The Tweedy Intellectual And The Used Car Dealer

Conservative intellectuals often have very different priorities from conservative voters

A few weeks ago, I posted on X: “A dilemma of American conservatism: the tweedy trad intellectual has to pretend the used car salesman cares about the ‘Permanent Things.’”

Not many followers got it. Some were angry over it because they thought it claimed car salesmen don’t care about important things. That wasn’t the post’s intent. It was meant to highlight the discrepancy between the rhetoric of conservative intellectuals and the actual interests of conservative voters. Since the conservative movement formed in the 1950s, its thinkers have tried to claim the American Right stands for the “Permanent Things” and a rooted order. But ordinary conservatives are far more pragmatic and utilitarian. Their concerns often stand awkwardly with the fanciful bromides of conservative intellectuals. The reality sometimes leads the right-wing chattering class to invent an America that only exists in their minds.

The famous liberal intellectual Lionel Trilling thought conservatism couldn’t exist in America. “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition,” Trilling wrote in 1950. “For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” He defined both conservatism and liberalism in the European sense.

In Europe, conservatives stood for throne and altar. They defended monarchy, the landed aristocracy, and the established church. In America, we had no king, no nobility, and no state-backed church. European conservatives were often skeptical of the market and suspicious of the bourgeoisie. But in America, the market was king and the bourgeoisie had thoroughly triumphed. In the eyes of the Old World, we were a thoroughly liberal society–but only in the classical sense. New Deal liberalism was a different breed, and it generated a demand for an uniquely American conservatism to challenge it.

Figures such as Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Erik Voeglin articulated a conservatism influenced by European reactionary thought. It envisioned a rooted order in America that was under threat from liberalism and communism. What exactly this rooted order is was left ambiguous. Some saw small-town America as their traditional order. It made sense to a degree. The heartland did prefer more traditional ways and values than elitist liberals. But rural America lacked the deep roots and institutions of the European peasantry, and embraced the dynamic economic system of America that made it maintain certain traditions. Rural America was (and still is) overwhelmingly low-church Protestant, which is generally not the faith of conservative intellectuals. However, seeing Middle America as a bastion of true America made political sense, so conservatives went with it.

Often, conservatives pointed to “western civilization” as the order it tried to defend. This allowed them to lump America alongside European high culture, the Catholic Church, and the general accomplishments of the Old World, even if these things may not be as cherished within the New World’s folk culture. The concept of western civilization allowed them to see America as part of a larger culture that included things they admired and downplayed things that they weren’t as fond of. It also allowed them to undermine the claims that liberalism is the only political tradition possible in America. When made part of western civilization, conservatism became a more viable option. These intellectuals could imagine something grander than the grubby commercialism of America’s bourgeoisie through a romanticized West.

When defining conservatism, these intellectuals would turn to high-falutin language that would be hard to put in concrete terms. For instance, Russell Kirk defined his philosophy in this way:

In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers.

This would sound nice to the social base conservatives claimed to speak for, but these same folks would likely scratch their heads at what it truly meant.

The primary social base for conservatism was found among small businessmen and independent entrepreneurs. These were practical men with practical interests. They didn’t like big government, taxes, or regulation. They were horrified by communism. They loved America and took pride in the country’s newfound global power. They admired the free market and felt it was the key to their wealth. They were not people interested in airy, abstract speculations. They didn’t care for agrarian fantasies or turgid prose about the degradations of the modern world. They simply wanted government to get out of the way of business and stop the spread of communism.

Much of the conservative social base remains the same today, with an added blue-collar element. This social base is not entirely centered on economic issues. Identity and cultural matters can also rile them up. They do care about threats such as uncontrolled illegal immigration, anti-white racism in their kids’ schools, or busing. These directly impact their lives and is why they care about them. They’re the issues Donald Trump made his own and elevated him to the leader of the Republican Party.

But even the Trumpian GOP isn’t really concerned with the Permanent Things. It likes technological advancement, service innovation, and commercial maximalization. It revels in low-brow culture and ignores the symphonies and poetry favored by conservative intellectuals. Trump rarely sells his policies because they will preserve some nostalgic image of small-town America or some other rooted way of life. He promotes his policies because they will make Americans money and count as WINS. That resonates far more with middle Americans than agrarian longings.

To repeat a common Highly Respected point, Americans often stand as a people without a past. They see their heritage as a kitschy restaurant chain. Many Americans’ roots in this country do run deep, but they don’t care that much about it. They’re too busy chasing the American dream to dwell on it.

Some tweedy conservative intellectuals recognize this and fantasize about a better time in American history or even in European history. It’s a bitter pill to swallow for the people you claim to speak for to have little interest in your ideas and concepts. The right-wing intellectuals who struggle the least with embracing actual America are free market obsessives like Milton Friedman. They just want a country with a thriving capitalist economy and minimal state intervention. It’s easier for them to feel at home with used car dealers.

Sam Francis noticed this conflict in the opening essay of his book, Beautiful Losers. It’s worth quoting at length:

However sophisticated and well expressed conservative intellectualism may have been in the years after World War II, its virtues did not assure it victory, mainly because there existed in American society and political culture no significant set of interests to which its ideas could attach themselves. Hence, post-World War II conservatism in its political efforts generally ignored the philosophical contributions of its highbrow exponents and fell back on the more mundane considerations of low taxes and small budgets, anticommunism and law and order; and the preoccupation of the Old Right mind in that era with an abstract and abstruse intellectualism helped ensure its eventual irrelevance. For the most part, any suggestion that the savants of the Right ought to have attended to the concrete social, regional, and ethnic dimensions of the human and American conditions rather than to their purely philosophical aspects was greeted with accusations of "determinism," though why it is less deterministic to say that ideas, rather than nonintellectual forces, are the major causal agents in human affairs has never been clear to me.

The truth is that, for all their talk about social "roots," conservative intellectuals in the postwar era were often rootless men themselves, and the philosophical mystifications in which they enveloped themselves were frequently the only garments that fit them. Alienated from the prevailing intellectual and political currents as well as from traditional social forms that were ceasing to exist or cohere, the conservative intelligentsia was able to find explanations for and solutions to the civilizational crisis it perceived only in the most esoteric theory, and the "practical" applications of such theory often took the form of some species of romanticism or archaism a pretentious medievalism, accompanied by antimodernist posturings and colored with a highly politicized religiosity; an attraction to archaic social and political forms such as the antebellum South, the ancien regime of eighteenth-century Europe, or the era of nineteenth-century laissez-faire; and a distaste for and often an ignorance of American history that derived from a mirror-image agreement with the Left-liberal understanding of America as an "experiment" dedicated to an egalitarian and progressivist proposition. If the intellectuals of the Right did not adhere to some form of archaism, they tended, like Whittaker Chambers, simply to withdraw from the world in despair and acknowledgment of defeat.

Francis may be a bit over-the-top in his analysis, but much of it rings true. There is a humorous contrast between tweedy intellectuals fawning over the traditions of enrooted peasants and culture-bearing aristocrats while their base are used car dealers and insurance salesmen who just want to be left alone.

The arrangement has worked, however awkwardly, since the 1950s. It’s just worth remembering that not everything conjured up in conservative opinion journals and think tanks is shared by actual conservative voters. Much of it merely reflects the peculiar interests of tweedy intellectuals.