Displaying all his talent for translating observations about the contours of human nature into modern parlance, Michael Brendan Dougherty last November took the opportunity to answer a rhetorical question: Aren’t you embarrassed by the state of the GOP? His response: “No more than usual.”
“It would be cool if the Right were cool,” he added. “But it never was.” Nor should it be. A political philosophy inclined toward the individual over the collective must sacrifice the passions that produce trends and fashions. The tastemakers will not join a movement that’s wary of exciting revolutionary ideals meant to remake the world in alignment with the ethos of this generation or the next. Conservatism especially suffers from an acute hipness deficit, in part because it cannot flatter the pretensions of those who think they’ve stumbled upon a genuinely new theory of social organization, and it cannot attempt to capitalize on the faddish sentiments that bubble up from the streets. Your new ideas aren’t so new at all, the conservative insists; their consequences are knowable and often undesirable. What a drag.
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