What does it mean to be conservative in the Trump era? How is that changing? Has the term — and the philosophy behind it — lost all meaning?
Elizabeth Corey, a political scientist at Baylor, is a conservative — though what she sees being called “conservatism” today has left her dismayed.
She explained what she thinks about conservatism’s present, and potential future, in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.
John Guida: What is the state of conservatism today, and how confusing has it been to call yourself one in the Trump era?
Elizabeth Corey: The state of conservatism is quite varied, as anyone who follows politics knows. There are post-liberals, common-good conservatives, national conservatives and so on. One thing I see in all these camps is a certain adversarial posture toward American culture — or toward certain aspects of that culture that they dislike. I sympathize with some of that.
But my own understanding of conservatism is different — it’s grounded in culture and tradition, and in some sense, religion. It’s the idea that we should “conserve” the many goods that we have received from the past: philosophy, art, poetry, music, family life, etc. We can’t have any of these things without a stable political order. But political action is not at the very heart of things.
Guida: You recently published essays that tease out your vision of conservatism. You describe the primary obligation of conservatives as “cultivating a positive and hopeful vision in the midst of disorder.” You contrast this approach — what you call “maintainers” — against “scrappy warriors.” You clearly see yourself as a “maintainer”— it makes you, and others who prefer it, a “beautiful loser.” What is a “beautiful loser”?
Corey: I’ve been criticized quite a lot since I wrote the “beautiful loser” essay, but much of the criticism results from people not reading the essay itself. In that essay, I describe a beautiful loser as someone who is not interested in conceiving of life as a battle — the very notions of winners, losers, adversaries and allies aren’t appropriate here. If you see battle as your primary activity, then of course a “loser” is something shameful.
But I want to understand life in a different way. What would this look like? I suppose it’s “peaceful.” It’s deeply pluralist (I am a conservative pluralist, who recognizes that not everyone thinks as I do), and it’s also focused on the ways we might reach across aisles and battle lines, to try to find common ground. It’s a capacious vision of life — politics is part of it, but not the whole. This is foreign to the conservative activists who are so loud in our present moment.
Guida: Could you say a bit more about the strands of criticism of the essay? For one, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo commented on social media, specifically looking at the issue of D.E.I., that “you have morally forfeited the right to criticize those of us who then got rid of it for you.” What I hear a little bit is a contest between zero-sum thinking vs. positive-sum? Or were there other grounds?
Corey: Yes, that’s right. The idea of battle is that you crush your opponents; you win or lose, and it’s always better to be the winner. But what I want to say, and believe to be true, is that so many of these issues, like D.E.I., are complicated in ways that the activists don’t take account of. J.S. Mill has a wonderful line in “On Liberty” that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Mill goes on to say that you must hear the case from the other side, in the strongest possible terms.
That has always been my philosophy: We must charitably engage with our opponents, to see the good that they are pursuing (because there is some good!) before dismissing them. The problem with the activist class, on both left and right, is that they’re unwilling to do this, and thus they don’t understand what’s at stake. It is the obligation of an academic to understand the world in graduated terms, in shades of gray.
One last thing about the D.E.I. stuff and Chris Rufo. After The Wall Street Journal piece (a response to his criticism) came out, I received a lot of emails — both pleasant and not so pleasant. One really struck me. It was from a young man on the job market, who was angry at me for saying that there was anything good about diversity, when it was (in his view) the reason he was being passed over for job after job.
What struck me about his response was that it showed me D.E.I. hasn’t really been stamped out. It’s still there, just below the surface. And it’s there because there are some legitimate reasons for the movement, and especially because activists haven’t persuaded people who were in favor of D.E.I. that they were wrong. They’ve just tried to stamp it out by force. This isn’t a solution; it’s a suppression of the conflict.
Guida: Conservatives traditionally looked on government action skeptically. There’s the quote from Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’ ” The current administration has shifted that posture. Is that one area of conservatism you no longer recognize?
Corey: It is. And it worries me, because if anything we’ve seen conservatives seize state power with a force that I wouldn’t have imagined possible before Trump. This troubles me not just because it hasn’t been a traditional conservative view, but because the degree of moral righteousness is often unquestioned.
Guida: You explored this adversarial political posture through an 1826 essay by William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” in which he describes hating as “a never-failing source of satisfaction.” The pleasure of hating, he writes, transforms religion, patriotism and virtue into pretexts for destruction. You sympathized, to an extent, with the energizing aspects of tribalism.
Corey: Hazlitt was on to something in that essay — many of us don’t want to admit it, but we like to see bad and awful things because, frankly, they make us feel better about ourselves. To hate something gives us clarity about what we don’t hate, but also because hating the right things, with the right people, gives us a sense of camaraderie and of being together with a tribe of like-minded others.
Perhaps the most damning thing Hazlitt says in that essay is that we hate because “we cannot bear a state of indifference and ennui: the mind seems to abhor a vacuum.” A lot of us are bored and distracted right now, and politics as war is entertaining.
Guida: Do you think a minority of super-engaged Americans are driving this cycle?
Corey: This is a tremendous problem at present. Many people who don’t have radical and activist views have checked out of politics because they think they are the weird ones. I don’t live online as much as some people do, so I’m often talking to people who say that they are politically homeless — that they would gladly vote for any reasonable person of any party, but they don’t see such people in politics. So they check out altogether.
Part of the reason I wrote the recent pieces was simply to say that there is probably a quiet majority out there of more-or-less sensible people. Why should the loudest voices be the only ones we hear?
Guida: You contrast the space that adversarial politics takes place in with a more “generative” space. You wrote, “Our modern frenzy and constant, anxious busyness push us away from the very sources of cultural conservatism that I and so many others want to rejuvenate.” How do you balance the demands of citizenship — which includes, at least to some extent, politics — with that generative attitude?
Corey: One thing I’d say here is that the obligations of citizenship are very important, and I would like to shore up our notion of what it means to be a citizen. That’s what all the schools of civic leadership around the country are doing. But I would also say that citizenship is, for most of us, a local activity, which is mostly lost in the contemporary debate. Writing essays and being on social media is a kind of political activity, undoubtedly, but I’m not sure it’s the most important part of citizenship.
Far more important are the things we do that have real impacts on real people, like serving on juries and school boards and taking part in the communities where we actually live. That kind of activity is vital for human flourishing, and it requires us to interact with people who are not like us. We can’t be tribal on a jury.
Guida: You suggest that those who are “unrelentingly angry and critical” nevertheless draw from “an unseen foundation of equanimity, careful argument, civility and self-control” — a foundation, as you put it, traditionally maintained by conservatives. What is that foundation? What is in it? Books, music?
Corey: As a college professor, I’m always tempted to say it has something to do with education. When you read and converse and learn how to think philosophically, or “disinterestedly,” you are forced to see yourself in different ways — not as the center of the world, but almost as a character in a play.
That sounds a little bit strange, I realize; but when you read literature or philosophy you gain a certain distance that allows you not only to consider the complexities of the characters in the books, but yourself as well. You may be inclined to be a bit more humble, a bit more charitable, about what you know, and about your judgments of other people. This leads, often, to a kind of “moral calm” that can lead to equanimity and self-control.
It’s not just books and learning: We also learn these things in families — perhaps nowhere better do we come to terms with our emotions (their good and bad outcomes). Ideally, we learn how to be human — how to compromise and consider others’ feelings — through family. It’s a deeply Christian vision of what social life could be. Humility and charity aren’t easy virtues, after all — especially when you’re attacked.
Guida: Another quality that conservatives have traditionally stressed is character, including or even in particular in political leaders. Has the shift away from character as a concern — among politicians like President Trump or even, in Texas, Ken Paxton, who just won the Republican Senate runoff — surprised you?
Corey: This is where I see the arguments about power coming to the fore. Yes, some people say, character matters, but this is our one chance to do something big! Even if we’re a little squeamish about someone’s character, that matters less than what that person can do to advance our cause. And again, it’s about power, winning and losing: If winning is what matters, and it seems in many places to be the most important thing, then the way we win is less important. Warriors, I think, would say that we can’t be afraid to dirty our hands in the process. While I recognize that arguments about moral purity can be taken too far, I still think character matters.
Also on this question: I can’t tell you how many people in my circles have commented on the recent Ross Douthat-Ben Sasse interview. That great “sensible middle” that I’ve been talking about is simply dying to see people like Sasse in positions of authority; but there are very few of him in public life.
Guida: You mentioned the phrase, “Politics is downstream from culture.” How do you think about the direction of travel, so to speak, in that phrase. President Trump has now been elected twice to the presidency. There is clearly a part of the electorate that clamors for “warriors.” Is that coming from a new type of culture, one that is the antithesis of the type of culture that you describe?
Corey: I don’t have a way of knowing what a vast majority of Americans think — and yet I do have my own experience to go by. Just last week I visited several national parks in Utah, and had the opportunity to listen in on people’s conversations — on the shuttles, in the hotel breakfasts and elsewhere. I was struck by the genuine goodness of so many of these people. What did they want? They wanted their families to flourish, they wanted to be proud of their country (as they were, in Zion National Park) and they talked about neighbors, pets and sometimes politics. I guess what I took from this is that most people really aren’t invested in the kind of politics we often see in the media. That’s what makes me think that there is a quiet majority of people who, like me, want to move away from political warfare.
Because here’s the problem with warfare among citizens: What is the end game? What do we do with the opponents whom we’ve supposedly vanquished? They’re all still here, and we must live with them. It’s a little like a marital fight: You don’t think about “defeating” your “enemy”; you must somehow still live together in peace after the fight is over.
Guida: So is it fair to say that your hope is that somehow — through better leaders, institutions, some persistent mechanism — the quiet majority begins to reshape our politics and national future?
Corey: I do hope so. Perhaps that’s idealistic. It’s hard to say anything these days without worrying that you’ll be pilloried for it. But we really can’t let the loud and bellicose voices drown us out.
Elizabeth Corey, a professor of political science at Baylor, is the author of “Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics” and the forthcoming “The Heart of Learning.” John Guida is a Times Opinion editor.
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