and his second. In fact, he owes all his wordily success to me. But I don’t know why the other was so hostile. I never did him a favor in my life.”

From A Thread of Silk, the memoir of Philip Mason, longtime head of the British Institute of Race Relations.

Never reach for a grand explanation when a simpler one will do, and when your explanation is to blame the Puritans, you can be pretty certain there’s a simpler option available. Rebecca Solnit is frustrated that so many liberals are letting occasional policy disagreements blind them to the fact that Obama is the only candidate who’s even trying to be on their side, which to her mind should earn him at least a little bit of loyalty and ideological slack-cutting. “Every four years we are asked if we want to have our foot trod upon or sawed off at the ankle without anesthetic. The usual reply on the left is that there’s no difference between the two experiences and they prefer that Che Guevara give them a spa pedicure.”

Maybe it’s part of our country’s Puritan heritage, of demonstrating one’s own purity and superiority rather than focusing on fixing problems or being compassionate. Maybe it comes from people who grew up in the mainstream and felt like the kid who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes, that there were naked lies, hypocrisies, and corruptions in the system. Believe me, a lot of us already know most of the dimples on the imperial derriere by now, and there are other things worth discussing.

Sure, you might say, but chin up: however much the hard left complains, they’re still going to turn out for their man on election day. But that’s not the point. The real problem with the carpers isn’t their effect on political outcomes but their effect on our political discussion. Solnit’s frustration with them, if you want to trace it back to experiences she has had personally, probably has more to do with conversations they’ve ruined than elections they’ve thrown. I don’t mean to suggest that Solnit doesn’t really care whether Democrats win elections. I just mean that people who write about politics do it for two reasons—they want their political ideas to win, and they find it fun. The complainers’ effect on the former is negligible, their effect on the latter overwhelming.

Two hundred lefties clogging Solnit’s Twitter feed with “leftsplaining” probably annoys her more than one guy in Topeka lacking the motivation to do a shift at the call center. Which is why, if the left seems hard to please these days, the explanation has less to do with the tradition of absolutism in American thought from 1600 to the present, and more to do with the dynamics of the Internet.

Some of the flaws of today’s political conversation are the same ones that existed forty years ago; some of them are longstanding faults that the Internet has made worse; some of the faults are brand new. One example of the second type is the tendency for people to weigh in just for the sake of weighing in, even though their opinion is neither deeply felt, well thought out, or interesting. Pundits do this and always will, as long as there is money to be made in telling the base what it wants to hear. Ordinary people have always done it too, but it used to be done in private—tweaking your dad’s nose over Thanksgiving turkey or earning a pat on the back from your friends over drinks down the pub. These arguments bore about as much resemblance to informed debate as a “Drunk History” video does to your high-school textbook, but that didn’t matter. People got harmless emotional satisfaction out of it, and emotional satisfaction is hard to come by.

Meanwhile, the well-informed grown-ups could continue their conversation without being distracted by the parody of their debate that their readers were conducting at home. Thanks to the Internet, that’s no longer the case. The parody debate is caught in a feedback loop that makes the lazy opinions harder to ignore and the lazy opinionators more convinced that they’re right.

Aggrieved leftier-than-thou remarks have gotten the biggest boost from this loop, which makes sense. They’re the easiest response to come up with—it takes almost no brain-power to come up with reasons why something is racist, unfeminist, or an expression of privilege. They also deliver a veterinary-grade hit of self-satisfaction. But more importantly—and  this is where the Internet comes in—these kinds of remarks, whether they are expressed snarkily or sanctimoniously, are impossible to respond to. People voice them repeatedly and brazenly because they have no reason to fear being made to look foolish, much less demolished by a rational argument. This immunity from reply, as far as I can tell, is something new.

Even the most airtight rebuttal is seen as a response, not a refutation, in the online world—this is what Ryan Holiday says in Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator. To be honest, he says, if your calm and conclusive rebuttal is completely disregarded, that’s a best-case scenario. More often, it’s “the equivalent of a squeaky cry of ‘Why is everyone making fun of me?!’ on the playground. Whether it happens in front of snarky blogs or a real-life bully, the result is the same: Everyone makes fun of you even more.” style=”text-align: justify;”

I am not sure why this bullying atmosphere dominates the Internet. Possible explanations are: 

• Anyone who sounds aggrieved or—in the case of Solnit’s enemies—more high-minded and principled can always summon an avenging army of supporters from the vast population of Internet-dwellers unwilling to spend more than five seconds trying to understand the dispute at hand, but endlessly willing to get a quick hit of that old self-congratulation. If you insult, question, or disagree with such a sympathetic opponent, the avenging army of ignoramuses comes after you.
• In addition to the layman ignoramuses, there are also professional bloggers for whom the number of posts they need to produce and the number of ideas they have per day fail utterly to correspond. Outrage is always good for readership.
• In an old-fashioned print publication, editors are all for stoking controversy but usually draw the line at willful misrepresentation of your opponent’s position. People on the Internet are not so scrupulous. Also, a lot of them are shockingly bad at basic reading comprehension. A writer has to think damned long and hard about whether he wants to respond to some bad-but-appealing argument, since there’s a serious danger that his response will be taken out of context (deliberately or out of laziness), reduced to a headline like “So-and-so Doesn’t Care If Women Get Raped,” and reproduced on a thousand blogs. Even if all you said in the first place was that a federal program to hand out ten free rape whistles to every woman in America was not an efficient use of government funds.

My time in political journalism made me pessimistic about the people who follow politics. The way I figure it, you might as well get worked up about the NFL, since the emotional high is all you’re looking for anyway. Which makes me worse than Rebecca Solnit, because I am a hypocrite. I don’t at all mind when people clog my Twitter feed with “leftsplaining,” but sweet angels in glory, I really wish my Tweeps would shut up about sports already.

The most well-known paradox of liberal and conservative temperaments is that humanitarians tend to be moved by mankind in the abstract but callous or even cruel to individual men, while many reactionaries and misanthropes are noted for their private generosity.

Other such paradoxes include the tendency of avowed multiculturalists to be incurious about actual foreign cultures, choosing instead to assume that other people can’t be that different from themselves, whereas tribalists respect foreign cultures enough to study them properly and are apt to do things like become fluent in Sanskrit (Enoch Powell is the obvious example). Earnest liberals who treat politics as a grand and serious business can be small and petty in their actual dealings, while politicians inclined to treat their calling frivolously are surprisingly capable of professional magnanimity and self-sacrifice.

That last paradox is the one I am concerned with today, because I am concerned with Disraeli and Gladstone. (I am reading John Morley’s Life of the latter.) I have to be careful in presenting the following example, because it involves reading between the lines and, if I am not careful, I will put the most honorable construction on Disraeli’s letter and read unnecessary sarcasm into Gladstone’s. And, needless to say, I am not an expert in Victorian parliamentary politics, so I would be grateful for guidance from the better-informed.

I won’t reprint Disraeli’s letter, which can be found here, but the main point of it is that Gladstone’s party affiliation was in a state of flux between his conservative and liberal periods, and Disraeli was trying to convince him to rejoin the conservatives so they could form a government. It was generally believed that Gladstone’s personal dislike of Disraeli was the main obstacle to his joining such a regime, which he would otherwise have been inclined to do. (This is the pettiness I mentioned.) Disraeli explains—with what honesty I could not say—that he bears Gladstone no ill will and is eager for reconciliation.

Gladstone’s response, in full:

The letter you have been so kind as to address to me will enable me, I trust, to remove from your mind some impressions with which you will not be sorry to part.

You have given me a narrative of your conduct since 1850 with reference to your position as leader of your party. But I have never thought your retention of that office matter of reproach to you, and on Saturday last I acknowledge to Mr. Walpole the handsomeness of your conduct in offering to resign it to Sir James Graham.

You consider that the relations between yourself and me have proved the main difficulty in the way of certain political arrangements. Will you allow me to assure you that I have never in my life taken a decision which turned upon those relations?

You assure me that I have ever been mistaken in failing to place you among my friends or admirers. Again I pray you to let me say that I have never known you penurious in admiration towards any one who had the slightest claim to it, and that at no period of my life, not even during the limited one when we were in sharp political conflict, have iIeither felt any enmity towards you, or believed that you felt any towards me.

At the present moment I am awaiting counsel which at Lord Derby’s wish I have sought. But the difficulties which he wishes me to find means of overcoming, are broader than you may have supposed. Were I at this time to join any government I could not do it in virtue of party connections. I must consider then what are the conditions which make harmonious and effective co-operation in cabinet possible—how largely old habits enter into them—what connections can be formed with public approval—and what change would be requisite in the constitution of the present government, in order to make any change worth a trial.

I state these points fearlessly and without reserve, for you have yourself well reminded me that there is a Power beyond us that disposes of what we are and do, and I find the limits of choice in public life to be very narrow. I remain, etc.

In the first bolded remark, is Gladstone calling Disraeli an insignificance beneath his consideration? In the second, is he calling him a flatterer? I am not finished collecting anecdotes of Gladstone being a bastard, and I am wondering if this letter can be added to the list. It would be nice to have, even though I have an abundance already. Spreading gossip—as late as 1890—that Lord Salisbury was not his father’s biological son? To think that people still admire him.

A GLADSTONE BONUS: I have always treasured this footnote from Robert Blake’s The Conservative Party from Peel to Churchill:

Gladstone, though agreeing with Maynooth Bill, resigned [from Peel’s cabinet in 1845] because its principle was inconsistent with the doctrine of a book which he had written some years earlier but in which he now no longer believed. His behavior was widely regarded as incomprehensible.

From Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters:

My impression of Republicans, after living among them as an interested and sympathetic observer for almost two years, [is that] as a group you have almost no confidence that any serious thinker could be with you on any issue of consequence. Economists, perhaps, but few others. To a Republican a serious thinker is a liberal Democrat or a left-wing anti-democrat. I said finally that this reminded me somewhat of the situation of the English Catholics in the mid-nineteenth century. It was a demoralized church in the sense that none of the bishops really felt himself the social or intellectual equal of the Anglican establishment. They assumed the Protestants had won the theological battles, and for their part were resigned to tending to the equally undemanding religious needs of the Duke of Norfolk on the one hand, and the Liverpool Irish on the other. From time to time, however, men of great and acknowledged intellectual powers would convert to Catholicism and ask to be put to work. The bishops were at a loss to think what to do with them, and for the most part simply avoided the issue. What none knew was that they were at the beginning, not the end of a process. Triumphant Protestantism had just about run out of intellectual and spiritual authority. England was becoming dechurched. In the century that was to follow English Catholics were, by contrast, to be an intellectual and spiritual force of some consequence. I have, as I say, a somewhat similar feeling about this moment with respect to political ideology.

This was written in a personal memo to John Ehrlichman while DPM was working in the Nixon White House, midway through their first term. I have no idea what his bosses made of it.

From F.E.: The Life of F.E. Smith, the First Earl of Birkenhead. Our hero is defending a tram company being sued by the family of a boy injured on the tracks:

It was alleged that this boy could no longer work and was unable to raise his arm above the level of his shoulder. Smith was sympathetic and took pains to put the boy at his ease. ‘Will you please show us how high you can lift your arm now?’ he asked. With a face contorted with pain the boy slowly raised the arm to the level of the shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ said F.E., ‘and will you now show us how high you could lift it before the accident?’ The arm was thrust high in the air—and the case lost.

If you ask me why conservatism has become intellectually impoverished, my answer is going to be a lot more prosaic than David Brooks’s. He starts his decline-of-the-conservative-mind column with a relatively rare allusion to his years working for National Review, and I could do the same but I don’t want to talk out of school. So I’ll stick to something any attentive reader might have noticed, which is that NR and NRO have filled their writing stable with a heck of a lot of think tankers. Almost every article that isn’t written by someone on staff is written by someone from Heritage, AEI, Cato, Hudson, or Hoover. I’m just speculating here (I have no inside knowledge on this question), but the most obvious reason for relying so heavily on think tankers is that they come cheap. Unlike freelancers, think tankers will put up with nonexistent-to-nominal fees because their salaries are being paid by someone else. Alas, think tankers—with a few exceptions—are not exactly known for the felicity of their prose or the originality of their thinking. They also think almost exclusively in terms of policy prescriptions—i.e., what Congress or the president or state legislatures can do—because that’s what they’re paid to care about. The result is that a lot of conservatism journalism today is (1) so badly written that it is difficult to read with any pleasure, (2) entirely unimaginative in its application of conservative principles, and (3) narrowly focused on either the Hill or the horse-race. All because of the market forces that come into operation when think tankers flood the market with cheap, reliable, and minimally acceptable journalism.

That’s one explanation for why conservatism is dumber than it used to be. Many others are equally valid. But the one explanation that I refuse to accept is the one Brooks and Rod Dreher both hyped this week (which is also the Left’s favorite critique—not that there’s anything wrong with that). This theory says that conservatism has been mortally weakened by the replacement of fusionism with small-government absolutism—an overemphasis on liberty and an underemphasis on tradition and community.

Brooks:

In the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse. These days, speakers at Republican gatherings almost always use the language of market conservatism — getting government off our backs, enhancing economic freedom. Even Mitt Romney, who subscribes to a faith that knows a lot about social capital, relies exclusively on the language of market conservatism. It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists. . . .

The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.

Heaven preserve us from politicians who appeal to their constituents as parents and neighbors! Most of us have actual family and neighbors for that.

That particular line reminds me of the tenured radicals who argued that college instruction should recognize that students are not just scholars but also human beings of particular genders and races, as well as citizens with democratic responsibilities (the solution: politicize the curriculum). It’s quite true that my citizenship, my faith, and my heritage are more important to me than my college major—but they are miles outside a professor’s job description. Like Stanley Fish says, save the world on your own time. And introducing extraneous themes doesn’t just distract from real education, it corrupts it. Professors who want to talk about the important things, rather than the appropriate things, end up doing more harm than good—and the same goes for politicians. Double.

There was an Australian politician who wanted to run his reelection campaign on a theme of togetherness rather than tax cuts, and it’s a shame that more Americans aren’t familiar with what his colleague Neville Wran said to talk him out of it: “It’s all very well to go on with all that spiritual stuff, but if the greedy bastards out there wanted spiritualism, they’d join the f—ing Hare Krishna.” 

Rod Dreher takes Brooks’s case for the intellectual poverty of modern conservatism and pursues it further, but—and I mean this respectfully—he phrases his argument in a way that left me feeling affronted. He exhorts conservatives to study the great traditionalist thinkers of the past, when it seems to me that he’s the one who could use a history lesson: