Lightspeed politics
I’m just about finished listening to the audiobook version of Charles C. W. Cooke’s 2015 book The Conservatarian Manifesto: Libertarians, Conservatives, and the Fight for the Right’s Future. Cooke is a writer and editor for National Review who leans libertarian. Like all his writing, the book is lucid, witty, substantive, and focused in earnest on what matters most. I’m not a libertarian, and I think Cooke is wrong in significant respects, but I regularly read him both for instruction and for pleasure—and, occasionally, to listen to the most eloquent representative of views I oppose.
But I’m not here to talk about that. Rather, I want to share why listening to the book has caused me a fair bit of political whiplash. It was written around 2013 or so, at the height of Obama’s national unpopularity and the Tea Party’s ascendancy. Cooke adroitly saw a window for the proposal of a new vision for the GOP: fiscally conservative and socially liberal, with an emphasis on limited government and classical liberalism. And listening to him read the book, you can understand why that proposal appeared plausible at the time. And yet, in hindsight, nothing could have been less likely either for the GOP’s rank and file to get behind or for the GOP’s electoral prospects at the national level. Trump comes along just a few months after the book’s publication and torpedoes the whole project. More than that, the proverbial “quadrant” of fiscally conservative and socially liberal is the polar opposite of the most nationally popular but under-served voting bloc in America: socially conservative but fiscally liberal. Bracketing the merits of the proposal, at the level of strategy it is dead on arrival.
Elements of the book also capture, as though in amber, a moment in political time that seemed, then and there, to be perennial, even eternal, but was finished within mere months—or, at most, by the next election. One reference in particular, to Glenn Beck, reminded me of a similar moment in Ross Douthat’s otherwise outstanding book Bad Religion, published in 2012. There Douthat uses Beck to open the book’s eighth and final chapter, framing the argument that follows. Now, neither Douthat nor Cooke is especially enamored of Beck; they aren’t enlisting him in a joint cause. But they permit themselves somewhat spellbound rhetoric to describe the “phenomenon” of Beck and his “extraordinary” popularity “outside” the media “mainstream.”
That’s all fine and good. But does a serious (however popular) work of intellectual history really need central casting to call in a shock jock conspiracy theorist for the concluding discussion of (in this case) American nationalism? Both authors write about Beck the way all journalists did at the time: with a mixture of repulsion, admiration, and envy.
And yet, just as the libertarian moment vanished in a puff of smoke, so Beck’s ubiquity died away without anyone really noticing. He’s still out there—I checked so you don’t have to—but he’s no longer Part Of The Discourse. His time has passed. His presence in these two books, however, written around the same time, testifies to an important feature of our politics as well as how it is observed and chronicled by our journalists in real time.
That feature is this: Politics moves at the speed of light. But while you’re watching it, it seems somehow unchanging, even atemporal. The result of this combination is that nothing is so dated as the verities and common sense of a particular slice of political time, especially when it is caught and put into words immediately, illic et tunc.
For us today, who have lived through this radical, perhaps epochal, set of changes in only half a decade, this is a worthy reminder of two things. First: What seems fixed and permanent in politics in the moment is far more likely to be the opposite: wholly malleable and subject to rapid and profound variation. Second: Politically speaking, what appears impossible is probably anything but.
That said, it takes imagination to cast the truly transformative vision and to find the means of making it a reality. Preferably, though, the right imagination.
