So David’s article is interesting more for its listing of various young conservatives than its actual content.
I just don’t have time to comment much right now, but I thought I’d get it out there for your consideration.
My TALKING POINTS for now are pretty random:
1. Our Pete should, of course, be listed. Make should you spread his word around as far as possible through your liking and linking.
2. THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE and the PORCHERS are connected with Walker Percy. But their poetry man is really Wendell Berry. Percy, for one thing, didn’t identify human liberty and dignity with the prevailing mode of the division of labor, consciously rejected agrarianism and localism (and its Stoicism and nativism), and actually voted for the candidate of one major party or the other in presidential elections. He was also quite the liberal when it comes to civil rights and hardly an isolationist when it came to threat of communism (and so voted for Reagan and against the Sandinistas). His core scientific project was to put back together what’s true about European existentialism and Anglo-American empiricism. And he was ambiguously glad to have such a challenge by living in untraditional times, times in which life in the ruins (and not everything is ruined) will allow us to learn a lot about love. He also had a higher opinion of ordinary Southerners–not the Country Clubbers but the evangelical Wal-Mart shoppers–as they actually are these days.
3. And back to the serious point of who’s conspicious by his or her omission in Brooks’ meandering list: Any “Declaration of Independence” conservatives, from the young students of Mr. Ceaser and the Claremonsters to “new natural lawyers” who studied with Robby George.
4. Even Yuval Levin, whom we rank just as highly here at POMOCON as David does, is described as a Burkean, which he actually is.
5. But even from a Burkean or self-consciously traditionalist view, Brooks wasn’t savvy enough to pick up on the fact that the excellent and ecumenical THE IMAGINATIVE CONSERVATIVE gets a lot more hits than THE FRONT PORCH REPUBLIC.
November 20th, 2012 | 10:35 am
[...] its actual content. I just don’t have time to comment much right now, but I thought Source: Postmodern Conservative Category: Blogs and Websites [...]
November 20th, 2012 | 11:00 am
All true, but don’t forget us Kirkians gathered around the Bookman! It is great for Brooks to recognize these folks, finally, but it would have bene better 5 years ago; but hopefuly this means, at least, that an authentic conservative voice is being heard, even in the halls of the NYT.
November 20th, 2012 | 2:09 pm
So I agree–remember THE UNIVERSITY BOOKMAN. I’m still pondering the point of Brooks’ post.
November 20th, 2012 | 4:24 pm
I agree with your point #3 Peter, and it’s all the more a surprising omission given that a student of Robby George (Ted Cruz, TX) and a Claremontster (Tom Cotton, AR) were just elected to Congress and have been adopted as two of the favorite sons of the Tea Party. There were few silver linings in the election of 2012, but the election of these two guys certainly was one in my mind
November 20th, 2012 | 6:06 pm
“I’m still pondering the point of Brooks’ post.”
I think Mr. Brooks’ unstated job description over at the NYT is to play the role of embedded sociologist among the exotic conservative primitives. Think of him as a sort of Jane Goodall who reports back to his fellow sophisticates about what silver backs are now competing for alpha position among the tribes.
Unfortunately, Mr. Brooks’ investigative skills have become increasingly rusty in light of the fact that we don’t see him much out here beyond the borders of Northwestern Seaboard.
So I try to cut him some slack.
November 20th, 2012 | 7:47 pm
While I agree that Brooks’s list is incomplete, I’m glad that he featured the work of this new generation of conservatives who recognize that we need to revive the conservative intellectual tradition that seemed to go into hibernation in the early 1980s.
Notably absent from the list are fora who contributors are largely evangelicals. And to be honest, I can’t think of any such forum, online or otherwise. I find it ironic that the most ardent adherents to social conservatism are the same folks who seem to have no interest in participating in discussions about where we go from here.
This thought occurred to me today as I read Marvin Olasky’s most recent piece on World Magazine. (Olasky is probably evangelicalism’s leading political thinker.) He was summarizing Ross Douthat’s Sunday NYT editorial. But in summarizing the editorial, he only pulled out the parts that were critical of liberals. The equally cogent criticisms of modern conservatism were stripped from Olasky’s summary, as though it was improper to allow his evangelical readers to consider that the Romney lost may have been about something more complex than the battle between “makers” and “takers.”
I would love to see the revival of the conservative intellectual tradition along the lines of what we saw in the 60s. But can we ever get evangelicals to participate? After all, it strikes me that evangelicals come awfully close to treating anti-intellectualism as a virtue and viewing any kind of nuance as implicitly heretical.
November 20th, 2012 | 8:39 pm
“I would love to see the revival of the conservative intellectual tradition along the lines of what we saw in the 60s. But can we ever get evangelicals to participate?”
The answer to your question is yes. How do I know? Because I’m an evengelical.
Why the apparent reticence among evengelicals to participate? It’s not for lack of “nuance”. From what I am observing it has more to do with what I would describe as a kind of “post traumatic stress disorder” from the W. Bush experience. Over the eight years of his administration the popular culture has built up a caricature of the evengelical christian that has been pretty effective in initimidating believers from this segment from political participation. They are still conservative, just not particularly active, and their kids are doing everything they can to re-brand their christianity so it isn’t as culturally toxic. Hence the whole emergent church insurgence in the later years of Bush’s term.
If evangelicals are going to enter the fray again, they are going to have to have better cultural tools to deal with the new political landscape. But since the typical evengelical is middle class with a job and family, aka has a life, its not entirely clear to me how that is going to happen, at least with the same magnitude as previous decades.
Based on my facebook page the typical conservative evengelical friend is quiet, and the ones that do pronounce on conservative topics is progressive or aping progressivism.
These are just my observations, but I’m sure this site has plenty of contributors that can speak from their own observations.
November 20th, 2012 | 9:35 pm
Great contribution PP! Very helpful.
November 21st, 2012 | 12:44 pm
You’re right, Pseudo, evangelicals don’t seem to know what to do about engaging culture, and generally to lack an authentic culture of their own. I’m not sure whether the answer to this is to try and somehow make them culture-friendly (rather than counter-cultural?) or to reintroduce them into the culture of the Church or both.
But it does seem like they are responding to the attempts of mainstream culture to shame and caricature them. And they seem to take the shaming to heart, and to look on these caricatures as accurate portraits. It may be that this keeps evangelicals from doing much, politically. But there’s also a cultural asceticism preached from the pulpits and over the airwaves which causes some serious confusion in evangelical congregations. Are we supposed to live like Augustinian pilgrims who know that this world is not our true home, or to engage culture believing that the gospel of Christ is able to work across and through culture? I agree that it’s high time the evangelicals returned to the conversation, but I also think the Church can do a lot to initiate and draw them into the conversation. There’s that part in Paul’s letters about how the Church is to treat the less dignified members of the body. I corinthians 12 22-31 or so. something about treating the less honorable or weaker as indispensable and deserving of special honor. Evangelicals may really have self esteem problems, to put it in modern psychobabble, and there’s plenty the Church can do to restore them to a healthier self-image.
November 21st, 2012 | 1:35 pm
“pseudoaugustine”
Well, as they say, imitation is the highest for of flattery. Or maybe just an indication of a serious lack of imagination.
November 21st, 2012 | 2:04 pm
Regarding a lack of authentic evangelical culture, I think you have it backward. The business of family, kids and vocation is real, the present world of political partisanship is the theater. I give my fellow evangelicals credit for being able to see the plasticity of todays political environment for what it is and turning to what is ultimately more important.
Among evangelical churches that I am aware of, including my own, there seems to be a turn toward engagling with the local communities to reach out and help those who are struggling in their own neighborhoods. I think this turn is the result of the sort of political hangover that occurred after W Bush, and a renewed desire to express their christian faith in a way that is seems more authentically christian.
Personally I see problems with this admittedly appealing view, but I don’t blame them for wanting to opt out of a political culture that has simply turned very very poisonous.
November 21st, 2012 | 3:15 pm
PP,
Thanks for the comments. I don’t know too much about what evangelicals do. I usually glance at World Magazine once a week, and take its content to be reflective of what engages evangelical political thinkers. I used to have a subscription to an evangelical publication called “Books & Culture” that seemed to be better than World.
November 21st, 2012 | 3:19 pm
I’m with brother Pseudoplotinus, and would add, that the decline in Christendom can be found primarily in the MS Protestant Churches, who’ve by and large sold out to progressivism and a statist social-action Jesus cult.
The Catholic Church has a whole series of problems that consume their attention.
In the meantime the statist-progressivist take advantage of the separation in Christendom and work tirelessly to eliminate the Christian culture.
We’ll see who joins the Catholics, if there are any, at the barricades when Obamacommiecare forces the Catholics to either stand and fight or sin against God.
November 21st, 2012 | 4:53 pm
No problem Bobby,
I think it’s difficult to get a pulse on the evangelical culture because it’s more fragmented now than it has ever been. The sorts of names I hear in my church circles that are influential, to my chagrin, are NT Wright, Rob Bell, a number of Emergent Church Types. I even saw a book by Feurbach in my pastors office that made me want to groan.
On the other hand I am heartened that someone like Tim Keller seems to be as prominent as he is, though not at my church. I should mention I’m in Southern California so the sort of dynamics I am seeing may be very different than evangelical circles in red states.
However, my impression is that the evangelical community is going through a kind of identity crisis. The good new is that what comes out the other end of this process might be a better church. However, I know enough church history to know that that isn’t usually the way these things necessarily turn out.
November 22nd, 2012 | 10:04 am
PP-, have you read James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World? His counsel to “the churches” (but especially Evangelicals) is to withdraw from politics for a while, and to encourage and support and train believers to enter and occupy the commanding heights of culture. Do you hear any discussion of that thesis? (I don’t share his “withdraw” counsel, mainly because we’re citizens of two cities, not just one.)
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