Conservatism's Greatest Failure: The Academy

The conservative revolution was supposed to be a revolution. It has not been. It has been an insurgency. And while that insurgency captured a vast swath of open territory, it failed utterly to capture the key citadels of American culture, beginning with American higher education.

The academic left likes to complain about how the conservative onslaught forced it to "retreat" to the ivory tower - but without acknowledging that the ivory tower had become the Gibraltar of American life. For better or worse, an undergraduate degree has become the prerequisite for entry into middle-class life. Academics control the narrow neck through which America's managers, writers, thinkers, bankers, politicians, and executives must pass, and that passage has acquired an atmosphere, no matter how self-pityingly the academic left likes to deny it, in which Left assumptions are set as the default positions

The academic Left is correct when it pooh-poohs the idea that it conducts a massive ideological de-programming; but then again, it does not need to. It has merely to nudge the standard deviation of the politics of the future ruling class a few clicks to the left for conservatism to seem abnormal. Conservatives made the disastrous mistake of assuming that if they abandoned those tedious and expensive plans to lay siege to the university, they would be free to move on to the larger and more easily-annexed plains of government and finance. They were wrong. Governments change, finances crash, but the faculty is forever.

Because conservatism failed to capture the university, it failed to capture the next key fortress of the Left, which is the media, print and broadcast alike. Much as Americans routinely deplore the unapologetic left-list of the knowledge class, its unwearying capability for saturation bombing eventually erodes the intellectual power to resist. Sticks and stones do indeed hurt bones, but so do names - every Keith Olbermann sneer, every Paul Krugman screed, every sitcom episode in which hedonism suffers no penalty, is a chip at the certainty of the reader and beholder. Without a comparable response, the sheer volume of Left presuppositions carries the feeble flicker of resistance before it. But how could there be such a response when no conservatives owned the journalism schools?

Without a secure position in the university and the media, conservatism had no way to explain itself. There was Fox News; there were conservative programs and conservative professors. But Fox is a soloist, trying to be heard above a chorus. And the programs and professors were of little interest to conservative strategists and donors who wanted a quick bang for their buck instead of the loneliness of the long-distance runner. Without those key installations, conservatives had no place - and sometimes no depth - with which to exegete a basic contradiction in Reagan-era conservative politics, which is the need to use government to dismantle government. Conservatives operated on the premise that what Americans want most is liberty - which is to say, that Americans in the 21st century inhabited the same world of values as the Founders of the 18th.

This was perhaps a mistake. The young people with whom I have worked and lived for the last thirty-two years want security from the demands of self-government, and so they fail in droves to vote or to run for office. (I recall one township council meeting where a visibly-frightened first-time attender confessed that she didn't realize she was even allowed to speak, much less ask questions). They want security from public service, and so they dodge jury duty, recruit the poorest segments of the nation as their soldiers and behave as though on-campus recruiting was an intolerable threat to their future career path.

The conservative political movement never really learned how to play the game. We wanted too much control of too much territory, too fast; and like Napoleon in Russia, we conquered vast amounts of ground very quickly, only to realize too late that we had fallen, exhausted, just short of the pressure points that really counted. It's a mistake we did not need to make, and it's one we can start correcting now by plotting how to redirect our resources (which remain considerable) toward the capture of those pressure points.

Above all, it's a mistake we had better not make, the next time around. If there is one.