His manifesto, which appeared under the title “Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism” in the online edition of Doublethink, a magazine published by a small right-of-center foundation, began by allowing what most conservatives already believed: the mainstream media tilts to the left. “Contra the least-thoughtful conservative critics,” however, “there isnt any elite liberal conspiracy at work.” The source of the bias was something far more subtle: “The right,” Friedersdorf wrote, “has a problem with narrative.”
This wasnt entirely conservatives fault, he wrotethe story of, say, a destitute familys eviction from its apartment made for better copy than the explanation of why rent control was a bad idea from a societal perspective. But conservative writers, he argued, had themselves to blame, too. They were bad at telling stories. Operating forever in the shadow of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., they had spent half a century honing their rhetorical chops on the romantic notion that an argument, framed eloquently and forcefully enough, could change the course of history. Worse, these arguments tended to be advanced in right-wing publications that made little effort to attract a general audience, devolving into an exercise of limited interest to anyone not already locked inside the echo chamber.
Friedersdorf had a different idea in mind. “Im not sure another Buckleys what we really need,” he wrote. “Instead, Id prefer another Tom Wolfe, or better yet a dozen. As his generations conservative commentators railed against The Great Society, insisting its urban anti-poverty programs encouraged radicalism, bred dependence on the welfare state, and ignored the root causes of unemployment, Mr. Wolfe did something different: reporting.” Wolfe had gone to the conductor and composer Leonard Bernsteins cocktail party, watched Park Avenues finest flatter themselves by sharing hors doeurves with Black Panthers, and wrote about it in scathing detail, first in New York magazinethe cover featured three white socialites in glittery cocktail dresses with raised fistsand later in Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. In doing so, Friedersdorf believed, Wolfe had made a far stronger case for conservatism than the collected works of L. Brent Bozell. And Wolfe hadnt had any need to work within the confines of a conservative shadow institution; writing in New York and Esquire, he had reached and potentially persuaded an audience that didnt subscribe to Buckleys National Review. In sum, Friedersdorf wrote, “the right must conclude that were better off joining the journalistic project than trying to discredit it.”
Shortly after he wrote it, Friedersdorfs “Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism” came to the attention of David Kuo, President Bushs former point man for faith-based initiatives, who had left the administration unhappily and went on to write Tempting Faith, the most personal of the dissenting White House memoirs of the Bush years. Kuo had come to believe that the Republican Partys recent adventure with near-unchecked political power had left conservatives with a lot of soul-searching to do, and he wanted to provide them a place to do it. He and his former boss, veteran culture warrior William J. Bennett, were thinking of starting a social networking site for values voters. The projects loss leader, they decided, would be a modestly ambitioned online magazine, a kind of right-of-center Slate, tentatively called LibertyWire, and they hired a former Mike Huckabee campaign staffer and blogger named Joe Carter to be its managing editor. LibertyWires founders were all committed evangelicals, and Carter, who had once run a small newspaper in East Texas, envisioned the site as a place where social conservatives could talk about culturea safe zone between the purely political critiques of the conservative media and the secular liberal criticism that dominated the mainstream media, neither of which answered the questions he wanted answered about television and movies. “The Christian culture has the shit counters: the people who say, This movie has thirteen bad words, or whatever,” Carter told me. “We didnt want to do that. We thought there was a real audience for criticism of books, TV, and movies by people who actually liked books, TV, and movies.”
Kuo and Carter also wanted to attract a younger generation of conservative writers, and thought Friedersdorf would be a good start; “Electric Kool-Aid Conservatism” played to the soft spot both of them had for the New Journalism of the 70s. Ditching the LibertyWire monikerit sounded like a John Birch Society newsletterthey rechristened the site Culture11, after a list of eleven areas of culture they wanted it to encompass, and debuted quietly on August 20. The project fit the needs of the momentBushs approval ratings were below freezing, the presidential campaign was Barack Obamas to lose, and Republicans were unlikely to avoid a rout in both houses of Congress. It was an opportunity for a healthy retreat from politics for serious and thoughtful conservatives, a chance to sort out who they were and what they wanted to accomplish outside of the glare of party politics. Providing the online meeting place in which they could do it seemed like a great idea to Culture11s founders, maybe even one that could succeed as a for-profit enterprise. One of those things turned out to be true.
Culture11s in-house writers also had a gift for whacking their own partisans, with varying degrees of constructive criticism and snark. “Filmmaker Jean Luc Godard famously declared that, to do his job, all he needed was a girl and a gun, ” Suderman wrote on the occasion of Sarah Palins selection as John McCains running mate, alongside a photo of the Alaska governor posing with a stuffed grizzly bear. “On his hunt for a Vice President, John McCain apparently came to the same conclusion.” A month after the election, when even respectable right-leaning publications were expending ink and pixels on the legitimacy of Barack Obamas birth certificate, Culture11 offered up a mischievous list of the “Top 11 Fringe Right Arguments Against Barack Obama Becoming President” (Number two: “Hes not really black.” Number one: “Hes black.”). Poulos, the political editor, wrote about Democratic and Republican dynasties with equal acidity: the Clintons were “wily, and probably deathless, political opponents, with an arsenal of depleted-uranium loyalists”; Bush was “a man who thinks in grand words made up of few letters.” When Palin, at the apex of her popularity, held a campaign rally in Virginia, he stopped by and was perturbed by what he saw. “In place of a detailed contrast between the GOPs shortcomings and failures and the real change thats promised,” he wrote, “the McCain campaign seems content with zingers and chants. Those things are fine and natural ornaments for the election-year treebut they do require a tree.”
This sort of work did not win Culture11 an excess of friends among more tactically oriented conservatives. “One of my proudest moments,” Kuo told me, “was when someone at RedState”the conservative blog that attempted to mount an online purge of the movements reformists in the last weeks of the campaign”said, We arent even going to post a link to Culture11. ” After the election, of course, assessing the shortcomings of the Republican Party had become a popular pastime. In late November, I ran into Poulos and Friedersdorf at a post-election panel discussion cohosted by the National Review Institute and Hillsdale Collegea small school in Michigan whose student body was ranked the most conservative in the country by the Princeton Reviewat the Hyatt in downtown Washington called “The Future of Conservatism.” They were sitting at a table in the back of the room, intermittently taking notes on pads of hotel stationary, as the panelistsAtlantic senior editor Ross Douthat, National Review editors Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg, a token libertarian from the Cato Institute, and a professor from Hillsdaletook turns diagnosing the movements ills.
“Conservatism, were told,” intoned the Hillsdale professor, the kind of stiffly formal young man whose cheeks are simply waiting to become jowls, “is an ism that soon may be a was-m. ” A mixture of polite laughs and groans wafted through the room. The audience sat around tables scattered with dishes of hard candies, the kind that grandmothers keep in their kitchen drawers, and leafed idly through copies of the December 1 issue of National Review, the cover of which was a picture of a sunrise overlaid with the word RENEWAL.
Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, spoke last. “One of the things conservatives need to do for the future of conservatism,” he advised, “is deal with the issue of youth, and deal with the issue of the culture a lot better.” Conservatives had a problem with young people, he said, and it had to do in part with the modern college experience, which had come to embody the liberalism and libertinism that his magazine had famously stood athwart for fifty years. “I think that the end of history for liberalism today is that were all going to become like one vast college campus at the end of timewhere the only crime is to hurt somebody elses feelings,” he continued. Among college students, “the worst thing you can do is harsh someone elses buzz. And the second they step off the moving car of their college experience, and actually have to walkits like one of those moving walkways in airports, when you get off all of a sudden, Whoa, its hard to walk! ” The audience laughed appreciatively. “Once they get off, and realize they need jobs and need to actually pay rent and all that, they get a lot more conservative very quickly.”
When Goldberg got to the line about the moving sidewalk, Friedersdorf and Poulos looked at each other. Poulos made the finger-twirling “crazy” gesture. When New York Times columnist David Brooks, the panels moderator, opened up the floor for questions, Poulos walked briskly up to the microphone.
“Hi gentlemen,” he began. “Um in the interest of fun Im going to taunt the panel first, and then try to justify running the gauntlet by phrasing it as a serious question.” Poulos was wearing a charcoal suit and a brightly colored tie, which stood out in the ballrooms sea of navy blue and khaki but was subdued by his standards, which tend to run toward things like monochromatic three-piece suits and velvet jackets. (He also has sideburns that are shaped like New Hampshire and almost as big; the combination of muttonchops and fine tailoring suggests a character in a Victorian political cartoon, or one of the white guys in Superfly.) Pouloss writing was prone to densely cerebral sentences that unfurled over the course of a whole paragraph, and he addressed the panel in a similar tone. “One concern that I and others might have,” he began, “is that conservatives are particularly good at doing a kind of cultural criticism that results in inaccurate or radically incomplete observations about things going on in this crazy culture of ours. So, just sort of moving quickly down the line, right? Like, Jonah gives us a portrait of a college campus where everything is taken care of and no one buzzes anyone elses vibebut of course, you know, the dark side of college life is that everyone is buzzing everyone elses vibe in privateterrible breakups, attempted suicides, school counseling, and threesomes gone wrong.” Threesomes gone wrong. The Hillsdale professor looked like someone he had never met had just walked up and thrown a glass of water in his face. Several of the other panelists were friends or acquaintances of Pouloss, and they looked mildly amused as he moved on to the great conservative shibboleth: “The valiant working class, culturally robust and upright Americans? Well, yeah, but a lot of these people also enjoy Cheetos and watching Family Guy.
“In the interest of being more than provocative,” he said, getting to his serious question, “are we ever going to be able to address the question of cultural necessitarianism without being confident that were getting our cultural criticism right?”
Stripped of its woolly academese, what Poulos was asking was, can conservatism properly push back against a popular culture that it doesnt really understand? How does a movement that yearns for the values of the past confront a culture that prizes novelty? This was a problem that had bedeviled modern American conservatism since Buckley first inveighed against the Beatles in his syndicated column. It was something that Poulos, who had dabbled in screenwriting and indie rock (his band was called the End of History) in Los Angeles before moving to Washington, had kicked around in his own writing. “The right has a lot to learn from people who are completely outside of it,” he explained later. If they did that, they “might actually win some latecomers, people who have lived unhappy or unsatisfying lives. And if they show up at the door of the right and say, Gosh, my super-transgressive life is sort of unrewarding, maybe Ive exhausted this mine of self-indulgence and personal freedom and saying fuck the man, and the right is completely disinterested in engaging those people, I think theyre missing out.”
Poulos was more pontificator than reporter, but this line of thinking dovetailed with Friedersdorfs belief in sending conservative writers out to experience the world. If Poulos wasnt quite the Wolfean observer that his coeditor was looking for, his occasional pieces about his time in Los Angeles arguably came closer to Friedersdorfs ideal than anything else Culture11 publishedthey were biting but empathetic, and tapped the unexamined is-this-all-there-is melancholy that underlies the irony-heavy hipster milieu. “Ambiguity was cultivated and non-commitment a social compact,” he wrote in one piece about the L.A. scene. “A blurring of the basic facts took shape as a habitual coping mechanism.”
Beyond these forays, though, the cultural coverage that had been Culture11s original raison dtre proved to be a bit tricky. The lets-see-what-sticks approach with which the site was launched had produced contradictory ambitionsCarters socially conservative safe zone, Friedersdorfs electric Kool-Aid conservatismwhich, while not entirely incompatible, did make it a curious beast; there was a transparent absurdity to a journalistic enterprise with George Bush Sr.s drug czar at the head of its board of directors attempting to take stylistic cues from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The goal of providing conservative journalists a place to write for their fellow conservatives about cultural subjects gave the lesser features and reviews by young writers the sheltered-workshop aura of a college newspaper, and occasionally dipped into the kind of “these kids today” cultural commentary that right-of-center magazines have never been short of, with Iain Murrayone of the Competitive Enterprise Institutes in-house authorities on climate change denialharrumphing that “it seems impossible to find a show that airs after 8 p.m. on any of the major networks that is not obsessed with sex.” Friedersdorf turned out to have been right when he observed that the ranks of out-and-out conservative journalists who did this kind of thing well were pretty thinwhen he trolled for story pitches on Web sites that hungry freelancers frequented, such as Media Bistro, he was surprised to find that most of what he got came from writers who fell further left on the political spectrum (he published them anyway). And as some of the sites contributors grew increasingly adventurous, one of the principals got skittish. In December, when a pseudonymous contributor to Ladyblog, Culture11s “conservative feminist” forum, posted an entry titled “In Defense of the Hook-up Culture, ” Carter yanked it off the blog. (“I didnt like the content,” he later said. “We wanted dissent within the conservative perspective, but to me that fell out of line.”) The move prompted an in-house uproar and an apologetic response from Kuo, reinstating the post but also averring that “Culture11 is a conservative site. We see the world through a culturally conservative lens. As such the post isnt something that anyone here particularly agreed with. We dont believe the hookup lifestyle is good for anyone.” (“I think our disagreements were healthy disagreements,” he told me later.)
In a sense, Culture11 was running up against the natural limits of its niche. “We had expanded so much that I didnt even know who was writing for us anymore,” Carter said. “We were getting a lot of flack from conservativesWhats conservative about your site? ” While Carter was enthusiastic about Culture11s coverage of televisionthe last medium still largely regulated by federally imposed decency standardshe had come to the conclusion that, faced with the explicitness of contemporary music, there was a limit to what the site had to say. “How do you talk about something like gangsta rap from a conservative perspective?” he said. “Are you going to critique it, or just disagree with it?” Friedersdorf tried gamely to square that circle in a piece exploring his conflicted feelings about dancing to Lil Jon at a wedding, but it was an essay that could have been written only so many times.
It was a grimly funny coincidence that around the time Culture11s financial well was running dry, another Web site sharing its subject matter debuted to much greater fanfare in the right-wing media than Kuos project ever received: Big Hollywood, an entertainment and politics blog created by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Los Angelesbased Internet entrepreneur who helped launch both the Drudge Report and Huffington Post. Beneath an angry vermillion-colored banner, the blog offers recurring features like the “Celebutard of the Week”tracking the latest vapidly liberal political utterances from the likes of Cherand clips of the best conservative moments in film interspersed with rote breaking news from the entertainment industry. Its supposed to eventually host cultural musings from such notable film critics as House Minority Leader John Boehner and Minority Whip Eric Cantor; commenting on a scene in the new thriller The International in which the characters shoot it out in the Guggenheim Museum, one Big Hollywood contributor coos approvingly, “I love seeing modern (phony) art destroyed.”
But for all the bluster of all-caps headlines like “GLOBAL WARMING PROPAGANDA SINKS UNDER THE SEA 3D, ” its a far less courageous site than the comparably nonconfrontational Culture11; beneath the patina of combativeness, its really just a support group for 24 fans. What Big Hollywood does isnt criticism, or reportingits ideological accounting. And its failure to get its arms around the culture in which it is swimming is symptomatic of the broader failures of the conservative movement. For decades, the Nixonian notion of the silent majority created a strong temptation for conservatives to simply wall off the parts of society that they didnt like or understand, secure in the belief that there were more people on their side of the wall. Ballot for ballot, this may have been true in the 1970s and 80s, and even into the 90s. But if you build a border fence, its difficult to see whats happening on the other side of it. Which is why in 2008 the Republican Party awoke to a world in which it was losing every politically important demographic battle and had essentially ceded the field on issues like education, where it hadnt contributed a new policy idea since the school voucher, and energy, where the best plan it could come up with was a renewed push for offshore drilling. Big Hollywoods mania for ideological categorization stems from the same mind-setshared even by some of the smarter reform conservativesthat produced the Bush administrations disastrous loyalty-over-performance hiring practices: the instinct to see everything, from the Sundance Film Festival to NASAs atmospheric research programs, as just another battleground. What Culture11s editors got right was the observation that, regardless of what you think of the world as it is, you cant figure out how to wrestle with it until you understand whats actually happening in it.
One evening a few weeks after his Web site went bust, Kuo called me with news: earlier in the day he had met with a group of prospective new investors, and there appeared to be a good chance of resurrecting Culture11. As of this writing, its still unsettled, and I wish him wellbut Im also a little ambivalent about it. Because I think Friedersdorf was right in the first place. Tom Wolfe didnt need a conservative magazine to do what he didin fact, he succeeded largely because he wasnt writing for one. Young journalists, of course, work with the opportunities that are available to them, but I would have preferred to see Culture11s best talent writing for the actual Slate (which does, after all, publish plenty of conservative writers) rather than a self-consciously right-of-center version of it. With their online sanctuary gone, I was looking forward to seeing their bylines elsewhere, challenging and being challenged by editors and institutions of other stripes.
On the other hand, if new investors revive Culture11 and give it a proper launch, it will be an opportunity to find out if Kuo was right: whether there is a niche for an enterprise like Culture11, or whether right-leaning readers will opt in greater numbers for comforting cocoons like Big Hollywood. In the end, the market will decideand what could be more conservative than that?
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