A very respectable man, Mr. R.J. Snell, who runs academic programs for the Witherspoon Institute, which in turn publishes Public Discourse, has published in that journal a transcript of an exhortation to decency he offered young conservatives recently. It seems to me a failure on the whole & very revealing in two parts. To rush to his conclusion:
In our efforts against revolution, we should not respond with our own. Guardrails are required, & some positions should not be legitimized. We should react with uncompromising scorn when we hear proposals to overturn the Nineteenth Amendment or disenfranchise Jewish people. These are not acceptable proposals. Kinism & ethnic nationalism are not acceptable proposals & should be rejected root & branch. Sneering references about the longhouse or satirical tones about the dignity of women are not acceptable. Any form of Nietzscheanism, the metaphysics of violence, & aristocrats of the soul is not acceptable. Revolution is not overcome with revolution. Wildness not undone with wildness.
That seems to me a rejection of everything attractive to young men online. So far as I can tell, the man proposing it has neither the means & nor the desire to effect such a rejection. Ditto the people for whom he speaks, like-minded conservatives, learned, industrious, & decent. They can refuse employment or even blackball anyone they suspect of impiety, but those people aren’t applying for jobs in conservative institutions—it is the other way around, since a significant minority of the youth in conservative institutions do admire these miscreants & perhaps a majority has heard of them, whereas they wouldn’t be caught dead reading the respectable conservatives of mid-century America, & shirk that duty even when they get paid to do it.
Mr. Snell admits something of this unpalatable truth in an earlier passage in his speech. Here he is showing off his skills as an ironist, describing the miserable state of affairs from the point of view of a young man:
We are no longer the yeoman farmers of Jefferson or the commercial republicans of Hamilton but instead an unhealthy, enervated, exhausted, alienated, numbed populace zoned out on the filth produced by our anti-culture. Only the blind, the foolish, the RINO, the Boomer, & the cuck think otherwise. It’s time to get red-pilled, Claremonstered, #tradwifed, and out of the Longhouse!
I don’t have anything against Mr. Snell, but the Claremonsters are my friends & I have more in common by way of friendly conversation with the longhouse man, he goes by L0m3z on Twitter, than with Mr. Snell. Perhaps sensing this, Mr. Snell has never said hello, unlike L0mez. The class divide among conservatives is real & an urgent danger, which was not the case a generation back… I don’t think this prejudices me against the fellow, but it certainly reveals that the obstacles to fellowship are much greater than he lets on. Perhaps in the interests of probity, he does suggest awareness of this problem in the sequel, where he faces the utter failure of his irony:
That last line received quite a cheer from a sizable group of young men at the event. So sizable I read the line again, to another cheer, & then chastised them for doing so; they shouldn’t cheer for such ideas. The women, notably, did not cheer.
You have to applaud a man who takes a pie in the face & decides to force the moment to its crisis & do it again, only to then demand better handling of pies… The women could not save Mr. Snell from making a fool of himself; in order to earn Mr. Snell’s good opinion, I will assume that the women very earnestly agreed with him & wanted to save him, & that not a one found him laughable. Decency demands it; & decent men often have to make fools of themselves, for they hold on to manners in adverse circumstances—we wouldn’t have manners otherwise. In good times, this merely makes for comedy; in bad times, we’re too angry to laugh. For his part, Mr. Snell, unfortunately, cannot save the women either. It is of the essence of his attitude that at one moment he complains about their plight, unmarriageable men, but at no moment does he suggest anything untoward regarding the fairer sex. Yet he’s facing men who have heard of OnlyFans, a word which I hope Mr. Snell will never find cause to let pass between his lips.
Mr. Snell is rhetorically disarmed, because he is psychologically uneducated. He is facing a youth movement with the kinds of speeches young people wave away if they notice them. He acknowledges their spiritedness only to proceed to attempt to dissipate it. I cannot tell whether it were better for his cause that he succeed or fail in that regard. If he gets his genteel audience to listen, they will also become unable to deal with what’s brewing online—the only thing brewing in rightwing politics. If he domesticates young men too thoroughly, he only make them defenseless in a society which, he admits, does not reward gentle habits. Yet if he doesn’t, he risks not merely personal ridicule, tacit & perhaps resentful, but the discrediting of the ideas he espouses.
If we are to speak in an educated, yet a spirited way, to at least allude to the gentlemen of yore, who were men before they were gentled, rather than soft or frivolous, we should speak of Roman virtue & its collapse. Roman virtue has concerned Americans from the Founding & it is again on the lips of the young men & their older educators. Mr. Snell is playing Cicero warning the republic against Mark Antony; were America in a civil war, he’d end up just like him, without having his virtues. Happily, it’s not a civil war, so defeat is not so miserable nor yet so certain; & it is no insult to a man to compare unfavorably to Cicero: Who among us has those rhetorical gifts, the daring of the lawyer, or his philosophical learning? But it nevertheless is the measure of the moment that we need a Cicero or people who have learned the hard lessons of politics from his writings. I also note that among the people whom Mr. Snell would cast into the outer darkness Cicero has a very bad reputation, a mere talker of virtue when brutality was needful & a delight.
So these are the three lessons for today: If everyone respectable is soft & faintly ridiculous, morality will end up meaning nothing. Decent people will persist in their decency, but public things will decay, since no one will believe in justice without men strong enough to do justice. Indignation without deeds therefore is the sort of thing immoralists call “worse than a sin, a mistake.”
Further, if the class distinction which is also a difference between generations is reducible to this softness that passes for morality, the belief in loyalty will be destroyed. First, because there is left no mutuality between elder & younger & institutions become the merely private possessions of aspiring aristocrats; secondly, because spiritedness has become a mark of guilt among conservatives & is turning into demotic rage. Mr. Snell’s bete noire, Bronze Age Pervert, has many more admirers than himself. It won’t do to speak frivolously of leadership & virtue, if no one can point to the leaders & speak briefly, but persuasively about their virtues! Who among the rising conservatives can face up to this ugly truth, much less face it down? How avoid it, when ugly truths are so fashionable!
Finally, if moral exhortation fails to find an audience & the institutions are weak, defensive alliances, then politics requires finding many ways to address the broad audience in such a way as to restore the pride of being American. The integrity of that character cannot come from intellectuals, who live sheltered lives & are easy prey for activists & other demagogues, as well as for lawyers & the administrative intriguers that plague elite institutions—the revolution they decry overwhelms them. Spiritedness is wild today &, given the connection between our technologies & our imagination, far more powerful than any argument, including the arguments the various factions of the online right-wing make. To educate that spiritedness toward manliness would require some combination of patriotism & piety, that is, it would require, against the habits of nice people, to find the most talented among us & place our hopes in their efforts. Much of this work would be far more on the poetic side than on the side of think tanks; our think tank class is largely unpoetic, unerotic, & unmanly. A large enough coalition of impressive men could tame young men where everything else has failed; what else can work against the revolution but nobility, the essence of conservatism?
This is an important argument to have. I think Aaron Renn does a good job of facing reality head-on (e.g. being willing to criticize women as a group) without going full Nietzsche.
https://themasculinist.com/author/aaron-m-renn/
https://aaronrenn.substack.com/s/newsletter
This is fantastic--great critique.