So the postmodern and conservative brand will be leaving NRO this week.
One reason is that not enough people who visited the NRO main page came over to visit us. We were, in fact, nearly impossible to find there.
Another is that not enough people who came to PMC wandered over to other places on NRO.
It’s been clear for awhile that we just weren’t getting integrated.
Another reason still is that I, upon becoming 65, was starting to view all this as more a burden than a joy. Especially, of course, in this exceedingly creepy election year.
Even making fun of so-called higher education has lost a lot of its fun. It’s become too easy a target, and by mocking the empire of competency and diversity, I fear I’m actually facilitating the enemies of what remains of the moral and intellectual diversity we still have in our colleges and universities. One set of enemies — the Republicans with their libertarian economists, public-policy thank tanks, and clueless governors — have been about reducing higher education to competency, which means, of course, sucking the “higher” out of it. And others, on the left, of course, have been using the weapon “diversity” to take out everything that’s not techno-competency.
We postmodern conservatives also have been irresponsibly diverting ourselves from completing real books and keeping in decent physical shape, hoping to be around until the Singularity kicks in. Carl especially needs to get his book on music done, not to mention the ones on the various kinds of American liberty and on film.
Being postmodern and conservative will find a safer space fairly soon, probably in a different format. To make that work, we need a bunch of younger contributors. They’re out there, but to draw them in we need to move down the road. If you want to know more (or sign up), you have to find me.
Although we have been shown other possibilities, my conclusion is that the place of the little blog in the web presence of the newsstand magazine no longer makes sense. The word “blog,” thank God or history or technology, is also toast. Feel free to let me in on any new branding terms that come to mind.
I appreciate that our country’s increasingly deadly and utterly unironic institutional hostility to reasonable “viewpoint diversity” makes it about impossible for “younger scholars” to be associated with any place overtly conservative and/or Republican. But “postmodern conservative” and ”postmodern rightly understood” are more dissident than ideological stands. Yet we are always very pro-American, and we’re semi-bullish on our future.
Still, we have to sit back for a bit and reflect on a country where young people have enthusiasm only for libertarianism and socialism, and often really believe the two are compatible. We can see, like anyone else, that what experts call “neoliberalism” ain’t “neo” at all anymore. In some respects, it morphed into a hyper-globalism that discredited liberalism by detaching it from the privileges and responsibilities of political life. Can liberal democracy make a comeback? Well, I think so, if we learn selectively from both Trump and Sanders, and if our nostalgia is rigorously selective.
And we need to reflect on a country where each of the top four candidates for president repulses us (or at least me) enough not to even deserve to be chosen as the least of the evils. Well, there’s still the American Solidarity Party.
Now our authors aren’t disappearing from NRO altogether. Their articles may well appear from time to time on the “main page.”
Not only that, but Peter Spiliakos and I will be writing for the Corner, as the spirit moves. Exposure to that larger and more mainstream audience will make Pete famous fast. Look for him on the talk shows within the year. And it’s on the Corner that I will announce our new location.
Let me finish up for now by thanking the National Review for all its hospitality. That means mostly thanking Nick Frankovich, who made contributing here a luxury cruise.