Why Are Conservative Writers Funnier?

Last week, I sat through a whole morning at work pondering a thorny and controversial question: why are conservatives so often the best political writers?

While you pause in outrage, rallying your favourite left-wing writers like so many dead-eyed Pokemons, consider the following rhetorical death match, in the vein of TV’s TNI X-Plosion: in the blue corner: P.J. O’Rourke, Roger Kimball, Christopher Hitchens and Camille Paglia; and in the red: George Monbiot, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky and Tariq Ali. Now, these are only arbitrary samples, and I have defined ‘conservative’ in the rather loose sense of being ‘non-left-wing’;* but it did strike me how few committed left-wing intellectuals are really cracking writers. (Most of my favourites, in fact, are journalists: John Pilger, Robert Fisk, David Marr, Alexander Cockburn, Mungo MacCallum. But whither the intellectuals?).

Of course, this is not to say all conservatives are good writers. Far from it: many right-wingers are as muddy in their prose-style as in their thinking. But once we jettison the polemical flotsam from both extremes — the mouldering campus Trotskyites and the bigots out in Camden — there’s no contest: the joie de vivre of O’Rourke beats Monbiot’s dour sermonising any day of the week. However, leaving aside the relative quality of their ideas just for the moment — although I do think that there may be a link (see below) — the question remains: why are conservative intellectuals often so supple with the pen? And why are left-wing writers so po-faced and uninteresting?

Part of the problem, as I see it, is that many on the Left are weighed down with political commitments that encourage the smothering out of humorous or irreverent impulses. To accept the basic precept of political correctness — that the words we use directly shape the reality we live in — is to accept that there are certain things that are just too serious for a writer to joke about. Political activism, for instance; or anything that might cause ‘offence’ to women, ethnic groups, religious groups, animal-lovers, the disabled, the young, the old, the unemployed, the indigent or the ‘queer’. Once this muzzle of PC orthodoxy is in place, the only remaining options for the aspiring wit are a) political activism, with its kindergarten reckonings and dead rhyming chants; b) rote establishment-bashing; and c) achieving the ‘ironic’ ‘subversion’ of ‘dominant modes of representation’, in the Judith Butler vein. These are hardly the ingredients for a digestible or entertaining prose-style.

Another factor may be that few truly interesting intellectuals remain committed left-wingers beyond their first publishing deal. To take just one example: the brightest of the second-wave feminists — Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, Germaine Greer — have long drifted away from the totem of social constructionism to embrace an old heresy: the possibility that biology plays a roughly equal role in the creation of gender differences as does socialization. Indeed, any true intellectual would immediately leap at the opportunity to pull apart the fascinating implications of this position, rather than falling back into the bosom of the all-embracing ‘gender theory’ that is still worshipped like a lingum in the ziggurat of the liberal academy.

Extrapolating from Wittgenstein’s dictum that good ideas should be able to be expressed well (thanks, Yosh), it’s not entirely inaccurate to argue that left-wingers are bad writers because they are so often peddling bad ideas. While I’ve always supported left-wing positions on particular issues — from abortion rights to gay civil unions to opposing the war in Iraq — nothing is more reductive than applying a socio-political template that ‘explains’ everything and quashes all ambiguity. One might say that the tendency to boil down the complexities and contradictions of human existence to an easily ingestible political opiate is the reflex action of a juvenile mind; but the surprise is less that this sort of thinking exists — since it does on both Left and Right — than the fact that it is so disproportionately prevalent amongst the crème de la crème of the Left.

Well-educated conservatives, on the other hand, have less ideological preconceptions about the use of language, and so less reason for self-restraint in their writing. If one rejects social constructionism — and with it, the whole superstructure of speech codes, censorship and political correctness — public debate becomes less an argument about words (‘you can’t say that!’) and more an argument about ideas. If offense is taken, so be it: to paraphrase Supreme Justice of the US Supreme Court Oliver Wendell Holmes, every idea is potentially an incitement; and it is not to state’s job to dish out self-esteem to everyone ‘offended’ by simple words or phrases. This type of debate — free of ideological shackles — lends itself well to extravagant self-expression and the parry and thrust of well-honed wit, which seems, for better or worse, to be a strong suit of the centre-Right.

Furthermore, traditionalism has always been more closely aligned with the idea of excellence in the arts, while most of the Left — from Orwell on down — has shied away from style as somehow ‘deceptive’ or ‘bourgeois’. While most intellectuals are elitist, conservatives are less afraid of being seen as such; neither are they afraid to proclaim the objective value of truth, beauty, or great works of art. Free from the shroud of relativism that blankets academic literary criticism and art history — by which any work of art can be subjected to the fashionable theory of the moment to reveal hidden ‘power structures’ or ‘narratives’ — these writers are more likely to respect the pursuit of aesthetic excellence, a trait which emerges in their prose. It also tends to make their political arguments more convincing.

Add to this the academic Left’s penchant for self-parody — a veritable Vegas of dazzling illogic – and you’ve pretty much rounded out the argument. Consider, just for fun, the following examples: firstly, the case of Dartmouth professor Priya Venkatesan (and here) who recently threatened to sue her students for violating her civil rights in class by disagreeing and questioning the authority of her ‘French narrative theory’ (no joke); or the Yale art student who repeatedly inseminated herself and then allegedly miscarried the pregnancies as part of an video art project that demonstrated, somehow, ‘the ambiguity surrounding [the] form and function of a woman’s body’. (The stunt may or may not have been faked by the student). As I read about these two cases, I could practically hear the pundits tumbling over each other in their attempts to skewer them using the most finely-worded witticisms. With such source material, is there any way that conservatives can lose?

*Actually, many of the ‘conservative’ authors that I am discussing would more accurately be termed classical liberals, Burkean conservatives and libertarians. While their views differ on many subjects, they are all staunch defenders of freedom of expression and self-declared enemies of political correctness in all its forms. Of course, the fact the these writers either identify as ‘conservative’ in the popular American sense, or have been labeled as such by their left-wing opponents, gets me over the line.

~ by Sebastian Strangio on June 5, 2008.