Arguments of Varying Merit
In a post useful for its candor, Jonah Goldberg sums up his thoughts on the epistemic closure debate — or at least the debate that he perceives, but that neither I nor Julian Sanchez nor anyone else I’ve read recognizes. It contains enough mistaken analysis and factually incorrect assertions to warrant an unabridged airing.
Mr. Goldberg writes:
Okay, on the matter of this epistemic closure business. It seems to me it’s a stalking horse for several different but deeply overlapping arguments of varying merit.
The first argument comes from a bunch of younger conservatives. They have convinced themselves that the older establishment conservatives have become corrupt, oblivious or coopted by the Republican-Fox News machine. These younger, smarter, savvier more nuanced thinkers have been locked out of what they see as ideological wagon-circling and groupthink (“epistemic closure” has become the high-fallutin’ misnomer for the “problem”).
Let me offer a counter theory. When I first came to Washington, I hung around in very similar circles of young eager-beavers. I may not have been as smart as many of them, but I was just as determined to get my articles published and make my mark. We had many gripe sessions conversations about how hard it was to break-in at places like NR, the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal etc. But, because Al Gore hadn’t gotten around to inventing the internet yet, there was no place for me to vent these complaints in print, never mind work them up into a meta-narrative about the decrepit state of conservatism.
That’s not the case for today’s 20-somethings who have the luxury of translating their frustration with “the business” into long cri de coeur blog posts and essays that tend to bounce off one another for reinforcement. Instead of late night griping at the Toledo Lounge, the way we did things in the 1990s, the conversation has gone public. Indeed, so public that it has become something of an intellectual grievance culture all its own.
Note that Mr. Goldberg doesn’t offer any links to young 20-something conservatives complaining that it’s hard to break into National Review, The Weekly Standard or The Wall Street Journal — that is because there aren’t any doing so in this conversation, or even online insofar as I’m aware. Can Mr. Goldberg point to any posts in this epistemic closure debate where that complaint has appeared? How on earth did it enter this conversation?
Obviously I can’t speak for every twenty-something on the right — especially now that I’m 30 — but having come up doing work for The Claremont Institute, living in Washington DC, attending events hosted by America’s Future Foundation, going to journalism school, and working as a commissioning editor at a right-of-center Web magazine, where I interacted with tons of young people trying to break into conservative journalism, I have never once heard — over e-mail or on Twitter or drinking beers at Solly’s or Local 16 or The Big Hunt — a single person complain that it is difficult to break into National Review or The Weekly Standard, or Townhall or Human Events or The American Spectator or any other conservative publication, with the single exception of a guy who pitched me an essay at Culture11 after it was rejected at The Claremont Review of Books (I passed on it too). (Full disclosure: Once when I was 24, I submitted an op-ed to the Wall Street Journal — I got a nice rejection note back. I’ve never pitched or submitted anything to The Weekly Standard or National Review, though after Culture11 folded an editor there contacted me, said if I was interested I should take an editing test, and noted that while there weren’t any open positions I am welcome to pitch him. And one day, if the right piece comes along, I may well do it!)
I have heard people complain about how hard it is to break into The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The American Scholar, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, among others — which makes sense, because it is much harder to break into these publications, due to a combination of pay, prestige, and the dearth of publications running the kind of long form non-fiction that it’s most fun to write.
This isn’t to say that no one wants to write at National Review and is jilted, or that no one complains about the difficulty of breaking in. It’s just a very different group of people than are having this epistemic closure conversation (which after all began not with a young conservative, but with Julian Sanchez, who contains multitudes). In fact, I imagine the people most intent on breaking into NR or The Weekly Standard are carefully avoiding public comment on issues like this one, or anything critical of American foreign policy, or talk radio hosts, or National Review writers, because the perception — I cannot comment on the reality — is that there are certain things one can’t say if one wants to make a career inside of movement institutions. Perhaps Mr. Goldberg can point me to some blog post I haven’t seen, where a twenty-something writer is complaining that epistemic closure is responsible for his inability to break into movement magazines, but I’m pretty sure that he’s just summoned a straw man out of thin air.
Mr. Goldberg is correct to point out that, contra some of its critics — I’ve mostly encountered these critics in the comments sections of blog posts or I’d link them — National Review publishes a lot of interesting, talented writers, some of whom depart from movement conservative orthodoxy on certain subjects.
Let’s look at the younger conservatives. Ramesh Ponnuru has been described as the elder statesmen of the “young turks” – the supposedly heterodox youngsters trying to pry-open the closed conservative mind. Well, Ramesh is a pretty influential Senior Editor at one of the supposed bastions of conservative closed-minded orthodoxy. Ross Douthat, arguably the most famous of the Young Turks, is the film critic for NR and co-author of the young Turk manifesto, Grand New Party. The other co-author, Reihan Salam, is an NRO blogger concentrating on policy ideas. That book received massive support from the conservative establishment. It stemmed from an article in Bill Kristol’s Weekly Standard and was feted by the American Enterprise Institute. Then there’s Yuval Levin, another Young Turk, who is not only a conservative think tank star, regular contributor to National Review and the Weekly Standard, but who is also the editor of his brand-spanking new magazine largely dedicated to new ideas. Other young (or youngish) “new ideas” conservatives have prominent places at places like AEI and the Heritage Foundation. James Capretta, Nicole Gelinas, Brad Wilcox, Andrew Biggs and numerous others have been welcomed into the fold and celebrated. There are more conservative publications publishing high-end conservative wonkery and philosophy than there have ever been – and that’s in print! Throw the web into the mix, and at least according to one metric it is a conservative golden age.
This is all correct, and I haven’t seen anyone in the epistemic closure conversation dispute it.
Mr. Goldberg continues:
So, forgive me if I don’t take too seriously the complaint that younger conservative intellectuals have been locked out by the old guard. I’m sure there’s some talent out there deserving more attention and exposure (just as I’m convinced that there’s some young talent out there that maybe could have spent some more time in the minors). But that is hardly a new story.
Again, no one is making this complaint, insofar as I’m aware, and Mr. Goldberg can’t seem to link anyone who is making it — and even if he could find someone making this complaint, the ongoing conversation about epistemic closure isn’t even tangentially about young conservative intellectuals being locked out of movement magazines.
Moving on:
The second “epistemic closure” argument is aimed at talk radio and Fox News. A lot of folks think conservative Big Media are too powerful and define the debate too much. Okay. I don’t think this is an unreasonable position on its face. But whenever I hear it, I always have to ask “compared to what?” Would conservatism be in better shape if conservatives had to rely on the mainstream media? Isn’t the fact that Fox News and talk radio are so popular a sign of conservative success instead of conservative weakness?
During the Reagan Administration, when conservatives had to rely on the mainstream media, conservatives were “in better shape” than they are now — back then, the President of the United States was accomplishing all the changes that the right so celebrates, whereas now a Democratic president is implementing a domestic agenda that the right abhors. In the months leading up to Election 2008, talk radio and Fox News were quite popular. Doesn’t the outcome of that election prove that their success and the success of conservatism are independent of one another?
When he makes this argument, Mr. Goldberg never defines by what metric conservatism is “in better shape now,” so it is difficult to refute him directly, but it should be enough to point out that those of us criticizing conservative Big Media aren’t even saying that conservatives would be better off going back to the media landscape of 1983 (though perhaps we would). Our argument is that the right would be better off if the media infrastructure it has built survived in some form, but stripped of the groupthink, the factual inaccuracies, the blowhard personalities, the information bubble, etc.
Mr. Goldberg writes:
Does that success bring new challenges? Sure. Can it breed the laziness that comes with preaching to the choir? Absolutely. But I see little evidence of that among the best and brightest on the right. Does that climate make it harder at times to express more nuanced arguments? Yep. But that’s a problem not with conservatism per se but with the media landscape generally.
Really? Where I’m sitting, it seems like the most profitable book Matthew Continetti could write involved making the case that Sarah Palin is uniquely persecuted in American life, and that the most profitable book you could write makes the case that fascism, a long discredited political system, is liberal in origin. Is this not “preaching to the choir” on subjects largely irrelevant to the issues facing conservatives? Or take wonderful books by smart, indispensable writers like Tim Carney: in order to maximize sales, they require titles that ensure fewer people “on the other side” will read and be persuaded by them. Yes, that happens to writers on the left too — and so what? It is nevertheless a problem within conservatism, insofar as it’s editors at Regnery and the book buying right whose combined preferences are responsible for weakening the cross-ideological impact one of the right’s best and brightest will have.
Mr. Goldberg writes:
Indeed, for all of the lamentations about the “professionalization” of conservatism, I have to chuckle when I hear so much nostalgia for what Ross calls the “lost early-1970s world of Commentary and The Public Interest.” Indeed, to listen to Sam Tanenhaus this was a golden age for conservatism. As someone who has a collection of old issues of the Public Interest and Commentary going back to around that time, I am as sympathetic to such nostalgia as anyone. But that’s what it is: nostalgia. For while conservative intellectuals were having a rip-roaring time back then, conservatism itself was at arguably its weakest point. The Republican Party had crushed the Goldwaterites, the Republican President loathed the Buckleyites and the Reagan-revival still seemed like a pipe dream.
This is so myopic. In the 1970s, conservatism in government was at one of its weakest points. Its intellectuals, however, were laboring to change that. Mr. Goldberg seems oblivious to the fact that intellectual work precedes productive returns to political power — that if William F. Buckley would’ve spent the 1970s writing the equivalent of The Persecution of Sarah Palin the Reagan Administration would’ve turned out very differently, had it happened at all. I am not a student of 1970s era conservatism, but the argument the nostalgists are making is that the movement was better then at laying intellectual groundwork then than it is now.
Mr. Goldberg, oblivious to that argument, writes:
It seems to me that what many of these nostalgists really miss is a time when conservative intellectuals were more esteemed by liberal intellectuals and liberal institutions – a climate made possible solely by conservatism’s political impotence.
Does Mr. Goldberg believe that conservative intellectuals were esteemed by liberal intellectuals and liberal institutions in the 1970s?! Here is what he wrote just 10 days ago:
For more than a generation, liberalism craved and ruthlessly enforced epistemic closure. I hate to trot out Lionnel Trilling here (it’s such a cliché), but it’s worth recalling his famous 1950 line about how “In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” Indeed, he reduced conservatism to “irritable mental gestures”—an effort joined by Richard Hofstadter, the Frankfurt School, and more, recently, George Lakoff, and quite a few scientists getting government grants today. Since 1950, “vital center” liberals, and of course leftists, have looked for every conceivable excuse to delegitimize conservative dissent and criticism. For decades, liberal elites abused their monopoly on the media and their near complete control of the commanding heights of the culture to attack not just conservative ideas, but conservative motives in order to render any serious alternative to liberalism a kind of crankery or fascism. That effort is still under way in the arts, in academia and in the few remaining bastions of the “legacy media.”
It seems to me that Mr. Goldberg’s guess about what motivates these nostalgists cannot even stand up to his own account of reality.
Mr. Goldberg’s piece concludes:
Last, there’s this notion that Republican politicians are lacking ideals and intellectual creativity. Too true. But not entirely true. Marco Rubio is young and full of tough-minded ideas for fixing our problems. Paul Ryan is a rock star because he has tough-minded ideas for fixing our problems. If you read about the intellectual landscape Newt Gingrich, and before him Jack Kemp, had to navigate, you would know that this is hardly a new problem.
Indeed, as someone who thinks being the “Party of No” was a perfectly appropriate stance for the GOP to take during Obama’s first year, I think it’s arguably been less of a problem than it was in years past. But as the political climate is changing, I think the GOP needs to start rolling out real alternatives to Obamaism. Fortunately, there’s a lot of intellectual talent out there for the GOP to rely on.
Should National Review and other conservative magazines start treating Paul Ryan like more of a rock star than Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh, perhaps more Republican politicians will do their utmost to follow his example, rather than the one set forth by conservative entertainers. In closing, I’d note all the substantive aspects of Julian Sanchez’s “epistemic closure” theory that Mr. Goldberg left unaddressed, except that it’s basically all of them.
Btw, Julian Sanchez has a nice piece revisiting what he thinks of as epistemic closure. Good points, IMHO.
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/22/a-coda-on-closure/
— J Mann · Apr 23, 08:30 PM · #
I had a very similar reaction when I read Mr. Goldberg’s piece. It was as if he was talking about a completely different subject. In the end, I felt that he came off in a very paternalistic, “oh you kids don’t know what you’re talking about” sort of way. I think that speaks to the kind of intellectual laziness that is rampant not only on the right, but that permeates American life more generally. We want the creation of “knowledge” to be easy, which has spawned this kind of talking point culture where people don’t interrogate the meaning of phrases like “President Obama wants to take away your freedom.” I have never understood what that means, but millions of people nod their heads in agreement when Beck, Levin, or Palin say it. Thinkers from Plato, to Walter Benjamin, to Julius Robert Oppenheimer have reminded us for thousands of years that the path toward enlightenment, or at the very least new ideas, is supposed to be difficult and defined by honest debate and introspection. We seem unable or unwilling as a culture to engage with ideas that challenge our beliefs, but it’s even scarier that we seem to be allergic to understanding the real substance of the ideas we profess to already hold. Mr. Goldberg’s post illustrates this phenomenon pretty clearly.
— Dan · Apr 23, 08:46 PM · #
“Paul Ryan is a rock star because he has tough-minded ideas for fixing our problems. “
In a nutshell, this is why conservatism is crashing and burning. Ryan is a rock star, not because of the content of his policy ideas, but because they are “tough-minded.” All responses to issues are judged in terms of their testosterone level. I’m sure that 30-35% of Americans feel this way, but that’s about it and that’s where the Rs are going to end up if they keep this crap up.
— Steven Donegal · Apr 23, 08:50 PM · #
Responding to Conor and this excerpt from Dan’s comment:
I often find Jonah Goldberg’s writings enjoyable and humorous, but I think that by now it’s quite evident that Goldberg is more or less incapable of rigorous thinking. And I mean incapable in the fairly strong sense of something approaching a cognitive flaw.
He wrote a number of posts on the epistemic closure subject by now. In every one of them, it’s as if he forgets the meaning in which Julian Sanchez originally used the term. So you invariably find yourself reading a rebuttal of some thesis no one actually defended.
And here’s the thing – I’m perfectly convinced Goldberg, unlike, say, McCarthy or Lopez, earnestly tries to address the points raised by those he is responding to. It’s just that something happens along the way.
— Sam Roberts · Apr 23, 09:11 PM · #
“And here’s the thing – I’m perfectly convinced Goldberg, unlike, say, McCarthy or Lopez, earnestly tries to address the points raised by those he is responding to. It’s just that something happens along the way.”
Agree, except I tend to think Lopez is even more cognitively challenged than Goldberg – or maybe just conventionally stupid, whereas Goldberg seems reasonably smart by some metrics but just, as you say, incapable of rigorous thinking.
And no, this isn’t a “conservatives are stupid” comment. Plenty of smart conservatives, here for example and even at NRO, though the smart ones at NRO tend for the most part not always to be terribly intellectually honest (there are exceptions).
— LarrryM · Apr 23, 09:18 PM · #
@Sam
Goldberg responded directly to Sanchez a week or so ago, and seems to have held on to Sanchez’s original meaning. (Link below). Since then, I agree that the concept has drifted all over the map as different writers put their spins on it.
http://blog.american.com/?p=12631
— J Mann · Apr 23, 09:23 PM · #
Jonah Goldberg misrepresenting someone’s argument so he can both duck tough questions and gratuitously slam the questioner?
(deadpan to the point of flat-lining)
I’m shocked.
— Gold Star for Robot Boy · Apr 23, 09:35 PM · #
Where’s Chet been recently?
I’m always interested in reading his responses here.
— ChetFan · Apr 23, 10:51 PM · #
What Gold Star for Robot Boy said. Give up on this crew, Conor.
— Freddie · Apr 23, 11:35 PM · #
yeah and im the engineer motie that is deconstructing and rebuilding your failarguments to my own taste and purpose the minnit you lay them down.
abandon ship.
— matoko_chan · Apr 24, 12:09 AM · #
I’m a little behind on these threads, I guess. For the most part, this is a conversation for conservatives to have amongst themselves. I’m largely concerning myself with swatting down the inevitable, insipid “liberals do it too!” nonsense.
@Matoko-sama:
Love the Mote in God’s Eye reference. Don’t clean your coffee maker!
— Chet · Apr 24, 02:09 AM · #
“<i>During the Reagan Administration, when conservatives had to rely on the mainstream media, conservatives were “in better shape” than they are now — back then, the President of the United States was accomplishing all the changes that the right so celebrates, whereas now a Democratic president is implementing a domestic agenda that the right abhors.</i>”
That is true, the right is very sad and mad. But Obama’s program, of tax cuts on almost everyone, modest tax hikes, and Heritage-Romney health care plan, is all stuff that the right of 1983 would have been pretty happy with (at least, minus the health insurance stuff, it’s quite a bit like what Reagan did).
Maybe this is all the product of the right having gotten its way on policy, so there’s nothing left but impotent, absurd, partisan rage left, as tribalism subsumes policy in the conservative identity.
— Elvis Elvisberg · Apr 24, 02:32 AM · #
I am personally a “wonky liberal centrist,” of the kind disowned by both the right an the left (Kevin Drum is my rock star…)
I enjoy watching Conor tilt at windmills, and there are a number of non-movement conservatives that I enjoy reading, respect, and sometimes find persuasive (including Ramesh Pomeru, the post- Bush Administration David Frum, Noah Millman, Daniel Larison, and Scott McConnell).
But Johah Goldman never ceases to raise my blood pressure. His political argumentation always comes down to one of two styles of argument:
1. Yes, conservatives do (some undesirable behavior), but liberals are much worse, or
2. A critique of conservatism is addressed by:
a. Restating it in some partial or fantastical way,
b. Knocking down this straw dog argument (while leaving the disputed thesis untouched), and finally
c. Questioning the motives or integrity of the other disputant, questioning how they could make such an obviously false argument.
Mr. Goldberg’s various postings on epistemic closure are of the second variant, and serve—for those so inclined—as hilariously ironic confirmations on Julian Sanchez’s original definition of the term.
The paragraph above summarizes his approach perfectly by
Misstating the critique he’s responding to. “The Right media is too powerful”
Granting that there may be a little grain of truth in this misstatement, and
Pivoting to “demonstrate” that this critique is wrong-headed, and actually evidence of its opposite.
But the argument Mr. Sanchez was proffering was not that right-wing media was too powerful, but that the conservative movement consumes and believes nothing but right-wing media. And for this reason, the conservative understanding of the political landscape is consumed by such left-field fantasy as Acorn’s manipulation of elections, the centrality of the CRA and Fannie Mae in the financial crisis, the compromised citizenship of Obama, the devastating blow that the “Climategate” emails delivered to the global warming debate, and the incipient Marxism/Stalinism/Fascism of our president. Because of the phenomenon of epistemic closure, movement conservatives believe that liberals operate in essential bad faith, their real goal being to increase the role of government in American life to authoritarian levels.
I grew up in an era where this was more characteristic of the left than right, but it is much worse now. There is a strong element of tribalism to the current conservative movement, and the prevailing supposition behind a lot of conservative thought is to presume ulterior motives from all liberals, and impute wisdom to all “trusted” sources of information.
In the meantime, the “movement” right begins to occupy a different America from the rest of us, with lines continually being drawn between “real Americans” like themselves, with those whose motives are secretly to end the freedom, prosperity and happiness of the rest.
Goldberg is not really an intellectual or policy thinker, but a cheap polemicist, and shady rhetorician, using techniques learned in his high-school debating club to distract, mislead and disparage his “opposition.”
— Scrooge McDuck · Apr 24, 10:05 PM · #
Scrooge McDuck, your comment is worthy of being a blog entry.
— Sven · Apr 25, 01:10 AM · #
The cheapness of Goldberg’s argument is captured in his crack about Al Gore not having invented the internet yet. Of course Al Gore never said he invented the internet. In fact, Gore said (and I have heard Newt Gingrich acknowledge that it’s true) that he was a congressional leader in promoting the early government-run computer networks that were the basis for the internet.
If Goldberg prefers a false sound-bite to a truth (one, furthermore, which would require him to admit that government-sponsored efforts can indeed be quite good for economic development) or to even leaving Gore out the commentary altogether, that tells you all you need to know about his lack of intellectual heft and honesty.
Besides which, Goldberg never grapples with the issue of whether conservatives are limiting the sources of information to which they expose themselves and are living in an epistemic bubble. Instead, all he cares about is whether the current media configuration is “good for conservatives.” I remember when conservatives criticized liberals for relativism. Oh, how the wheel has turned.
— Amy · Apr 25, 09:18 PM · #
Root and shoots worthy of space in our political garden. Thank you all. And I agree with sven; Scrooge McDuck’s comment is worthy of development and expansion.
— zic · Apr 25, 09:41 PM · #
My favorite part is the condescension: “I was a struggling young conservative once, but I worked hard, unlike kids these days… If it wasn’t for the Internet I would not have to deal with this issue… SIGH”
In his mind, he is a lion of the Right, a Kirk or a Buckley. No recognition of his mother’s help with internships at AEI, exploiting the Lewinsky scandal to further his career etc.
What infuriates me is the lack of self awareness. It’s what infuriates me about Movement Conservatism.
— dino · Apr 25, 10:21 PM · #
You are wrong, Conor, and just won’t admit it. Jonah has masterfully destroyed the arguments of all the jealous young conservative intellectuals that exist in his mind.
— D. Aristophanes · Apr 26, 12:21 AM · #
wow…..five days in and here is a partial list of conservative blogs that fail to mention Manzigate…..hotair, instapundit, pjm, malkin, first things, patterico, ace…..
hows that for epistemic closure, Conor?
the controversry doesn’t even exist in therightosphere.
down the memory hole!
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— xixixi · Apr 26, 12:47 PM · #
every time i read yet another analysis of a goldberg “rebuttal’ i’m left with the same question: “can mama’s boy read for comprehension?”
— dj spellchecka · Apr 26, 07:01 PM · #
Obama is a soicalist, this is not an ideal or an ideation of merit, let history speak to you and for itself. Your comments are insulting to republicans but of course they are meant to be , afterall if you can’t insult them or call them racists oreven blunted uninformed and dim witted, then where’s the fun. No republican would be caught dead in the pursuit of enlightenment , isnt that right? If you cant run down republicans then what merit does your diatribe have, afterall?
— barbara · May 6, 06:53 PM · #