There is a small heap of books for the conservative reader to ponder this summer.
There is a small heap of books for the conservative reader to ponder this summer.
M ost of us want to get away from politics on our vacations. I like to take short-story collections to the beach. Maybe the complete collections of Flannery O’Connor or Truman Capote. Or the brilliant debuts by Wells Tower (Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned) or Nam Le (The Boat).
But there is a small heap of books for the conservative reader to ponder this summer.
The first on my list is Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress. Harrington has risen to prominence as a contributor to the offbeat, anti-Establishment U.K. website UnHerd. She’s well equipped to critique the sexual politics of the moment, having once been so immersed in online gender-questioning culture that she experimented with an identity under the name Sebastian. What pulled her out and woke up the reactionary feminist inside her was marriage and motherhood.
Harrington’s intellectual engagement is refreshingly astringent. She’s motherly but militant. Anti-progressive, but a bit of a revolutionary. As a stay-at-home mom, she chafes at the hierarchy of values that prizes women who do wage work for bosses and denigrates those in caring roles. It’s not as if children today need less care than children in the past. As a political analyst who started on the left, Harrington tends to ground her work in economic and technological analysis. She writes,
For many [feminists], the aim has historically been a recognition of men and women as physiologically distinct but equal in dignity, interdependent and capable of excellence. But over the 20th century, the movement has taken a decisive turn against care, and in favour of individual autonomy. This happened via another material transition: the arrival into this picture of reproductive technologies that seemed to level previously irreducible differences between the sexes.
Time and again, Harrington returns to an irreducible human nature. In a wonderfully insightful chapter, “War on Relationships,” she says that despite half a century of propaganda trying to convince us that men and women are basically alike, “sexed differences return as weaknesses to be exploited, as options on dating profiles.” She ends up advocating “rewilding sex” — that is, sex without the pharmaceutical management of fertility via birth control. By returning sex to our “wild” nature, we end up rebuilding the pressure between the sexes that forms romance, intimacy, and civilization itself. If our nature is unchangeable, and if it is a gift, the only “progress” that can be made against it is to make us less human, and more miserable.
Next on my list would be Christopher F. Rufo’s America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo has cut a dashing figure across the Right in recent years, an active-duty warrior-scholar. Like many conservative books before it, Rufo’s begins with the crisis of the Left: the failure of the worker to take up his assigned role as the revolutionary subject of history. A variety of left-wing thinkers then tried to come up with new subjects — the students, or “the subaltern.”
Rufo’s book reminded me in some ways of Roger Scruton’s classic Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left. But whereas Scruton’s book aims at exposing the New Left’s pettifoggery and discrediting its thinkers at a philosophical level, Rufo’s book is a more accessible history of how America’s revolutionary thinkers got inside the sense-making institutions of our society and then instituted their ideas. Scruton aims to correct errors. Rufo narrates “a coup.” But both show the Left as committed to, in Rufo’s words, a strategy of “relentless negation.” Derrick Bell’s critical race theory is “better understood as nihilism in the mask of the tragic hero,” Rufo concludes.
His ultimate cure for the coup is a recovery of self-government — that is, allowing the American citizen to use the powers and institutions he inherits through our Constitution to “restore the rule of the legislature, executive, and judiciary over the de facto rule of managers and social engineers.” Captured bureaucracies and DEI departments must be “dismantled.”
Finally, I’d commend political readers to Senator Marco Rubio’s Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity. Normally politicians’ books exist without being read. Book buyers purchase them as a substitute for or an addition to voting for the guy on the cover.
But Rubio’s book is instructive in that it shows a still-young but wiser politician grappling with some of the ideas of the “new right” and synthesizing them into a practical politics. Rubio has an appreciation for how law and policy shape — or misshape — markets and culture alike. If American policy-makers’ ideological indifference to who controls key supply chains is joined to a Chinese policy of obtaining and onshoring crucial technological and military technologies, you can call the sum of it “free trade” all you like, but the result is a China that is an ever more capable threat and foe.
To simplify it even further, what Rubio presents is a politics of surviving and thriving under the pressure of China’s challenge for global dominance, and of defeating the Left’s defeatism at home. There’s something deeply conservative about the way Rubio has navigated to where he is now. It’s precisely by being open to a few new ideas that he is reviving a political formula strikingly like Ronald Reagan’s in effect, if not in policy details. Rubio’s manifesto feels like a charter for America’s winning a new cold war after having bungled the beginning.