“IT’S TIME you came off the fence, Nigel.” So said conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, turning half-around as he walked away from my Oxford front-door one sunny afternoon in 2016.
How refreshing you are to read! I have a similar story to share, although I won't be as eloquent as you—but perhaps there is charm in that difference, because it is emblematic of counterpoints of our cultures I still find appealing. (I am a muddy-boots American who had childhood dreams of becoming a pamphleteer and polemicist as much as I did of playing synth on Mtv.)
I, too, have recently come off the fence. No one encouraged me, though for some years there has been a small voice in my mind and heart that whispered with increasing urgency. During Covid and the BLM riots, it started shouting. I spent that time in the San Francisco Bay Area—the heart of American "liberalism", where I had lived for the previous fifteen years, enjoying the luxury of being politically complacent. I worked sixty-hour weeks, I played in two bands, I took for granted the freedoms I had, and I thought only marginally about the great, inspiring concepts with which I was raised.
My father's career as a high-ranking Army officer gave us a peripatetic lifestyle and placed us in locations as far-flung as Riyadh, Hiroshima, Washington, D.C., Oklahoma City, Honolulu, and the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Being exposed to such disparate cultures from my earliest years instilled in me a longing to know more about my own. I studied American history with zeal in my adolescence, reading Paine, Adams, de Tocqueville; all the greats. As a teen in Northern Virginia during the Reagan Eighties, it was cool to be able to discuss and debate with other daughters and sons of international diplomats. I *loved* it. I felt no compunction about supporting the president and relating his philosophies and wins back to the ideas in those books, particularly after the fall of The Wall.
Fast forward to 2020.
In Marin County, we locked down early and long—from March of '20 to June of '21. At first, my introvert nature viewed it as a godsend. Truly, the lockdown itself gave me the greatest gift I could ask for in the form of a remote-work career. As the events of 2020 continued to unfold, however, I started to perceive, for the first time in my life, the tightening grip of State Control, and the cult mentalities that support it, both of which Eric Hoffer warned about in The True Believer.
At night, my husband and I compared notes about the implications of the latest vaccine mandate, the latest statue to be toppled, and the latest friend to be unwilling to entertain a critical discourse about any of it. As the months dragged on and events became more extreme, we wondered aloud how close the riots and unchecked crime would get to us and whether we should arm ourselves, whether we would be fined, fired, or jailed for having forged vaccine cards, and whether or not we would ever be able to share our thoughts about it all with anyone but each other.
I've always been a Creative, and I found my creative urges begin to shut down. I second-guessed everything I said for fear of cancellation. That was tantamount to emotional expiration.
The anxiety of those years threw me into a chronic, low-grade, depression as it did for many. I had time and space to consider what the inevitable march of State Control looked and felt like, and it terrified me. I went back to my history books and read about Stalin's Soviet Union, about the rise of the Third Reich, about North Korea and Communist China. For years, I'd rested assured that the specter of totalitarianism had been vanquished so far from typical American life as to pose no threat at all—a relic of the Cold War. In 2020, I started to realize that wasn't true. In the years I'd been away from the nation's political debate, leaving it to others to be involved, a bizarre attraction to Marxism had taken hold in many areas of society—particularly in California. I started to wonder if my parents had been right all along in their oft-expressed Conservative views.
As I observed and learned more, I tested my own deeply-held beliefs. I had long considered myself a Classically Liberal libertarian—somewhere in the middle—and like you, not wanting to box myself in. I examined the radical left that was making so much headway week-to-week and found it to be a frothing, vacuous, hypocritical zombie comprising nothing more than people who seemed brainwashed by outrage culture, competing for victimhood, and only interested in destruction, fear mongering, guilt-assigning, and justification for bad behavior. I also noticed that many of the worst offenders were "liberal" kids from wealth who, like their flower children forebears, trafficked in luxury beliefs and demonstrated a decided detachment from the need to offer solutions to any of the problems about which they so stridently shouted.
Things in the Bay Area became foreboding and uncomfortable enough that I began to think of life in terms of Prison Rules—at a certain point, you've got to pick a table. I went back to the well and reacquainted myself with the thinkers I loved in adolescence, and I found new ones to read and respect, like Brendan O'Neill, Thomas Sowell, Kathleen Stock, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who led me to you. I am forever grateful to all of you who have stuck out your necks to challenge the going narrative with cogent thought and well-reasoned arguments.
Over the course of the past five years, I've taken it all to the lab and emerged more committed than ever to what I feel are humanity's best hopes for a better future. Because of the liberal slurs and slanders on these systems, I find them still difficult to write without feeling like I'm committing a grievous social sin. After an extensive survey of belief systems, histories, political and economic systems, and a lot of self-reflection, I believe humanity's best hopes are found in Christianity and Capitalism. I believe, when used wisely and in concert, they offer more people a better shot at a higher quality of life than most of our species has ever known. Those two "C"s brought me to the third one—Conservatism.
Having been closer than comfortable to the upending and potential loss of my own freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of religion (to be a professed Christian in SF is to be a social leper), I chose my table. Being a creative and an artist, I am supposed to be none of these things, but I've always viewed myself as an Apollonian artist, not a Dionysian one. To be able to admit that is sweet relief.
Yes, I support pragmatic economics, border sovereignty, and good stewardship of a smaller government, but beyond that, I believe in learning from the past, conserving the good, leaving the bad, and building on what we've done that was worthwhile. Plenty of it has been worthwhile!
Like you, I never bought into the "frivolous trashing of the past" and continue to believe that we will repeat history if we are afraid to learn it and look it in the eye, challenge it, and conserve the wisdom it can offer.
Another hallmark of Conservatism (at least in this country) is a penchant for efficiency. What is less efficient than repeating the same mistakes generation after generation and learning nothing?
How refreshing you are to read! I have a similar story to share, although I won't be as eloquent as you—but perhaps there is charm in that difference, because it is emblematic of counterpoints of our cultures I still find appealing. (I am a muddy-boots American who had childhood dreams of becoming a pamphleteer and polemicist as much as I did of playing synth on Mtv.)
I, too, have recently come off the fence. No one encouraged me, though for some years there has been a small voice in my mind and heart that whispered with increasing urgency. During Covid and the BLM riots, it started shouting. I spent that time in the San Francisco Bay Area—the heart of American "liberalism", where I had lived for the previous fifteen years, enjoying the luxury of being politically complacent. I worked sixty-hour weeks, I played in two bands, I took for granted the freedoms I had, and I thought only marginally about the great, inspiring concepts with which I was raised.
My father's career as a high-ranking Army officer gave us a peripatetic lifestyle and placed us in locations as far-flung as Riyadh, Hiroshima, Washington, D.C., Oklahoma City, Honolulu, and the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. Being exposed to such disparate cultures from my earliest years instilled in me a longing to know more about my own. I studied American history with zeal in my adolescence, reading Paine, Adams, de Tocqueville; all the greats. As a teen in Northern Virginia during the Reagan Eighties, it was cool to be able to discuss and debate with other daughters and sons of international diplomats. I *loved* it. I felt no compunction about supporting the president and relating his philosophies and wins back to the ideas in those books, particularly after the fall of The Wall.
Fast forward to 2020.
In Marin County, we locked down early and long—from March of '20 to June of '21. At first, my introvert nature viewed it as a godsend. Truly, the lockdown itself gave me the greatest gift I could ask for in the form of a remote-work career. As the events of 2020 continued to unfold, however, I started to perceive, for the first time in my life, the tightening grip of State Control, and the cult mentalities that support it, both of which Eric Hoffer warned about in The True Believer.
At night, my husband and I compared notes about the implications of the latest vaccine mandate, the latest statue to be toppled, and the latest friend to be unwilling to entertain a critical discourse about any of it. As the months dragged on and events became more extreme, we wondered aloud how close the riots and unchecked crime would get to us and whether we should arm ourselves, whether we would be fined, fired, or jailed for having forged vaccine cards, and whether or not we would ever be able to share our thoughts about it all with anyone but each other.
I've always been a Creative, and I found my creative urges begin to shut down. I second-guessed everything I said for fear of cancellation. That was tantamount to emotional expiration.
The anxiety of those years threw me into a chronic, low-grade, depression as it did for many. I had time and space to consider what the inevitable march of State Control looked and felt like, and it terrified me. I went back to my history books and read about Stalin's Soviet Union, about the rise of the Third Reich, about North Korea and Communist China. For years, I'd rested assured that the specter of totalitarianism had been vanquished so far from typical American life as to pose no threat at all—a relic of the Cold War. In 2020, I started to realize that wasn't true. In the years I'd been away from the nation's political debate, leaving it to others to be involved, a bizarre attraction to Marxism had taken hold in many areas of society—particularly in California. I started to wonder if my parents had been right all along in their oft-expressed Conservative views.
As I observed and learned more, I tested my own deeply-held beliefs. I had long considered myself a Classically Liberal libertarian—somewhere in the middle—and like you, not wanting to box myself in. I examined the radical left that was making so much headway week-to-week and found it to be a frothing, vacuous, hypocritical zombie comprising nothing more than people who seemed brainwashed by outrage culture, competing for victimhood, and only interested in destruction, fear mongering, guilt-assigning, and justification for bad behavior. I also noticed that many of the worst offenders were "liberal" kids from wealth who, like their flower children forebears, trafficked in luxury beliefs and demonstrated a decided detachment from the need to offer solutions to any of the problems about which they so stridently shouted.
Things in the Bay Area became foreboding and uncomfortable enough that I began to think of life in terms of Prison Rules—at a certain point, you've got to pick a table. I went back to the well and reacquainted myself with the thinkers I loved in adolescence, and I found new ones to read and respect, like Brendan O'Neill, Thomas Sowell, Kathleen Stock, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who led me to you. I am forever grateful to all of you who have stuck out your necks to challenge the going narrative with cogent thought and well-reasoned arguments.
Over the course of the past five years, I've taken it all to the lab and emerged more committed than ever to what I feel are humanity's best hopes for a better future. Because of the liberal slurs and slanders on these systems, I find them still difficult to write without feeling like I'm committing a grievous social sin. After an extensive survey of belief systems, histories, political and economic systems, and a lot of self-reflection, I believe humanity's best hopes are found in Christianity and Capitalism. I believe, when used wisely and in concert, they offer more people a better shot at a higher quality of life than most of our species has ever known. Those two "C"s brought me to the third one—Conservatism.
Having been closer than comfortable to the upending and potential loss of my own freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of religion (to be a professed Christian in SF is to be a social leper), I chose my table. Being a creative and an artist, I am supposed to be none of these things, but I've always viewed myself as an Apollonian artist, not a Dionysian one. To be able to admit that is sweet relief.
Yes, I support pragmatic economics, border sovereignty, and good stewardship of a smaller government, but beyond that, I believe in learning from the past, conserving the good, leaving the bad, and building on what we've done that was worthwhile. Plenty of it has been worthwhile!
Like you, I never bought into the "frivolous trashing of the past" and continue to believe that we will repeat history if we are afraid to learn it and look it in the eye, challenge it, and conserve the wisdom it can offer.
Another hallmark of Conservatism (at least in this country) is a penchant for efficiency. What is less efficient than repeating the same mistakes generation after generation and learning nothing?