The Perils of Anti-Populist Chic

Any advice offered to the Republican party from a self-proclaimed liberal who admits he "couldn't care less" for its future might reasonably arouse suspicion. However, Mark Lilla does precisely this ("The Perils of Populist Chic", The Wall Street Journal, November 2008) when he provocatively announces that whatever may become of the political right, the "conservative intellectual tradition is already dead". Lilla's post-mortem of respectable conservative thought in America is apparently well evidenced by what he calls the "Palin farce," or the philosophical bankruptcy that must be root cause of taking Sarah Palin seriously — either as a vice presidential candidate or otherwise.

His diagnosis is not offered in the spirit of partisan celebration — quite the contrary. Lilla explains that the utter impoverishment of conservative thought is not good even for liberals; he laments the closing of the conservative mind as a partisan of political philosophy, as one who wishes for a return to the fruitful, cerebral contests between the two parties' respective intellectual soldiers. Lilla might has well have declared that he couldn't care less for the future of the Democratic party — his concern seems not to be with the attainment of particular policy objectives but rather with the richness of conceptual fodder for sophisticated philosophical dispute. He never once makes an argument regarding a substantive policy issue or attempts to demonstrate the way that his alleged mental rot has led to legislative blunders.

Lilla's essay is not so much post-partisan as it is post-political — if Republicans today would only recapture the "sophistication" and "bookish seriousness" of yesteryear we could once again reignite the great debates of the DC salons. The death of conservative intellectualism means Lilla has no worthy opponents for deep, meditative combat; the only people left smart enough for Lilla to talk to — ostensibly reinforcing the conservative caricature of our nation's hyper-educated elite — are other liberal professors.

Of course, the implication of Lilla's argument is that, by way of contrast, the Democrat party is quite alive intellectually and has a plentiful supply of would-be philosopher kings. However, Lilla never bothers to list for us who these luminaries are, other than himself. He does provide a catalog of the great conservative public intellectuals who saved us all from the "grim 70's," a time when "liberalism seemed utterly exhausted." He never provides us with a parallel historical narrative describing precisely how liberalism re-energized itself in the face of the "intellectually ascendant" conservative challenge, or how the ideological foundations of 1970s liberalism were duly fortified by this challenge. In fact, the never explicitly-stated subtext of Lilla's editorial is that, following the collapse of philosophical liberalism and the rejuvenation of philosophical conservatism, their roles somehow reversed.

It would follow, according to Lilla, that if we properly inspect the political platforms of Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, or Joe Biden, we will presumably find all kinds of innovative ideas unrecognizable to the liberalism of a generation ago. We are led to believe that racial identity politics and thoughtless multiculturalism, public policy driven by stale technocratic sociology, reflexive redistributive economics, unwieldy labor regulation, trade protectionism, soft internationalism, and so forth have all been decisively rejected in exchange for fresh, new liberal ideas. Lilla clearly seems to believe that contemporary liberalism is now in the ascendant intellectually, though he never bothers to edify us with a persuasive argument to this effect.