“The science” has taken blows to the person of Dr. Anthony Fauci, whose myriad self-serving lies about coronavirus have now been publicly revealed in congressional hearings. The trendy bluff of gender identity has been called by two former NBA players declaring for the WNBA draft, in turn forcing the WNBA to confer about its (as yet ambiguous) eligibility requirements. 

Meanwhile, the dream of critical race theory’s final triumph has been shattered. There is the tragic story of Jason Arday. The young, Black Cambridge professor took his own life after being outed as an academic fraud whose career was predicated on credulity and tokenization so outrageous as to be racist in its own right. And, flanking that tale like some sort of prophecy, there is that viral essay by Tyler Austin Harper, the young, Black former Bates professor who left the tenure track when he got tired of his own tokenization. Harper argues that the academy elevates DEI around race in part to deflect attention from the broad class inequities that it not only ignores but perpetrates. Many of DEI’s apologists have been left spluttering. 

For some on the online right, these are just more chances to “own the libs.” But for those conservatives and moderates who operate in better faith, the successive toppling of these idols—trust in “the science,” gender ideology, and “antiracism”—seems like a moment for hope. One can be forgiven for thinking: Surely now they’ll come around, acknowledge the facts, join the rest of us on turf where reality reigns. Perhaps not all the talking heads and the Democratic strategists, but at least some of them … and maybe my nice lefty neighbor.

But, nope. As most of us probably know by now, that hope is mostly unfounded. 

Contrary to prevailing conservative opinion, though, I think that those who continue to profess an unfathomable belief in things like Dr. Fauci’s integrity, swimmer Lia Thomas’ womanhood, or Jason Arday’s scholarship are afflicted less with venality than with an anxiety so profound that it precludes all rational thought. In other words, the mainstream left’s lack of any reality principle has less to do with morality than with psychology.

What we are witnessing, I believe, is a kind of mass “imposter syndrome,” wherein the drive not to be found out is so profound as to obliterate absolutely everything else. As I will discuss, the eradication of any common culture has left Americans with far narrower options for ascendancy to elite status via much more curated in-groups. With the disintegration of communities centered on family and faith, these politicized factions now defining American social life and personal identity demand constant (and ever more ridiculous) affirmations of tribal loyalty. 

The big winners in this charade? The social media companies and foreign powers that make money off of our ever-wider divisions. The big losers? All the rest of us. 

The Emperor Is Wearing a Dress—and a Mask

Former Obama chief of staff and current CNN political correspondent David Axelrod is among the sanest Democrats around. Amidst allies who have become almost entirely detached from reality on gender identity and critical race theory (not to mention Covid), Axelrod often keeps his feet on or near the ground. 

Yet on X, he offered this take on the recent congressional hearings where a preemptively pardoned Fauci pleaded the fifth over and over (in slick self-assurance that his allies and defenders would never believe his own written words if they came out of a Republican senator’s mouth): “There was plenty senators could have asked Dr. Fauci about what lessons he learned, and the country should, from the COVID pandemic. Instead, they engaged in an obvious attempt to demonize and entrap the 85-year-old.”

It’s “demonizing” and “entrapping” a person to point out what he himself admits to having done? Does Axelrod want to know next why Simba is “demonizing” and “entrapping” Scar at the end of The Lion King, when he exposes the reality that Scar murdered Mufasa?

What manner of credulity is this, for such a smart man and so many smart people just like him? Why this maddening deflection, rather than any kind of direct response to the facts at play? 

The only explanation is a kind of mass imposter syndrome wherein actually engaging directly with the damning facts is disqualifying from the inner circle claiming both intelligence and integrity. To share, say, Senator Rand Paul’s view of Dr. Fauci would be to forfeit credibility among the formidable (albeit shrinking) group of influential people whose identities depend on sharing absolutely nothing with Rand Paul. 

This insistence that anyone who states that the emperor is wearing no clothes is doing so out of holistic inferiority and/or meanness—when you, too, can see full well that he’s naked—is undertaken mostly out of fear.

No doubt Axelrod, along with millions of otherwise sane Americans, can see perfectly well that Fauci is a less-than-honest broker—among other realities that are considered anathema. So, they deny their lying eyes, pretending—and influencing others to pretend—that they share the vision of the ostensibly worthy few rather than that of the honest many. 

Because the honest many are, well, many. 

The Cult of “Smart”

In his 1965 Cambridge University debate against Bill Buckley, James Baldwin explained that the racism of many working-class and poor white Southerners was rooted largely in status anxiety. The “one great consolation” in the otherwise bleak life of a poor white storekeeper, Baldwin argues, is that “she is not Black.” In other words, struggling white Southerners in the early and mid-twentieth century rooted their fragile sense of stability and self-worth largely on their socially sanctioned and legally enforced “superiority” to Black people. However (as memorialized in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird), many poor white Southerners were abundantly aware that they were culturally as well as economically superior to no one; professing virulent racism helped to sublimate that insecurity. Incredibly enough, none other than Vice President JD Vance picks up on this strand of Baldwin and Lee in Hillbilly Elegy, explaining how downwardly mobile white men in Appalachia resent President Barack Obama not because they believe him to be inferior to them but precisely because they know he isn’t. 

In his 2018 essay “The Great White Culture War,” David French makes a similar argument about progressive, college-educated white Americans, the distinction being that they are looking to signify their distinction not from racial minorities but from non-college-educated white Americans who are not progressive. In this need to achieve distinction from their less educated counterparts, white college-educated progressives are not unique. Brittney Cooper, a Black feminist, illuminates the ways in which cultural divisions predicated on educational differences similarly divide even a far more politically unified group, namely Black women. 

Baldwin’s insight about how a codified, categorical construction (in this case, race) can be used for one group to separate itself as superior to another regardless of any evidence to the contrary is as relevant today as it ever was. Only now, it is a multiracial elite separating itself from multiracial “normies” by virtue of the one “immutable” characteristic everyone respects: (alleged) intelligence. 

In order for this ostensible line of separation between enlightened elites and everyone else to stand in for virtue, as race once did, it (like race) has to be divorced entirely from truth. In other words, it is only by denying the banal facts that suffice for less brilliant minds—say, the fact that there are two sexes—that one can prove her belonging in this elite club, where sacred cows stay that way. 

In what Princeton professor Robert P. George has called our “age of feeling,” it is sentiment—that is, the conviction that we should “trust the science,” but never the actual science itself—that suffices for enlightenment. And that, by extension, serves as a ticket into a post-reality elite.

To those captured by this mindset, any break in that post-reality cartel serves only to ratchet up its intensity. Every defection proves only the rare virtue of those who remain—especially as the ranks continue to thin. 

The Waning Power of “Cool”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as I was coming of age, the leftward march of the culture succeeded in large part because those leading the march were cool. And those opposing it were not. I still remember a late-90s issue of Girls Life magazine that quoted one of the Spice Girls as saying that “feminism has become a dirty word; girl power is just a nineties way of saying it.” Even at 11, I got the gist of that comment. Old-school feminists were into burning their bras and hating men; now, feminism would encompass showing off bras for men, à la Sex and the City and all the other popular culture that was, well, popular.

Back then, the left controlled pretty much all the mainstream media and culture—along with, of course, the universities. But its excesses were, counterintuitively enough, disciplined by its very popularity. Sex and the City did not appeal only to liberal, sex-positive feminists. It was too high-quality a show for that. Ditto for nearly everything else that was mainstream. The “tenured radicals” may have been radical enough, sure. But it was also a boom time in a higher education landscape populated almost entirely by people who, radical or not, could not conceive of eradicating all universal tastes and standards. Their radicalism, in other words, depended upon the solidity of their broader institutions and a broader society that still had some trust in meritocracy; that’s what gave them something to push against. That leftward march (still within reality’s realm) continued all the way through about 2013. 

Then came the siloing effect of individualized technology, instigated by the smartphone and its social media apps. Once every individual person could (and did) curate and project a digital “identity,” the fissures that already existed between secular, leftist elites and more traditional, less “enlightened” normal people became chasms. The left retained its hold on “cool” for a time; its preferences and tastes continued to shape the popular culture. (The predominantly religious right, in a posture of resistance, may be many good things; but “fun” doesn’t tend to be one of them.)

With Trump’s election in 2016, followed by our pandemic response in 2020, came the total eradication of what remained of a common culture. There is no universal “cool” now. We have largely traded actual stars (whose popularity rests on broad appeal) for influencers in various fields and on various platforms (whose little niches are the name of their games). 

A common conception of what’s cool may have been our last tenuous hold on any common reaction to (or even acknowledgment of) what’s true. Now, we have arrived at a point where being able to easily tell the difference between boys and girls is beneath those whose in-group coolness is predicated on their ostensibly superior intelligence. Reality as we acknowledge it is now curated for our validation and entertainment. 

This happens on the right, too, of course; but what’s cool in that cohort seems to be predominantly the invention of fantastical conspiracy theories that can’t be technically disproven—rather than the willful denial of facts that have already been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. It’s “some emperor, somewhere, is wearing an elephant on his head” vs. “this clearly naked emperor is wearing beautiful vestments that only the smartest people, like me, can see.” 

It is not clear to me where this outright denial of ideologically inconvenient realities fueled by rampant imposter syndrome ends for today’s elite left. But it is quite clear that we should stop assuming it ever will. 

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The Colombian thinker Nicolás Gómez Dávila (Bogotá, 1913–94), though certainly not the best known, has stood the test of time surprisingly well, and may have particular value to twenty-first-century conservatives seeking to reconcile reactionary and libertarian currents without ending up in an irreconcilable limbo of contradictions. I use the expression “authentic reactionaries” because it is how Gómez Dávila described himself. He never considered himself a “conservative.” In his view, the conservative seeks to preserve what exists, whereas the reactionary believes the modern world has already lost what is essential. Like many traditionalists, he embraced reaction because the world, the culture, and the values they wished to preserve had been demolished by the modern age, marching to the cadence of the Enlightenment and the goddess Reason.

Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, Charles Péguy, Léon Bloy, and, of course, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc belong to the essential constellation of traditionalist and reactionary thought. Some, like Chesterton, have been enthusiastically reclaimed by the political right in recent years, while others, such as Péguy, Maistre, or Léon Bloy, remain largely forgotten, sometimes because of their fierce attacks on capitalism, and at other times because some of their ideas were later embraced or adapted, in their own ways, by authoritarian movements; their religious dogmatism, too, can make some contemporary conservatives uneasy.

In Nicolás Gómez Dávila we find a similar reaction against modernity, with the added advantage that his work is as accessible as it is intellectually fascinating. But his criticism of modernity never swung to the opposite extreme; it was never an apology for authoritarianism or a turn toward fascism. Perhaps this is because his deepest concern was not political but something more profound and spiritual. The Columbian thinker left behind no lengthy treatises, only a vast collection of what he called “Scholia to an Implicit Text,” brief aphorisms on countless aspects of life, politics, sociology, and culture. In just a few words they condense the substance of weighty essays, thanks to his extraordinary command of language and his remarkable ability to make ellipsis into serious discourse.

We should not ignore the fact that much of the traditionalists’ work is explicitly anti-liberal. They attack classical liberalism and communism with equal force, regarding both as different manifestations of the same modern worldview. Donoso Cortés’s “Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism”, which profoundly influenced later traditionalists, revolves around the controversial claim that classical liberalism is not socialism’s antidote but its intellectual precursor. This understandably raises suspicion among many contemporary conservatives, but at the same time, we should avoid the mistake of assuming that an author like Cortés had the liberalism of Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek in mind. Both were born long after the death of the nineteenth-century Spanish philosopher, and the world they inhabited was entirely different.

Cortés writes against European liberalism because he rejects the secularization of the state and the exaltation of individual autonomy, long before the rise of the welfare state or American libertarianism. De Maistre, for his part, uses the word “liberalism” to describe the immediate legacy of the French Revolution: anticlericalism, popular sovereignty, rationalism, and the destruction of the Ancien Régime. The criticisms these authors leveled against liberalism are better understood if we consider in detail what the European liberalism they knew actually entailed. They were not attacking the liberal order that would later take shape and flourish in the United States, but the political upheavals of Europe, where the language of liberty was often accompanied by attacks on other traditional institutions, such as religion and the existing social order, and where the development of liberal ideas and the establishment of liberal institutions in the real world involved mistakes and excesses. These are authors who must always be read and understood within their historical context.

As important as that context is, however, it’s even more important to recognize that the value of the great traditionalists’ work also lies in the fact that it often arrives at conclusions surprisingly close to those of liberal conservatives, even while starting from very different premises. Reading Gómez Dávila today does not require embracing his entire worldview, which he never laid out in a systematic treatise in any case. He was a brilliant polemicist with no political affiliation. Just as a traditionalist reader may find inspiration in Hayek without becoming a classical liberal, lovers of liberty can disagree with many of Gómez Dávila’s views and still discover extraordinarily fertile insights into power, the state, revolutions, egalitarianism, technology, and political utopias.

As a twentieth-century thinker, Gómez Dávila was well acquainted with contemporary economic liberalism, which he openly condemned, yet his criticism was never focused on the economic sphere, which lay outside his field of interest. His focus was always theological and philosophical. The starting point of his thought is perfectly compatible with modern libertarianism: the imperfection of man. Libertarians do not trust in the inherent goodness of human beings, while traditionalists ground human imperfection in original sin. Consequently, the former seek to prevent any individual from accumulating excessive power to impose his own vision of society, whereas the latter uphold the need for an objective moral order, tradition, and authority. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, the point at which their views most clearly converge is in their rejection of the omnipresent state and, more broadly, of every form of unlimited power.

“As the state grows, the individual diminishes,” wrote Gómez Dávila in a scholium Ronald Reagan himself might have signed. “Wise politics is the art of strengthening society and weakening the state,” he added later. And later still: “As the state entangles all human activities in its threads, governing becomes increasingly difficult, commanding increasingly easy,” a remark that seems almost to anticipate the sprawling bureaucratic web of the twenty-first-century European Union. With characteristic irony, he even observed that “the three enemies of man are the devil, the state, and technology.” When he argues for robust checks and balances, he begins to sound positively liberal: “A soundly constituted state is one where innumerable obstacles hinder and obstruct the freedom of the legislator.”

Technology is one of the great obsessions of the author of Scholia to an Implicit Text. Although he was no Luddite, he relentlessly attacked what he called “technocracy,” and often seemed to be speaking directly to our own age, repeatedly warning of the dangers of a world in which technology seizes power, while power in turn places itself at the service of technology. “Technology would pose fewer dangers if its manipulation were not so easy for the fool and so profitable for the thief,” is a scholium that could easily have been written today, amid profound moral debates over AI, Big Tech, algorithms, and transhumanism.

Traditionalists of a liberal persuasion hold appeal for conservatives in part because of their struggle against common enemies, such as socialism, communism, and the various forms of totalitarianism. Gómez Dávila, for instance, captures the essence of the communism of our own time, as seen in the Castro brothers, or in Chávez’s socialist revolution inherited by Maduro. “A communist,” he wrote, “is one who struggles to have the state guarantee him a bourgeois existence.”

The Colombian writer devoted a large portion of his work to denouncing revolutions. One of his briefest, sharpest, and most melancholic aphorisms reads simply: “Useless, like a revolution.” Elsewhere he observes that revolutions “are not the locomotives but the derailments of history,” adding that “every revolution aggravates the evils against which it erupts.” Yet he carefully distinguished revolution from reaction, and from rebellion: “Revolution is progressive and seeks to strengthen the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance. The revolutionary is a functionary in embryo; the rebel is a reactionary in action.” This subtle distinction is particularly interesting today, when some adventurers on the right, sympathetic to an old-fashioned populism, in their impatience with the progressive order that has culturally dominated the West, go too far and risk becoming revolutionaries in their own way.

When contemplating the disaster of the Soviet Union, the widespread barbarism of Mao’s China, or the endless poverty of Cuba, one still hears nostalgic revolutionaries such as Bernie Sanders and his followers stubbornly insisting that the experiment failed only because it was badly implemented, while the recipe itself remains sound. Communism, or socialism, is probably history’s most frequently repeated failed experiment, in open defiance of the elementary scientific principle of trial and error, which learns from failure instead of endlessly repeating it. Gómez Dávila immediately exposed the trap by reminding us that “after every revolution,” the revolutionary will claim that “the true revolution will be tomorrow’s”: “The revolutionary explains that a scoundrel betrayed yesterday’s revolution.” Thus it has been through more than a century of bloody revolutions, all carried out in the name of left-wing ideals. 

Behind many of these revolutionary projects lay an ideal, now much abused: equality. This is one of Gómez Dávila’s greatest themes. Traditionalists generally recognize only one form of equality: spiritual equality, the equality that comes from all men being children of the same God. Their critique of modern egalitarianism, however, is every bit as devastating as their critique of rationalism. “There is no such thing as man in the world,” De Maistre famously remarked. “I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian; but as for man, I declare I have never met him in my life; if he exists, it is entirely without my knowledge.”

Gómez Dávila was even harsher toward egalitarians, those vain utopians whom he regarded as incapable of understanding human nature, always driven by envy, and always willing to commit crimes in pursuit of an end that neither justifies the means nor can ever be achieved except cosmetically or in theory. Today, when the left has become overwhelmingly identity-driven, that postmodern left he never lived to see, his scholium on the subject resonates even more powerfully, almost as a prophecy: “Even if inequality were not indelible, we should prefer it to equality for love of diversity.” So convinced was he that egalitarianism is impossible, even if it were desirable, that he wrote: “He who favors equality without being envious can only do so because he is a fool.”

The writer from Bogotá usually made his scholia explicit enough to prevent their brevity from degenerating into ambiguity. Thus, when discussing equality, he drew an important distinction: “The notion of economic equality raises a purely technical question that should be resolved by examining the universal consequences of its realization. The notion of equality that denies the existence of hierarchies, on the other hand, must simply and plainly be rejected.”

As we know, there is nothing wrong with aspiring to equality before the law, nor with, as we have noted, recognizing a certain degree of moral or spiritual equality. Material and social equality, however, are another matter: there is only one way to impose them (and even that fails): by force. That imposition may come through the state’s monopoly on violence or, more characteristic of today’s Western culture wars, through social engineering. Gómez Dávila expressed with remarkable subtlety the thin line separating left-wing utopias from crime: “A simple fit of impatience soon erases the distance between utopia and murder.”

Of all the traditionalists discussed here, Gómez Dávila was perhaps the one who most effectively confronted the different forms of social engineering promoted by the left, even though he never used that specific expression, which only became widespread after his death. “The progressive dreams of the scientific stabling of mankind,” he wrote, observing that behind every leftist stands someone who, given the opportunity, would attempt to improve humanity by applying to men and societies the same scientific methods that have increased the productivity of livestock farming. He went even further, acknowledging an uncomfortable truth through his characteristic blend of transcendence and provocation: “Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.”

In Gómez Dávila’s image of humans stabled like livestock, we can imagine Friedrich Hayek himself, already elderly, when he dismantled the errors of planning in his final work, The Fatal Conceit: “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

This concern is of course deeply connected to another recurring conservative criticism of twenty-first-century progressive social engineering. It destroys traditional intermediary institutions, such as marriage, the family, and the church. Traditionalists fervently defend these institutions and set them against the omnipresent power of the state as bastions of freedom. Perhaps the most inspired traditionalist apostle of the family was G. K. Chesterton. For him, the family was a “test of freedom,” because he regarded it as the one thing “the free man makes for himself and by himself.” He also saw the family as a kind of refuge, an oasis of freedom in which to shelter from the excessive power of the State and what we might today call “globalist elites.” Gómez Dávila approached the family more fragmentarily, but he too regarded it as a fundamental natural and moral institution, and saw it as a refuge from the State’s intervention in matters of personal conscience and culture.

However, the attachment to family, voluntary association, guild, and homeland also points to something deeper in Gómez Dávila: his distrust of social engineers who seek to remake societies and artificially reshape individuals from above. In this respect, his work comes even closer to the conservative defense of inherited institutions and the classical liberal suspicion of concentrated power.

Gómez Dávila once again portrays socialists and Keynesians in just a few words, recognizing the need for civil society to hold the reins of a nation: “Asking the state to do what only society should do is the error of the left.” Few sentences better illustrate the common ground between his traditionalist instincts and the classical liberal defense of a society capable of limiting the reach of the state. A good illustration of the vast common ground where the ideas of traditionalists, conservatives, and libertarians coexist and reinforce one another can be found in that famous scholium by the Columbian thinker.

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