It was over three decades ago when I was living in
Washington DC that I first saw a bumper sticker endorsing annoyance as a
conservative virtue. The sticker said “Annoy the Post: Vote Republican.”
As someone who had grown up reading a more classical version
of American conservatism, this seemed odd to me. Columnists like George Will,
Jack Kilpatrick, and William F. Buckley embodied a conservatism rooted in civic
virtue, and institutional memory. The idea of conservatives striving to disrupt
that decorum, even in service of winning elections, didn’t fit.
But annoying as an organizing principle became a staple of the
rhetoric of a newly coined disruptive conservatism. It became a refrain for
Rush Limbaugh: “You know this is true from how angry liberals get about it,”
ignoring the obvious truth that people can get really, really mad hearing
untruths.
If conservatism as a disruptive force has a birthday, it is
probably when then-Secretary of State Jim Watt declared “I’m a conservative and
I want change.” In the Reagan era, conservatism began the transition from (in
Buckley’s formulation) standing athwart history saying “stop,” instead yelling
“we’re going back that way as quickly as possible, you scum!”
I’ve been thinking about Watt and pro-annoyance bumper
stickers this past week as the nation witnessed the peak, then sudden fall of
Milo Yiannopoulos.
Yiannopoulos has been variously described as a provocateur,
a professional troll, and an anti-PC comedian. He specializes in race-based and
sexist humor, mixed with slightly more serious screeds against Islam.
To take one infamous example, when the all-female Ghostbusters reboot came out,
Yiannopoulos joined the phalanx of (mostly) men who hooted and jeered at the
very idea of such a thing. He then led a racist, misogynist Twitter campaign aimed
directly at cast member Leslie Jones.
In one tweet, he posted an image of what was surely a
perfectly awful 60s-era movie with a gorilla in it, to which he added commentary
that Ghostbusters is not the first
movie to include an ape in the cast. The campaign against Jones, against the history
of other antics, got him banned for life from Twitter.
Yiannopoulos’s claims that all he is really doing is
tweaking the PC left for laughs. He and
his followers describe their bigoted humor as the latest iteration of crazy
kids rebelling against whatever the previous generation considers sacred. Never
mind that the sacred thing in this case is treating other people with decency.
His schtick earned him a rabid following among the 4chan/Breitbart young conservatives. As his
media reach grew, he was invited to speak at CPAC, and in the week leading up
to that, got a guest spot on Real Time
with Bill Maher.Then a tape surfaced of Yiannopoulos seemingly minimizing
the trauma of child sex abuse, particularly in the context of the abuse scandal
in the Catholic church. He was immediately dropped from CPAC, Breitbart, and his major publisher book
deal.
That Yiannopoulos stepped over a line that his erstwhile
patrons couldn’t stomach shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. His act represented
an ethical nihilism that did nothing toward advancing a principled agenda. As
such he was destined for one transgression too far at some point.
All of which makes his embrace by the conservative movement
curious for someone like me who
grew up understanding conservatism as foremost
an intellectual movement.
One explanation given for his ascendency was his willingness
to take on the PC culture of the left. But he did not merely mock Oberlin
students who protested inauthentic sandwiches. He resurrected race and gender
humor long thought no longer viable in polite society.
Instead, the embrace of Yiannopoulos owes more to a political
moment in which the center of gravity within the conservative movement has
shifted from establishing bedrock philosophical underpinnings of a healthy
society to a tribalism defined far too often by the reflexive rejection of
whatever the other side is for.
This is a debased conservatism, one whose intellectual core
has been gutted, leaving only an empty hull on which the day’s vulgar slogan
insulting the other side gets painted.
It’s easy to dismiss someone like me as only being
interested in seeing more of my center/left agenda enacted. Fair enough. But
much of what I do here hopefully exhorts conservatives to do a better job at
conservativing. I have found genuine conservative thinkers essential to my
development as a political animal. We need the variety of voices in our
political ecosystem.
The best defense against the next Milo—and there will be
others—would be for conservatives to return to real conservatism. We can only
hope.
©2017 Akron Legal News, reproduced with permission.
