Where Do the Barstool Conservatives Go from Here?

I n recent years a lot of words have been devoted to the rise of the so-called barstool conservatives. The term, coined by Matthew Walther, is a reference to the fratty, politically incorrect style of commentary championed by Barstool Sports, and describes a cohort of voters who have moved into the Republican Party over the course of the past half decade — partially because of a friendliness to Donald Trump, and partially because of an alienation from left-wing cultural pieties. Walther writes:

What Trump recognized was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and “SJWs,” opposition to the popularization of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military, the rights of male undergraduates to engage in fornication while intoxicated without fear of the Title IX mafia. Whatever their opinions might have been 20 years ago, in 2021 these are people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever GamerGate was about.

I would contest Walther’s characterization of the issues as “nebulous”: While some “concerns about political correctness” are “vague,” there are also distinct debates — on gender ideology, critical race theory and anti-American curricula in schools, the broader assault on American history and identity, and so on — that are the particulars of broader discussions of “wokeness.” Insofar as they are driven by an antipathy to the Left’s position on these questions, the barstool conservatives represent a kind of “cultural” conservatism, however shallow or flawed it may be.

In an essay for the New York Times last month, I attempted to lay out the contours of this new cultural-conservative coalition. The barstool-conservative appeal “has the capacity to dramatically expand the Republican tent,” I wrote. It is attractive “to a wide range of Americans, many of whom had been put off by the old conservatism’s explicitly religious sheen and don’t quite see themselves as Republicans yet,” and it “may be able to deliver on the old religious right’s priorities.” But it is also distinct from social conservatism in important ways. The new secular conservatives and the old religious right, in fact, “may yet find themselves at odds about the country’s future”:

The future of the emergent, not-so-silent majority remains uncertain. If Roe is overturned, it may well heighten the contradictions within the uneasy alliance of the new and old forms of social conservatism. In the days after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion, the Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy — perhaps the most prominent representative of [barstool conservatives] — declared that if Republicans tried to ban abortion, he would become a Democrat. Just let a “woman do what she wants with her body,” he said, with an expletive for emphasis.

Roe’s official demise did expose the cracks in the barstool–social conservative alliance. Portnoy released another video after the decision was announced, reiterating his conviction that we are “literally going backwards in time”: “At what point do you look at the Constitution and say, hey, this was written by people who had slaves?” he asked. “Maybe not everything is exactly to a T in the Constitution. It’s just nuts. The world evolves, people evolve, technology evolves — you gotta evolve. You can’t stick with this document and look at that and be like, that’s the end-all, be-all.” He added that “this is coming from somebody who consistently is like, the US is the best country in the world by miles,” and “the woke Left is crazy, they’re insane people.” But “I end up having to vote for a moron like Biden because the Right is gonna put Supreme Court people in who are just ruining this country and taking basic rights away,” he maintained. “I honestly believe 95 percent of people in the country think like me — they’re socially liberal and financially conservative.”

In NR, Bethel McGrew easily dispensed with that last claim, pointing out that the statistic “exists purely in Dave Portnoy’s head.” Of all of the various economic and social-political preferences, public-opinion polling consistently shows that “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” is the least popular combination.

But it’s undeniably true that many Americans are moderately pro-choice and that barstool-conservative types — who may share the Right’s distaste for wokeness but emphatically break with the social-conservative view of sexual mores — are likely to share Portnoy’s attitudes on abortion. The simple fact is that Roe’s overturn — and the state abortion bans that have gone or will go into effect in its wake — will remind many Portnoy-style conservatives of why they disliked the Right in the first place. Barstool conservatism was always its own kind of libertinism, with its adherents shunning what they perceive as puritanism of any stripe.

Still, to McGrew’s point, it would be premature to declare that barstool conservatism is dead. While Portnoy may resolve to vote for Democrats, many other like-minded voters might be more put off by the Left’s abortion radicalism. Others might find that they hate wokeness more than they hate Republican abortion bans. Still others might just not care very much at all. (After all, for many voters, abortion simply isn’t a high priority.)

In the meantime, there’s not much that social conservatives can do about the Portnoys of the world, short of betraying core principles. The Barstool Sports founder’s meltdown illustrated the ugly side of the kind of vaguely right-wing politics he represents. At the same time, it also vindicates the social-conservative position: “We were told that a sexual ethic reliant on easily accessible contraception and abortion as a backstop would liberate women,” my colleague Madeleine Kearns wrote. “What it’s done instead is liberate several generations of Portnoys. Now, the bro-choice movement is getting its comeuppance.”

That Dave Portnoy, an influential grown-up, is throwing a temper tantrum about (partially) losing the ability to kill his unborn children is a perfect encapsulation of what our modern sexual ethic, and the abortion regime that enabled it, hath wrought. Compromise is a necessary feature of politics; coalitions require a certain amount of give and take. But a politics unmoored from first principles is merely the pursuit of raw power — an invitation to nihilism. And some principles are simply too important to concede.