The Dark Side of the NatCons, 12-2

is it uncharitable to call them illiberal?

Robert Tracinski writes,

There is a basic rift on the “anti-woke” Right that is increasingly coming out into the open. Some of us oppose the censorious conformism of the social-justice Left because we are classical liberals who believe that freedom of speech and inquiry are critical to the functioning of a free society. Then there are those whose opposition rests on the belief that they should be the ones imposing limits on free inquiry in the name of traditional values. They don't want a free society, they want a virtuous society, in which their idea of virtue is promoted by government.

I think that the last sentence, uncharitable as it might sound, actually passes an ideological Turing test.*

Later,

Glenn Youngkin's recent victory in Virginia’s statewide election indicates that woke ideology is poisonously unpopular. Given the chance, people will vote against it and will cross party lines to do so. Nationalism is unnecessary, ideologically and electorally, to achieve this result. In fact, given that Youngkin performed far better than Donald Trump, who lost the state decisively a year earlier, nationalism is almost certainly a hindrance.

I disagree that nationalism is a problem. What is a hindrance to winning elections is sounding super-angry and crazy. Crazy-sounding is when a progressive says that parents should not be telling schools what to teach. Or when a libertarian calling for open borders. Or when a NatCon says that we need to bring Jesus back into the public schools.

I think that in the body politic today there is an intense longing for sanity. People thought that they would get that from Mr. Biden, and they got burned. In 2024, somebody, in some party, has to manage to run in the sane lane and get the nomination. Being anti-Woke is a necessary condition for sanity, but it is not sufficient.

*See, for example, Joshua Mitchell’s review of the book Speechless. Mitchell writes,

if the conservative movement is to recapture lost ground, to what should it recur—the ancient wisdom of an Aristotle, on the basis of which politics must be concerned with human flourishing, or the modern strain of thought traceable through John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, and others, which elevates human choice, sometimes as an ultimate good? For those who hew to ancient wisdom, the political correctness debate reveals the impotence of the argument for “choice” for its own sake. As a substitute for the Left’s substantive—if malignant—vision, the Right’s defense of “choice” is thin gruel. The conservative movement has been to this extent ill-served by its classical liberal fellow-travelers. In this respect, Speechless is well within the emerging conservative consensus

or see Bradford Littlejohn

as a religious and moral tradition has a plausible claim to cultural dominance, it is entirely justified in using the institutions of the state to support, protect, and perpetuate that tradition. In his lecture as well as in the Monday-night panel discussion, Hazony recurred over and over to education to make his arguments: if we are not willing to fight to get God and Scripture back into the schools, then there is no point fighting for anything, because this is the battle that will decide all others in the end.