Beware the Cul-De-Sac of Weirdness 

Editor’s Note: This is the second essay in a three-part series on the control of meaning within conservatism. You can read the first essay in the series, written by Elizabeth Corey, here.

Somewhere G. K. Chesterton wryly notes that while Progressives make it their business to carry on making mistakes, “the business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.” Skeptical of innovation, the conservative prefers the devil he knows to one potentially worse, as when a former colleague of mine remarked that “he was against change, especially improvements.”   

At its core, the conservative mind is prudent, cautious, and leans into the tried and true rather than the optimistic and fanciful; it is willing to accept amelioration and reform over unlikely promises of perfection. Wariness is evident, but so, too, are humility and gratitude; for we lack reasons to suppose ourselves inherently superior to our ancestors, we still benefit from their efforts, and we hesitate to lose our inheritance. Also, and quite simply, the conservative loves what is his, because it is his. 

My version of conservatism is on its back foot, however, increasingly forgotten or recalled only to be scorned. Thinkers such as Russell Kirk, Roger Scruton, and Michael Oakeshott, to name just a few of the old stalwarts, are out of step with the current “conservative” mood, which is immoderate, experimental, pugnacious, and ironical—hardly conservative, in other words. 

Consider ironism. Not so long ago, ironism was alive and well, but mostly on the political left. In its hermeneutic of suspicion, postmodernism held truth claims quite lightly, prone to perspectivalism or even relativism instead. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty defines the “ironist” as “the sort of person who faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires—someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance.” Rorty is consistent, concluding that the most cherished commitments of the Western form of life—say, human dignity—are merely forms of “ethnocentrism,” what we believe around here, certainly, but not true.  

Ironism as historicism or perspectivalism is quite distinct from irony. Scruton defended irony, calling it “another of our civilization’s gifts to us.” In his reading, irony could “look on the spectacle of human folly and wryly show us how to live with it,” as when Christ tells the crowd that “he who is without sin” should cast the first stone at the adulterous woman. Irony, in this sense, is conservative, for it is, Scruton suggests, a “mode of acceptance rather than a mode of rejection,” moving toward accommodation with reality, with others, and with our own limitations. Irony prompts mercy and forgiveness; Rorty’s ironism, conversely, scorns the idea of truth itself and views reason as a mode of power. 

Ironism influenced much of postmodern culture. Whatever else postmodernism was, it shunned the ideals of foundational depth, continuity, meaningful tradition, and earnest gratitude in favor of superficiality, pastiche, and irony. It was the “knowing wink,” playful insouciance, and was embarrassed by the true believer.

On the level of appearances, ironism dissipated during the Obama years, a time when conservatives worried more about the dogmatism of “social justice warriors” than about relativism. No one thought President Obama ironical when he suggested his son might have looked like Trayvon Martin. The leaders of Black Lives Matter cynically made money off the movement, perhaps, but its liberal proponents believed with genuine seriousness, utterly without a hint of irony (as meant by either Rorty or Scruton). Insouciance was replaced by virtue-signaling. (Remember the yard signs?) 

Trump’s first term seemed to put ironism entirely to pasture. Outlets like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and NPR, previously comfortable with postmodern irony, now took arms against the “post-truth” presidency. The “Truth Is Worth It” and “Truth Is Hard” campaigns railed against “alternative facts” and insisted we overcome squeamishness about hard reality (despite previously celebrating Jean Baudrillard, the theorist who suggested—relying on his own jargon—that the Gulf War did not really happen). In the ’90s, one could argue in elite company that quantum gravity was merely a social construct, but this vanished once Trump became president: who can forget the exhortations to “trust science” and the “In Fauci We Trust” stickers of the COVID era? 

The neo-earnestness of the trendy left might be postmodern nihilism refashioning its tone of ironism while maintaining its content, namely, identity politics. Perhaps, but nihilistic ironism and ethnocentrism now thoroughly dominate certain segments of the right, especially the very online right.  

A recent Atlantic essay by Charlie Warzel depressingly explores a certain kind of conservative. As it turns out, the gatekeepers are gone—the days of Buckley expelling the Birchers no longer seem possible—in large part because “social-media platforms … have loosened their grip on moderation at the same time that AI tools have allowed for the easy proliferation of slop; never before has there been so much cynical, cruel content and trolling.” Warzel gives as examples overtly provocative trolling by figures such as Nick Fuentes and his cronies, instances of a “nihilism by default” used to “prove a point that there’s no rules anymore.” 

In Warzel’s accounting, this spirit migrated from 4chan to more visible mainstream outlets. The protagonists didn’t “care about old norms and institutions” and “actively tore them down,” with “ironic nihilism” the primary tool of destruction, summarized by Warzel as “lol, nothing matters.” Or, as Warzel suggested in a podcast (I paraphrase): for young men without a career or future, lurking alone and online in their childhood basement, reality is far less painful if nothing matters anyway: lol, nothing matters. 

The ironic nihilism infecting the very online (mainly male) conservative, if Warzel is correct, reveals rage against the old norms and institutions that  didn’t deliver as promised. Predictably, these same young conservatives are already turning against conservatism. But the mood of disappointment, anger, disgust, and rage against western and American norms and institutions has been prevalent among conservatives for a while now, and in far more responsible terms than those of Fuentes.  

There is no moral equivalence in content or intention between Nick Fuentes and mainstream critics of establishment Republicans (whatever Warzel claims); still, for some time the prevalent mood of many conservatives (including some serious thinkers) has been impatience and dislike of older, “normie” patterns: BenOp predicted a dark age, the “dead consensus” of the Boomercons was rejected, as were polite proceduralism, zombie Reaganism, fusionism, Locke, the postwar consensus, right liberalism, the food pyramid, and more. This is somewhat understandable: the establishment right lost and sometimes comfortably acquiesced in significant cultural battles. Frustration with the “keep calm and carry on” mentality makes sense if you think there’s not much left to conserve in our society, and serious people can reasonably conclude it’s time to try something different.   

But experiments in conserving, just like experiments in living, can go wrong, especially when untried and untested. Not only wrong, but weirdly wrong. There’s not much to like about country-club Republicans when your culture collapses, perhaps, but young conservatives enthused about a lot of weirdness: Jordan Peterson had his lobsters … and an all-meat diet; Mencius Moldbug droned about Dark Enlightenment and technocratic monarchy; Bronze Age Pervert promoted atavistic vitalism; integralists disliked religious freedom for Jews; theocrats yearned for Presbyterian rule; Hungary emerged as the ideal regime; Carl Schmitt was all the rage; MAHA emerged. Concerns appeared about the Longhouse, women running institutions, and the 19th amendment—what a moment to be alive! Of course, it was mainly noise, however loud. 

One could think of this as akin to early punk music. Its chaos and incoherence howled in disgust at the state of things, here at the collapse of family, religion, marriage, decency, a living wage; at Drag Queen Story Hour, unfettered immigration, the uniparty, and more. I understand that howl, but one cannot fruitfully live, thrive, or govern from a state of rage. The tendency of disgust is now, as always, toward an intellectual cul-de-sac. 

Rage, coupled with the intrinsic nihilism of the internet, has slipped its bonds—the worst are full of passionate intensity (and have millions of online followers). Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson appear utterly mad. Groypers have emerged into the mainstream. Anti-Semitism is ubiquitous and apparently “respectable” so long as it’s couched as anti-Zionism. 

But recall, genuine conservatism is primarily about what is cherished and earns our gratitude; it is oikophilia, as Scruton insisted, a love of home, or, as Wendell Berry might put it, a love of membership for a place, people, and land. It is not abstract but concrete in its loves, which is why conservative thought translates so poorly to either the bureaucratic or the online.

Now, to the ears of some, my language simply reeks of a call to lay down arms while retreating to some comfortable enclave surrounded by great books and high ideals. Not so. When you love an actual place and its people, you fight for that place. Yes, elections matter, culture matters, and communities matter, and they should not be abandoned or surrendered easily. I do not advocate going gently into that good night. 

But what is profoundly lacking among conservatives just now, I’d suggest, is sound judgment. Whatever else a culture provides, it attempts through its institutions to impart pathways of wisdom, know-how about human flourishing. That is, a culture imparts its judgments on how to live well. Conservatives have always been hesitant to accept the abstract rationality or logic—the technocratic mind—as sufficient for human flourishing. (In part, this explains why liberals like John Stuart Mill thought stupid people were attracted to conservatism.) It’s not stupidity, but it is a distrust that isolated intellect can succeed in the absence of institutions and tradition. It’s also why we’ve tended to value soundness more than cleverness (even the cleverness of identitarian conservatives). A person might be of moderate intelligence yet fundamentally correct in his judgments if he is prudent, after all. On such people decent culture depends. 

Soundness is not built by rage, or endless tweets, or Substack experiments, or improbable dreams of utopia, but rather by sober, self-governed people engaged in the pursuits of life and the basic goods of humanity lived well, with others. This is a decent life, and how decency is learned. As conservatives attempt to conserve their movement, at a time when the guardrails are gone and the controls of meaning seem to have vanished, we can do no better than to tend to those basic goods that constitute integral human fulfillment. These basic goods can be articulated in high theory (see John Finnis), through history (see Russell Kirk), through an appreciation of a place and its ways (see Roger Scruton), or through religion (Jonathan Sacks or Joseph Ratzinger); but these accounts, however they differ in the particulars, are sober-minded defenses of the good rather than outraged howls at the offensive. They are all exercises in sound judgment, and all conservative. 

I do not myself believe there is such a thing as “the right side of history,” but I am nonetheless convinced that the human future, if there is to be one worth having, will be normal; that is to say, it will conserve the things that have always been good for the human to have, hold, cherish, and sometimes fight for. Weirdness has no future, or at least not one worth seeking, and it is long past time to put childish things behind us. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.