It seems that Conor Friedersdorf and I only ever have one fight: he tends to judge things (candidate, ideas, and political parties) strictly on their merits, and I always want to make it more complicated . From his post on Young Turkism in the pundit class:
. . . had TS Elliot sent me "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which he wrote when he was a about my age, I’d have found it within myself to overlook his age and publish it."Weak ideas are easily refuted." Yes, and calling something a young man’s argument is a kind of refutation.
One of the things that attracted me to the right as a young man was its rejection of identity politics. On college campuses all over America, idealistic young conservatives insist, and most really believe, that work ought to be judged on its merits, rather than using some proxy to determine its worth.
But these last few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot of criticism of certain conservative figures that focuses on the place where they live, or the college they attended, or their age, or the amount of money that they earn, or the fact that they are a black man backing a black candidate.
Enough.
Do any of those factors affect the way one thinks? Yes. But all are a poor proxy for actually addressing the issues and ideas at play on their substance. Weak ideas are easily refuted. Bad writers are quickly picked apart, or paid little attention anyway. An eloquent man can be refuted by a wise man who is in the right. Lack of experience that matters can be exposed by pointing out the flaw that wisdom would’ve remedied.
Conor says he came to conservatism as a young man out of weariness with identity politics. Me, I came for the Burke. It isn’t simply that traditions have existed for a long time and are therefore likely to have a lot of merit. Old ideas can correct our own in ways we don’t understand . We’re trapped in our own age and tradition can break us out of it, and the same goes for more experienced writers correcting Young Turks. It’s almost impossible for a man to perceive the ways in which he’s being unbearably young, and there really are some things I won’t understand until I’m older.
I don’t mean to open up political discourse into an ad hominem free-for-all, but youthful inexperience is one accusation that often holds water. This comparison probably isn’t as helpful as I think it is, but think of the time you fell in love and only then realized that all those pop song cliches you’d always heard were actually true (your heart does skip a beat when he walks down the street!)—I assume this is a universal phenomenon. Someone could have told you about it before you fell in love, but you wouldn’t have understood, much less believed it.
I tend to think that spending your twenties as a pundit is one way of paying your dues, if you do it with enough humility. At least I hope it is. (Does this mean I’ll have to stir my lazy bones and get involved in local politics? Teaching pre-school in a class for disabled kids is taxing enough, man.) That being said, I’m basically with McCain on this one: a rebuttal that begins and ends with "You only say that because you’re too young," or, for that matter, "because you went to Harvard" or "because you’re rich and can afford to think that way," is a legitimate rebuttal. (And, for the record, it’s not like the Other McCain avoids arguing on the merits !)
I will, of course, stand to be corrected by my elders on this one. After all, Conor has six years on me.
