Conservatives and cool

The discomfiture of many conservatives today stems from the growing fear that opinion makers in conservative circles are falling more in love with being 'hip,' or cool, or generally acceptable than with being conservative; that they are more concerned with being relevant than being right. --Mathew Mehan, Brainwash

With much respect to Mathew Mehan’s clever, precisely written piece “The Cost of Fitting In,” it still gets the relationship between pop-culture, popularity and conservatives wrong. Using the witty analogy of Boy Scouts (inherently virtuous) and cool kids (inherently scummy), Mehan argues that at some point, conservatives who embrace popular culture will have to choose between their good, courageous, honorable ethos and the selfish, secular snobbery of cool. While he stops short of demanding that conservatives break all ties with mass culture, his piece is a warning that the two opposing values will inevitably enter into binary conflict, forcing conservatives to choose between mainstream popularity and doing What’s Right. For Mehan, this means running away from popularity into the protective arms of conservative tradition.

The problem with this, obviously enough, is that it is an inherently conservative position in an area where conservatives have never had a stunning track record: pop-culture accessibility. The traditional wisdom has long been that conservatives should shy from the dark horse of pop culture, branding it as the slippery slope to evil that they see it. But this idea revolves around conservatism’s worst paternal instincts, and implies that conservatives don’t have the strength to stand up for their beliefs without running away. Mehan is championing an unwillingness to engage mainstream culture that will eventually lead to the reduction and isolation of the conservative movement.

One of conservatism’s strengths is its emphasis on individual responsibility, but Mehan’s idea places the rightward masses in the vice grip of (presumably) benevolent paternalism. With his Boy Scouts and cool kids analogy, he paints the conservative movement as a group of children in the prep school of virtue, writing as follows:

“If [the Boy Scout/conservative] finds himself one night with the cool kids, and things are going south, he ought to have the strength to call his scout master for a ride home from the Party.”

But to say this is to deny that conservatives have the strength to stand up for their beliefs without running from those with conflicting values. It’s one thing to teach children to call home for a midnight rescue, but eventually children must grow up and face problems without running home. Adults cannot rely on parents, and conservatives can’t always run away to the coddling of comforting social institutions. Parting of growing up, and part of becoming a mature conservative, is learning to be firm in one’s beliefs without having to leave the room every time someone starts to misbehave. We can and should expect that conservatives are strong enough to do The Right Thing even surrounded by those who don’t.

Mehan’s view seems to be that conservatives should have a tentative relationship with pop culture, but that their primary focus ought to be on building parallel institutions that work separately, unconcerned with the hedonism of the masses. He says bluntly that “conservatives should not seek popularity.” Even the basic comparison to the Boy Scouts implies a divided culture, with the hardworking, uniformed do-gooders on one side and the designer fashion wearing purveyors of cool on the other. This, along with his suggestion that good conservatives should “call home,” represents a fundamental unwillingness to embrace popular culture, one that, if perpetuated, will cost conservatives dearly.

To refuse to interact with pop culture unless it glimmers with the sheen of freshly soaped conservative moral approval is to ignore a huge segment of the population, virtually guaranteeing that conservatives will be branded as all those unfortunate synonyms of “uncool” for a long time to come. Mehan’s position is that it doesn’t matter if people consider the conservative movement cool or not, but that’s a dangerous path to take. Not only does this disavow all those for whom “cool” is a necessity (an increasingly large portion of the media generation), it refuses to recognize the possibility that conservatives can be cool without moral caving. Witness the crossover success of conservatives like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani – conservatives elected in the heart of liberal territory – and the recent talk of South Park conservatism. For Mehan, being a conservative and an outsider are inseparable, but this is clearly not the case.

At its core, Mehan's piece thinks conservatives have to make a choice: either stick to their guns or give in to the eroding amorality of popular culture. But conservatives have too long fled from culture, and that insulation has resulted in a slew of unearned stereotypes that need not continue. In today’s information society, popular culture cannot be ignored. The elementary school wisdom is to not care what other people think, but to do so is to not care about other people. There’s nothing wrong with being a Boy Scout, but if conservatives must confine themselves to merit badges and camp fires, they’re never going to reach the masses. Conservatives need to come out of their pup tents, trade in their uniforms and engage popular culture. We can hang with the cool kids and wear their clothes too.