How to reveal yourself with words

The 1968 Buckley - Vidal debate

Jahan Ganesh is one of the Financial Times centre-page commentators: these are, for the most part, the most respected figures writing for the newspaper. They represent the voice of the newspaper, a little more measured and dispassionate than the news reporters, and for the most part, worth reading for their reflections on political events.

Does Jahan Ganesh belong in this elite group? He clearly thinks he does; he writes with the assurance and stylishness that makes you feel this is someone who went to a high-ranking public school followed by Oxbridge. Never use an expected word in a sentence. As a result, his style is so elliptical that you sometimes have to parse each sentence a couple of times to work out what he means.

Today’s column, How conservatives lost the culture war, is about the perennial battle for hegemony between left and right for much of the last 75 years. He uses the analogy of a televised debate between the archetypal conservative William Buckley and the radical, if not quite liberal, Gore Vidal, in 1968. This debate was made into a film in 2015, and has recently been the subject of a recent book, The Fire Is Upon Us, by Nicolas Buccola, reviewed in the TLS on May 22 2020. Ganesh doesn’t mention this book, but no matter, since the Buckley-Vidal debate is well known from several sources.

Which side is Ganesh on? And what does he believe in himself? Perhaps it’s not fair to ask such a straightforward question of a this highly stylish writer – he describes the Buckley-Vidal debate as less "kinetic" than the recent Black Lives Matter demonstrations. In other words, much of the point is to parade the style, rather than to reveal the meaning, and perhaps as a result I am really not quite sure, at times, of Ganesh’s viewpoint. Ganesh writes for the FT as the thinking man’s conservative, providing some kind of intellectual justification for at least some of the misguided actions of the present government. Here is how the ostensible message of the column becomes rather murky.

Ganesh’s argument here is that the conservative forces have lost influence since 1945 in many ways, most recently last week’s US Supreme Court judgement to solidify LBGT rights in law. He then goes on to analyse why the forces of conservatism failed in the battle against liberalism. The conservatives, in his opinion, made two mistakes (always a good thing in political columns to include a list; it makes your thinking appear more organised). First, they sided with free-market economics (you could call it neoliberalism, but unfortunately that word has been so widely used as to lose much of its original meaning). Here, he correctly points out that the value-free economics espoused by neoliberals removes much of the social justice idea common to more traditional conservatives:

Capitalism is miraculously good at lots of things. Fostering stable communities, a sense of national belonging and deference to the sacred are not among them.

If correct, this reasoning invalidates much of the conservative thinking Ganesh describes, quite apart from bringing into question many of the actions, if not the rhetoric, of the present government. Secondly, he points out that the political victories of the right have not been matched by equivalent cultural victories. There is no triumph of the right in Hollywood, nor elsewhere in the media. Ganesh comments:

The best the right did was to set up parallel bodies, such as Fox News, and even these often address true believers.

But by now I begin to question the conservative right that Ganesh describes. Fox News does not, I think, contribute to the any cultural hegemony of the right; it is too divisive and offensive to ever achieve any genuine consensus. Is this a real conservativism in which he believes, or the populist parody offered by Trump, which reveals its hollowness as soon as a genuine moment of crisis occurs, such as the Floyd killing? If all the right has achieved in the media in the last 75 years is Fox News, then we are in a bad way.

Finally, Ganesh appears to show his true colours. He points out that universities remain resolutely liberal, for the most part. He states “Conservatives resent the infusion of universities with critical theory and other relativist lines of thought. If it matters that much, the burden is on them to clamber into the arena and compete”. Which conservatives is he describing here? The same conservatives who created Fox News? The handful of academics who have nailed their right-wing political colours to the mast are a very small and cantankerous group: Scruton, Minford, and others. I don't think anyone would describe them as forming a coherent body of conservative thought .

Ganesh’s final recommendation can hardly be taken any more seriously than the determination of Stendhal’s perpetual adolescent Julien Sorel to turn his back on the enlightenment and to embrace the forces of reaction in the most uncompromising, and unrealistic, way possible. You enjoy the posturing, but you don’t take it at all seriously. Ganesh might write about the right, but I don't for a moment think he genuinely believes any of this stuff. At most, he might encourage a few Talleyrands.