On Puglistic Communitarianism

Joe Arpaio is the epitome of a dangerous sort of conservatism.

I write about conservatism a lot from where I see it. I think of conservatism as a combination of a few things: respect for tradition, local preferences, apolitical spaces, the rule of law, epistemological modesty, bottom-up experimentation, and skepticism of both populism and technocracy. (I even wrote a bunch of rambling pieces to this effect!)

But people aren't voting for conservatives because they like the things I wrote about. Those factors are why I think conservatism is useful and essential--or, if I'm feeling cynical, how I rationalize my voting pattern post hoc. But conservatism in popular opinion seems to be more often a response to the perception of a threat.

Let's be clear: threats are real! The world is dangerous; people are fallen and sinful; our more enthusiastic reformers are often careless in attempting to destroy existing structures en route to immanetizing the eschaton. It is not prima facie irrational to be concerned about the preservation of what exists ovetrthe creation of the New Jerusalem.

It's useful to think of reflexive conservatism in the face of this struggle as a sort of pugilistic communitarianism. That's not my phrase; that's from a perceptive article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells about Chris Christie's response to the Ebola scare of 2014.  He wrote about how Christie's default posture was to position himself as the defender of the "in-group" against external threats--but also to define the in-group very broadly.

Wallace-Wells suggested that Christie was at times "heading for a truly great political accomplishment, modernizing conservative communitarianism, expanding the in-group so that it is no longer simply just white, Christian, male, and socially repressive." A great example of this was his defense of his nomination of Sohail Mohmamed for a Superior Court judgeship in New Jersey.

In this context, the "crazies" were the out-group, and Mohammed can be part of a broad American in-group.

While his article was insightful, Wallace-Wells missed the boat a bit on the zeitgeist. He writes,

The country is evolving; in-group ties are weakening, and a politics of individual rights has grown stronger. Christie’s own politics, his instinctive pugilistic communitarianism, may seem a little anachronistic in a country less inclined to see outsiders as enemies.

On the contrary: the ongoing disaster of 2016 and 2017 has proved that in-group ties are strengthening in our era of identity politics. Indeed, Donald Trump exploited a sort of narrow in-grouping--or white identity politics--en route to his narrow election win. It is through this prism that we should see the divide over Joe Arpaio. For a certain sort of conservative, Arpaio protects a narrow in-group from threats, and whatever method he chooses for the job is inherently justified. The rest is noise.

Unfortunately, pugilistic communitarian in the absence of charity is a dangerous place for the Right to be. And while Arpaio may feign religion by playing Christmas carols for his prisoners 12 hours a day, the condition of his jails suggests that he did not respect the inherent dignity of his charges. This leads to moral atrocities, with the complicity of a disinterested or uncompassionate electorate.

Right now, the public demands government, and the Right needs a better answer than narrow in-group pugilistic communitarianism that leads to Trump and Arpaio. For the sake of our souls, the Right probably needs to return to Christie's broader approach. If only Chris Christie were better than he is.