The Avant-Garde and the Minivan People

T he bookshelves were lined with classic conservative tomes but interlaced with European right-wing thought: Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola. That sort of thing. The crowd was made up of techno-futurist libertarians, some Wall Street guys, New York conservatives who were so tired of their deep-blue city that they’d grown brash. There was a hot fashion designer. There were Catholic priests in cassocks. There were a lot of young, attractive women who had similar stories of being refugees from left-wing Brooklyn and the drug-addled predations of male feminists. This downtown space, near the bridge, was supposedly paid for by a Silicon Valley billionaire. It had hosted Steve Sailer recently for the launch of a collection of his writing. And sometimes it hosted us, from National Review. That was the “Dimes Square” scene, such as I saw it — gathered around a small old-school salon of thought, Sovereign House. It was a safe space for a MAGA hat.

And visiting just for one night was a jolt of energy for me. It took me back to a time maybe 20 years earlier, in the thick of the War on Terror era, when a similar but far more pro-war crowd seemed to be developing in the city, meeting regularly for drinks, passing around issues of the New Criterion or City Journal, talking about the emerging blogosphere. The authoress of Sexless in the City was there. So was the funny, energetic New York Post headline writer Dawn Goldstein.

That scene from 20 years ago has mostly evaporated. I sometimes see old friends from it on Facebook, denouncing the right wing. Sovereign House is gone too, though there are rumors of a West Coast relaunch. Whether they want it or not, political movements often generate an avant-garde –– an advanced, edgy, curious, and sometimes dangerous play-space of ideas.

Last week in New York magazine, Sam Adler Bell wrote a profile of women who had left the new right’s avant-garde after experiencing misogyny there. Although that wasn’t all. The women he profiled described struggling to live up to the idealized and ideologized image that their politics suggested to them. They hinted at a culture of extremism and performance — of female traditionalism and male transgression. Some people came to this movement for the excitement of transgressing liberal pieties. Soon, they found themselves around people transgressing common decency. The phenomenon he is documenting is absolutely real, and it has some import. The discovery of nasty, racist, and antisemitic texts among young Republican groups and staffers points to this reality.

But the avant-garde intellectual scene and the edgy twentysomething staffers are perhaps not the best way to understand the right as a whole. Their intellectual ambition and their ambitions to be social media influencers place them on a precarious edge and distinguish them as a creative minority, even if sometimes a self-destructive one.

This is all the more evident to me as I see the great normie mass that doesn’t get profiles, the minivan crowd. I attend a Latin Mass parish and have for the life of my marriage. We’re surrounded by peer families, many of whom identify as conservative and traditionalist. That also marks us as a minority, but it’s been a remarkably stable one, with stable membership, forming a stable community for almost two decades. A few of them read widely in the day’s controversies about “post-liberalism,” they have opinions on feminism — but all of these views are more lightly held and more in contact with modern life as families live it. Some mothers work, others don’t. Some homeschool, some don’t. Almost everyone is just making the trade-offs that work best for their families. Often, the minivan people experienced a big worldview shift in their college years, but they’ve long since settled down into lives and lifestyles that moderate their passions. They don’t perform their worldview for the world; they’re just making it work. Theorizing about the loud, obnoxious space a male could inhabit in a patriarchy is just an entirely different enterprise than being a patriarch and having children who need to be fed, occupied, educated, and occasionally entertained or distracted by a screen. A few people wash out, but it’s not like the avant-garde in the city, made up of free radicals who can nucleate on the newest set of ideas circulating along the fringe.

The minivan crowd still provides the GOP coalition with electoral muscle. It provides the conservative movement with brains that get invested in one or another topic for years or decades. And it exercises restraint over the wild avant-garde, in that its members are more likely to occupy the senior roles in Republican offices. And their lives are less likely to be disrupted by an ideological fad. The minivan people might not be easy to profile or seem like news to anyone. But they’re still the beating heart of this movement and party.