Helen Andrews and the Conservative Future

Moving beyond the Boomers

Last week Helen Andrews announced she was being shoved aside from editorship of The American Conservative. The announcement closely followed her lambasting of Ta-Neeshi-Coates which highlighted her ability as a racial provocateur, i.e. holding up a black journalist to the same standard as a white one. It’s a time of sadness for any subscriber to The American Conservative (I am one). It’s also a semi-appropriate time to look back on Mrs. Andrews’s one and only book from 2021 Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (which N. Duffy already did here). The success and failure of that book shed light on why one of the best rightists in the semi-mainstream (behind Michael Anton and Christopher Caldwell) is now out of a job.

As Mrs. Andrews states in the opening pages, the premise of Boomers is borrowed from the minor classic Eminent Victorians, a collection of biographical essays by Lyton Strachey. The choice of aping is odd, for Strachey was a Bloomsbury man and a decadent engaged in the task of smiting his betters. The entire work is a dark converse of Dr. Johnson’s belief that good biography should morally edify us; Strachey’s work is a step forward in the nihilism of the modern age, which is the premise that failure to live up to ideals means we should eschew ideals overall.

Strachey’s method is not much worth emulating even in theory. Still, his essays were true biographies, and good for this sake. However unfairly I think he may have treated Cardinal Manning vis-à-vis (St.) John Henry Newman, the conveyance of the facts of his life is helpful even aside from his scoffing. The editorializing that Strachey engaged in and which makes the work a “classic” was well-integrated into the structure of the biographies themselves, which results in an informative if not edifying read.

The same is not true of Mrs. Andrews’s work. The subjects of her disdain are Steve Jobs, Jeffrey Sachs, Aaron Sorkin, Al Sharpton, Camile Paglia, and Sonia Sotomayor. Mrs. Andrews takes genuine interest in some of these subjects, but breaks no new ground in biographizing them. And it is difficult to believe she actually feels much respect for the likes of Sharpton and Sotomayor—more plausible is that some publisher thought that the victims of withering invective should be subject to Affirmative Action as well. More glaring is her inability to adhere to the flawed biographical premise she has chosen. In the Sotomayor chapter, we are treated to long and interesting indictments of the Warren Court, the last year of which saw the oldest Boomer turn 24 years old. How can the long list of nasty court decisions possibly be their fault, let alone the Wise Latina’s?

The fact is that Sotomayor is an idiot, and that idiots are nothing new to the Court. Why not take on a better victim? No one doubts the smarts of Elena Kagan (b. 1960), yet here is a woman who wrote an entire Supreme Court opinion with Superhero-esque asides.   Is this really equal to the supposed prestige of the Court? But why not raise the stakes? Why not take on John Roberts (b. 1955), the supposed originalist who twice reanimated the government/corporate boondoggle called Obamacare? Conservative language has dominated the judiciary for decades, and even the most radical of judges have found it necessary to fall back on specious claims of stare decisis and the like. The Boomer contribution to the Court has largely been conservative, so how do we end up with larger government and mass degeneracy?

The worst aspect of Boomers is how Mrs. Andrews tries to shoehorn Buckleyite arguments against liberal idealism into the larger jeremiad; it is far below someone with such clear insight and ability to see through conservative platitudes. For in truth, Baby Boomers are notable for their almost religious embrace of materialism—by the time they rolled around, liberalism had no need for idealists where the bureaucracies and courts could do much better. The most foolish idealists of the generation were self-described conservatives, and the most openly murderous of their causes was George W. Bush’s evisceration of Iraq. But questioning the Boomers for lack of idealism would upend the Buckleyite and even Burkean premises of modern conservatism.

And that project would be worthwhile from a young conservative trying to divorce our generation from the errors of the past. But a problem here as well as in Mrs. Andrews’s other work is that she is too ready to jump into the easy brawl, even where no substantive dispute exists. As I noted before, it was fine for a libertine like Strachey to lack the virtue of piety in haranguing his elders and betters, but it is quite another thing for a conservative to even acknowledge that such thing as “generation gaps” exist as some intrinsic attribute of the human race rather than the creation of political radials and ad-men.

For whatever their faults, there is still good reason to seek out the wisdom of the Boomers, if just for the Fourth Commandment. Jobs is dead, and Sotomayor and Sharpton are blobs dependent on their dialysis machines. But Sorkin, Sachs, and Paglia are all alive and kicking, and seem like they would be game for a fair inquiry. What do these people actually have to say about their ideals, their successes, their failures? In a recent rehabilitation tour, Sachs recently talked to Tucker Carlson. Paglia will talk to literally anything, from Italian journalists to potted plants. Why not reach out to them, show them their faults, ask what they have learned—why not try to harvest wisdom from this generation, even if this generation failed?

In any case, Mrs. Andrews is stoking arguments, and seeking fights more than seeking truth. But in this it is hard to call her uncharitable, because the fights she picks are the kind old-school scribblers would have relished, the kind that are supposed to start arguments, not end them. The problem is that there is no literary or intellectual environment that might provide a setting for it. Boomers is a good enough book to deserve a substantive treatment of its fundamental flaws. It has gotten some but most reviews are from liberals who condemn it out of hand and Conservative Inc. periodicals that laud it on more or less the same basis. The reaction to the book is itself a reflection of a decayed literary environment the author would prefer to forget.

But again, this is meant to compliment Mrs. Andrews as a journalist, as one who believes that an intellectual duking-out is a route to truth. This is what she commendably sought in her tenure of American Conservative. The issues centered around topics that conservatives are more likely to give mind to. Overall the best articles were strangely apolitical: Steve Sailer’s genealogy of the families behind NAFTA, Nic Rowan’s description of the angst of post-retirement Bill Watterson. Many of the articles taking on a conservative and even reactionary aspect—such as the claim that the Ukraine war is an extension of America’s promotion of sodomy—were often undeveloped by comparison; one could only really understand them if you have already been deeply immersed in an entirely different Weltanschauung. But overall, the work seemed an attempt to reach out to the remnants of sanity among the center-left and engage in a dialectic process of argument and thought.

And this was to Mrs. Andrews’s great credit. I asked recently, Why not set aside “conservatism” and actually try to conserve a dying medium? Reading The American Conservative under her watch often felt like you were reading one of the more-or-less apolitical glossies you used to find when she and I were coming of age. Conservative politics are downstream from a degraded literary culture. Mrs. Andrews proposed to do her part in resurrecting that culture, if only a little bit.

It was a gamble. Perhaps the issues were lacking in the red meat of culture war drivel that keep Breitbart and the Daily Wire in business. In its stead was a genuine attempt at pretending that we have a real literary culture, and that a small magazine like TAC might make an inroads amongst them. For in truth, conservatives are really the only people who care about culture anymore. Year Zero came sometime during the Obama Administration (I would put it in 2015, when The New Republic took a hiatus from stoking war with Syria to publish a cover story about “white privilege”). Print media are not dying, they are dead. Mrs. Andrews sought to reach those living still in a comatose dream where the printed word had value and the facile pissing contests of social media clanship were a secondary consideration.

This was the subtext of her recent attack on Ta-Neely Coates’s trip to Israel. It was a rather glib aside—Why can’t the schwartze build Wakanda?—that got her in the most trouble, but it was just a Neoconservative talking point, though one you don’t hear as much anymore. But more at heart of the critique was Coates’s basic failure as a writer and a journalist, his inability to rise to the level of polemical foil. Coates’s work fails not on political grounds, but on the basic level of elementary writing chops. Truly anyone who thinks Ta-Hanesis Coates is a compelling writer is already a lost cause, already sunk below a basic level of erudition and civilization. His alleged fans are apes who read and nod and grunt along in assent, but lack the intellectual discernment to tell that they are engaging with a mediocrity in every way.

Let’s argue about politics—but first give me someone worth arguing with. This is Mrs. Andrews’s position, betrayed by her ready eulogizing in Boomers of the “Old Left.” The difference between Leftism, “Old” and “New,” is a mostly creature of neoconservative ideation. But at least the old Marxist guard could make a good spectacle, lay down some good newsprint, produce Orwells and Hitchenses and Cockburns. She is just itching for a fight, and the New Left won’t give it to her. All they have to do is play a technocratic rope-a-dope and let the civilized conservative lass exhaust herself, to find that one fault they can hang “racist” upon. The gang warfare of social media does not lend itself to the kind of pugilism that Mrs. Andrews desires, and so her flaying comes from a million bot-like entities who have probably never read anything more than Ta-Neeggi Coates’s name and yet believe he must be defended.

Mrs. Andrews’s dismissal from TAC is a failure of a certain conception of the modern press. For all her lambasting, the media environment she wishes she inhabited was that of the Boomers: one of open contrarianism, open pomposity, nearly-free dispute and at least some tenuous thread to the norms of Western Civilization. The breakdown of this status quo was written out in the Immigration Act of 1965 (oldest Boomer at that time: 19 years old), so it is little use to blame that generation for the loss. But hopefully it leaves room for Mrs. Andrews to pursue more worthwhile tasks. She has publicly contemplated writing more about on the waxing barbarism of South Africa. A book that skips right over the liberal conventional wisdom would be far more precious than another volume of “here’s how the left fails to live up to its ideals.”