The Problem with ‘Barstool Conservatives’

D ave Portnoy can’t even deal right now. Shortly after the Dobbs news broke, the “barstool conservative” celebrity took to Twitter with an “Emergency Press Conference.” “I feel like I have to speak on this issue,” Portnoy announced. There followed 2.5 minutes of semi-coherent ranting, where he proposes that we are “literally going backwards in time,” that “maybe not everything is to a T in the Constitution,” considering it was written by “people who had slaves,” and that he’s pretty sure “95 percent of people in the country think like me — they’re socially liberal and financially conservative.”

That last statistic, of course, exists purely in Dave Portnoy’s head, as Ryan T. Anderson pointed out with a helpful scatterplot. Economic political preference is plotted along the x-axis, social along the y-axis, on a half-point scale where a -1 is “most liberal” and a +1 “most conservative.” Conspicuously empty: the bottom-right quadrant, precisely the quadrant that should be teeming in the world according to Dave Portnoy.

Portnoy’s babbling about the Constitution also indicates that he doesn’t even grasp the legal fiction that sustained Roe for the past five decades, namely that the right to abortion was in the Constitution (written in lemon juice, in the penumbra of the 14th Amendment, somewhere). For the social liberal, there are two buttons: “Abortion has always been a constitutional right!” and “F–k the Constitution, it was written by a buncha old dead white guys who owned slaves anyway!” Pick one, Dave.

Dave concludes his mini-rant in despair. Woke liberals to the left of him, kooky cons to the right, here he is, stuck in the middle with 95 percent of American voters. Look what we conservative crazies are gonna make him do, he pleads. We’re gonna make him vote for Joe F—kin’ Biden, for f—k’s sake! Seriously, WTAF?

Of course, it’s tempting to point out that this is the hot take we would expect from a guy who defended himself against charges of being a repulsive womanizing scumbag by countering that maybe he was, but he didn’t break the law. Portnoy would hardly be the first of his kind to wax vehemently eloquent on the sanctity of women’s reproductive autonomy. But his take also reflects the whole political oeuvre he represents—that areligious potpourri of sexual libertinism, anti-authoritarianism, anti-wokeness, and lots of f-bombs.

To say that barstool conservatism lacks a clear, animating political vision would be an understatement. But elements of it do attract a good number of voting Americans, even if Portnoy is delusional to think that 95 percent are as intensely distressed as he is over the fall of Roe v. Wade. One pulse Portnoy did accurately and popularly pick up last year was a deep, wide frustration with the Covid regime. Unfortunately, many mainstream conservative voices were not equally quick to find this pulse, which left many rank-and-file conservatives feeling jaded and betrayed. I have experienced a perturbing degree of hostile resistance from “my side” just for taking seriously reports about adverse reactions to vaccines. I have even seen self-styled pro-life voices insist that conservatives who hesitated to mask and vax up are not “truly pro-life.” David French, in his latest Sunday essay, “Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready,” seems incapable of celebrating the momentous fall of Roe without taking yet another swing at conservatives who happened not to share his particular take on pandemic policy.

In this frustrating milieu, I recognize how tempting it might be for the rank and file to drift at least partially toward loud populist voices — people who are not grounded in conservative principles, yet who responded sympathetically to the pandemic moment’s institutional overreach. In this way, they filled something of a vacuum. James Lindsay has played a similar role, as a smarter version of Dave Portnoy for the Very Online who read books on wokeness in addition to hating it. He may be a professional troll, but he has his genuinely useful qualities, such as a willingness to read “academic” papers on Drag Queen Story Hour so the rest of us don’t have to.

Personalities such as Bill Maher have also attracted attention for saying that the Left left them. But, like Portnoy, they are not exactly leaping to join the Right. In his own urbane British way, Douglas Murray was getting at something like Portnoy’s point when he suggested that conservatives shouldn’t wonder why disillusioned liberals like Maher don’t want to cross over, given the Right’s unflinching positions on abortion, among other issues. But his thesis misses the mark, in that he seems to assume that conservatives are peeved or surprised about this. Ordinary people on the right — the actual Right — were never hoping that a Bill Maher or a David Portnoy would “overlook” the bits of our belief system that have to do with core questions about life, death, and the essence of the family. We have always recognized that true conservatism is, in its essence, a modestly sized tent.

Our cultural moment does not merely call for a rejection of barstool “conservatism.” It calls for strong, principled conservative voices who won’t leave a vacuum for barstool “conservatives” to rush in. Chris Rufo has already mocked up a tagline for them: “pro-family, anti-woke, anti-interventionist.” This is certainly more moral and coherent than Dave Portnoy’s disjointed, frat-boy rants. It could fairly be asked, though, how well activists such as Rufo measure up to this tagline, given their casual affirmation of Dave Rubin’s surrogacy plans. In 2022, the phrase “pro-family” cannot be assumed to mean what it used to mean, and further interrogation may yield disappointing surprises.

All the more reason, then, to keep clear in the conservative mind what conservatism is — and what it is not.

Editor’s note: This article has been emended since its original publication.