Beautiful Losers
A note from R. J. Snell, Editor-in-Chief:
Conservatism has never had a fixed definition. For some time, however, at least in the post-WWII context, a somewhat fluid consensus emerged, a fusion of traditionalists, classical liberals, libertarians, and anti-Communists. That consensus seems broken, or at least is interpreted by many thoughtful observers as having broken, and not simply because of disagreements about President Trump; though certainly those disagreements have contributed to the fracture. Consequently, multiple, and sometimes quite disparate, voices have advocated their vision of the conservative future, both in the political and intellectual aspects of conservatism. Post-liberalism, national conservatism, classical liberalism, right liberalism, integralism, reconstructionism—the varieties are substantial. Further, the movement has splintered at the same time as the new media has exploded in size and influence, so much so that it seems almost impossible to envision a central figure or voice to the movement who could define it, control meaning, and decide the terms of “genuine” or “inauthentic” conservatism. There are no longer gatekeepers, or not in the way that William F. Buckley is widely considered to have expelled the Birchers from the movement. So how will conservatives control the meaning of the movement? Should they even try? Who has the right to do so, anyway?
In this three-day series, Elizabeth Corey, Andrew T. Walker, and I explore the control of meaning within conservatism.
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Only recently did I learn the meaning of the phrase “beautiful losers.” R. J. Snell, editor-in-chief of this journal, explained that it denotes men and women who maintain their moral and intellectual purity while losing cultural and political battles. They are reasonable and civil, but losers nevertheless. They would rather be defeated, with grace and dignity intact, than win at the cost of being crass, vulgar, or harsh.
This description brings to mind a certain type of aesthete. The nineteenth-century British writers Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, for example, were so committed to effete good taste and self-cultivation that they couldn’t—wouldn’t—pay attention to the messy conflicts of real life. “An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style,” wrote Wilde in the prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Let others manage life’s difficulties while we remain unspotted from the world!
If not an aesthete, then perhaps the beautiful loser is the scholar so devoted to studying some arcane corner of a discipline that he can’t function capably in everyday life, or the ideologue who doesn’t care what happens around him so long as he remains true to principles. Common to all these types is an ascetic detachment from the normal business of life and an unwillingness to dirty one’s hands. The posture can look like laziness, moral irresponsibility, elitism, or cowardice.
But beautiful losers can also be understood in a different, more positive light. They often possess indispensable civilizational virtues—like wisdom, courage, moderation, and a sense of justice. These quiet virtues facilitate the proper functioning of school boards, chambers of commerce, church vestries, and countless other institutions of civil society. Beautiful losers tend to operate behind the scenes, fostering reconciliation among people who are at odds and preserving vital goods that do not lie on the surface of ordinary life. They approach moral and political disputes differently than do the loud and the pertinacious.
To clarify this disposition, imagine the beautiful loser’s antithesis: the “scrappy warrior.” The warrior’s assumptions are grounded in a clear and mostly dichotomous vision of the world, a world he deems profoundly unwell. “There is a rot spreading through American life,” writes activist Christopher Rufo. “The country’s foundations are starting to shake loose. A new nihilism is starting to surround the common citizen in all of the institutions that matter: his government, his workplace, his church, his children’s school, even his home.”
Elite institutions, observes Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, “have become the people’s and the nation’s enemies. They are openly waging cultural war on those they ostensibly serve. They cannot be negotiated with or accommodated. They must be defunded, disbanded, and disempowered. … This is the fight before us.”
The scrappy warrior’s dark, pessimistic vision of intractable conflict is the foundation for all that follows. If indeed we face a civilization-defining war between elites and ordinary people, between left and right, between the heterodox and the orthodox, then everyone must choose a side. Failure to do so signals indecision and pusillanimity. In choosing sides, we can’t be afraid of offending people or losing friends—these are incidental costs, necessary for the greater good.
And nobody should be restrained by the norms of civility. “We can be polite and lose every battle,” writes Rufo, “or we can be impolite and actually deliver results for the great majority of Americans who are fighting for their small businesses, fighting for their jobs, fighting for their families.” Civility and kindness mask cowardice and cruelty.
These two “types” exist against the backdrop of an essentially competitive, adversarial view of life. Only games and battles presuppose losers and warriors. The loser appears to have failed in some way, usually by opting out; the warrior is at least trying to accomplish something of significance. To be sure, losing a game is often disappointing. Losing a battle is often much more serious, entailing the loss of status, livelihood, or even life.
Crucially, in both cases people are divided into teams, distinct categories of allies and enemies, with preconceived allegiances and loyalties. There is moral clarity here—or so it seems—but there can be no middle ground, no compromise. To “save our country from the brink of disaster” writes Roberts, we should approach our problems in the spirit of what sounds like a deranged arborist: “not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees—root and branch.”
The warrior suffers from a severe limitation of view precisely because his aim is so clear: to vanquish enemies along with the whole apparatus of their success. This outlook assumes absolute knowledge and moral righteousness. Isaiah Berlin has put it succinctly, speaking from the warrior’s point of view: “Since I know the only true path to the ultimate solution of the problem of society,” he writes, “I know which way to drive the human caravan; and since you are ignorant of what I know, you cannot be allowed to have liberty of choice even within the narrowest limits, if the goal is to be reached.”
Warfare requires prioritizing the political, not the personal; the national, not the local; sweeping generalizations, not subtle, qualified arguments. It is a false simplification of human life. Warriors tend to be fueled by emotion, as is evident in their prose and speeches, and as is especially obvious in the self-righteous anger that bubbles up when they feel slighted. The curated algorithms of social media help tremendously in this regard.
But what if the framework of games and battles were rejected altogether? We would then confront the challenge of expressing our thoughts not dogmatically but in graduated terms, with sobriety, discrimination, and patience. When faced with people who differ from us, our response wouldn’t be to condemn or incite, but to persuade, understand, and mollify. Would we really say in person the outrageous things we’re so bold to say online? This, I think, is where the beautiful loser succeeds brilliantly: he appreciates and even celebrates the complexity of the world and of human personality. Although he has strong views, he is allergic to partisanship.
In one sense, the ideal types of the beautiful loser and the scrappy warrior merely recast the ancient distinction between contemplation and action. The loser is invested in the life of the mind, in the theoria or aesthesis that apprehends experience in its totality while downplaying action. The warrior, in contrast, is the man or woman of purpose, someone who judges, wills, plans, and acts. Although the two kinds of lives may sometimes coexist in a single soul, they often don’t.
I know well that a defense of the contemplative or aesthetic life can go too far, and that it’s exactly why scrappy warriors disdain beautiful losers. I’m reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s famous line: “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” From the warrior perspective, all this subtlety and moderation may be good so far as it goes, especially in an academic context, but really! The world is full of serious problems, and we must declare ourselves, not stand off to the side, dithering and equivocating.
Warriors are right that this world is certainly full of problems, and sometimes battles must be fought. Nobody can shrug them off or pretend that they don’t exist. But losers don’t in fact shun the active life. Instead, they are engaged in activity that takes place in a much deeper stratum of consciousness than political and journalistic warfare. They invest energy in existentially permanent activities, like loving and caring for other people: children, students, family, neighbors, colleagues. They work as musicians, educators, physicians, priests, and artists. Beautiful losers renew and pass on the art, literature, and manners that constitute the best of our culture.
The actions a person takes in these roles may not be explicitly political or moral, but they tend to be the most formative parts of our lives. The words of a parent, mentor, or friend form us more profoundly than any polemic or screed, more than anything we might read, watch, or hear. And though this work is primarily constructive, it inevitably requires reproof, judgment, discipline, and a willingness to tell unpleasant truths. Conflict isn’t absent from the lives of beautiful losers, either.
But because beautiful losers tend to be mild-mannered and equable, it’s tempting for us to doubt ourselves. In an endless stream of polemical articles and speeches, warriors insist that we have things wrong, that we have misunderstood our moment, and that we should be more like them. I couldn’t disagree more. We should never assume that bloggers, writers, and podcasters are offering accurate assessments of the political world, and especially not of our personal worlds. They spend far too much time online, and we would do much better to trust our own experience.
It’s easy enough to be a critic, sniping from the bleachers as a journalist or prophet, when you’ve left the institutions of civil society or have little to do with them. But we who live and work in them must take a different approach. It is irresponsible and dangerous to call for attack and revolution without considering everything that has gone into our existing social order, which still has much health in it—especially at the local level; especially among people who live and work together in “analog” communities.
I have always thought that the work of so-called “beautiful losers” resembles the work of historic preservation. Old buildings and houses have their inconveniences; they may be drafty, and their layouts may not fit modern ways of living. But these structures embody more wisdom than we know. Their walls and windows silently reflect generations of devoted maintenance and care. The designers of these structures knew things that we have forgotten. And though we’re inclined to believe our technology superior to that of generations past, many of their materials were superior to ours: first-growth wood, leaded glass windows, and so on.
On this analogy, the job of present-day conservatives isn’t to tear down, lament, and criticize. Instead we should attempt to preserve the good, while mending those things that are broken. Maintaining a proper equilibrium here isn’t easy; our institutions, and we ourselves, are always under threat and usually in need of repair.
J. R. R. Tolkien has explained this task eloquently: “[I]t is not our part to master all the tides of the world,” he writes, “but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.” This is a most consequential way to spend our days: learning how to practice and even enjoy the difficult but indispensable virtues of humility and charity.