In last Sunday’s Washington Post, Steve Hayward gave us a terrific tour d’horizon of the state of intellectual conservatism and included some kind words about Glenn Beck, pointing out that he occasionally has guests who get into serious discussions of serious issues. Then yesterday Jonah Goldberg weighed in with a defense of Beck, in which Jonah chides me gently for my complaint about Beck (“Don’t tell me we have to put up with the Glenn Becks of the world to be successful,” I had grouched) when I wrote an appreciation of the three giants of the right that we have lost in the last three years (Milton Friedman, Bill Buckley, and Irving Kristol). In conclusion, Jonah wrote:
Most important, popularity is what the intellectuals [such as Friedman, Buckley, and Kristol] were fighting for: to create a conservative culture … By definition, making conservatism popular means making it less stuffy and intellectual and more accessible. Not only is Beck good at that, he actually gets people to read serious books in ways Buckley never could. Why defenestrate him from the house of conservatism merely to preserve the rarefied air?
To some extent, assessing these defenses of Beck depends on an empirical question. Net, does he attract people to conservative or libertarian thought or does he repel them? I haven’t any idea what the answer is. Probably if we disaggregate the audience, we will get different answers for different audience segments. But I know who I have in mind when I write, and I’m pretty sure I can guess how Beck’s affecting them.
My reader—the one I’m talking to with every sentence—is a bright, reasonable person who doesn’t agree with me but comes to my text ready to give me a shot. My task is to get this reader to stick with me as we work through difficult questions. If I take a cheap shot at his point of view, I’m going to lose him. If I duck an obvious objection to the argument I’m making, I’m going to lose him.
I realize that this is a saccharine, maybe even a wussy, way of thinking about what I’m doing. And it’s more than a little elitist. But we live in a world where a majority of the best and brightest young people who are going to shape the culture leave college with a standard liberal view of the world. The contribution that people like Steve Hayward and Jonah Goldberg (and me too) can make is to get these people to take a fresh look. Doing that requires restraint. In Sunday’s article, Steve set up a sort of koan for thinking about this question when he wrote about Jonah:
About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present, it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.
Steve’s right, of course—the title sold a lot of books. He’s right about the serious book that Liberal Fascism really is. But he’s also right about the off-putting nature of the title. And so the question that Steve brought to my mind: what if I had entitled Losing Ground something like Liberal Cruelty? It probably would have sold a lot more than the meager 27,000 copies it actually sold on release. Would the book have had as much impact? That’s the koan. I’m sure Jonah can give me examples of people who did pick up Liberal Fascism even though they hated the title, but I’ll still bet he lost a lot of people who would have been deeply affected by his argument if they had read the book.
We are indeed engaged in a battle for America’s soul, but the way that battle is conducted makes a big difference. The goal—at least my goal, but I think it is Steve’s and Jonah’s as well—is not to elect a Republican majority to Congress. That’s not our job, and it’s not as if Republican congresses were so wonderful anyway. Our job is to engage in a debate on great issues and make converts to our point of view. The key word is converts—referring to people who didn’t start out agreeing with us. We shouldn’t be civil and reasonable just because we want to be nice guys. It is the only option we’ve got if we want to succeed instead of just posture. The Glenn Becks of the world posture, and make our work harder.