A Pot of Sack

 How fortunate is our generation that we have the first intellectual vice presidential candidate in many a year! Of course, that venerable term does not mean all it once did. In yesteryear, it connoted a certain wide range of reading and broad exposure to many ideas. Now, when we say "intellectual," we mostly appear to mean that someone has read a few blogs, and come away with one idea, which they have since held on to like a vise. 

Today's intelligentsia, after all, consists of people who learned just enough philosophy in undergrad to label themselves "effective altruists," and then to move, by a circuitous path, from this belief to a worship of a superpowerful computerized deity called "The Singularity," and then to move from that, by a path still more circuitous, to becoming fascists. 

Or—in the alternative—they are people who read just enough blogs in undergrad to have declared themselves "traditionalist conservatives," and then to have moved from that—by a path much more direct—to becoming fascists. 

The latter appears to have been the route our current GOP vice presidential nominee took. In short, he read some Curtis Yarvin blogs, and had a handful of European thinkers described to him (inaccurately) by Peter Thiel, and then he became a "radtrad" Catholic and thence a MAGA stooge. 

In short, ours is the age of the "persons with one idea," as William Hazlitt once called them. They are people who have encountered one thing, in the course of their reading, that seemed to them true, and then decided they never needed to read again. The rest of life could be devoted to proselytizing for their one fixed idea. 

And this, of course, always leads to at least some variety of totalitarianism—for totalitarianism is nothing other than the submission of complex human societies to a single idea. 

I was reading Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novella Crotchet Castle today, and it diagnoses this phenomenon well. Peacock's novels were nearly all concerned with the foibles of "persons with one idea"—self-declared intellectuals whose minds had been dominated by a single obsession. As he puts it, the manufacturing of such hobbyhorse-haunted intellectual ghouls was the great danger of education in his time. 

Education does not so much cure people's stupidity, Peacock writes, as "it gives a fixed direction to their stupidity, a sort of incurable wry neck to the thing they call their understanding." This is indeed what appears to have happened to our GOP vice presidential nominee. His limited reading of white nationalist blogs and his restricted conversation with Bay Area tech fascists did not so much abolish his ignorance as give it a specific channel in which to flow. 

One of these channels, in Peacock's day as in our own, is the worship of power for its own sake. As Peacock explains, one of the well-trodden paths of the "persons with one idea" is to eventually become partisans of whatever power appears to be in the ascendant. Since minds such as these are always ready to be shaped by the next passerby, they easily become foot-soldiers for the cause of Things As They Are. 

Peacock had in mind the erstwhile radical poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey—who, one after another—all abandoned the liberal views of their youths and began writing panegyrics to Tradition. He mocks their self-interested betrayal of their own stated views as savagely as Shelley, Byron, and Browning all did in verse of their own. 

Peacock parodies these men in Nightmare Abbey as well, his satire of literary Romanticism, and he returns to the theme in Crotchet Castle, where Coleridge appears in the form of the "transcendental poet," Mr. Skionar. The latter has two friends, named "Wilful Wontsee" (Wordsworth) and "Ramblesack Shantsee" (Southey—who has "sack" in his name because he "sold his birthright for a pot of sack"—as Peacock puts it in Nightmare Abbey—by agreeing to serve as Poet Laureate; sack being the Laureate's traditional honorary remuneration).

As Lady Clarinda explains the ideological evolution of these erstwhile radicals and present preachers of Monarchy: Wontsee, Shantsee, and Skionar were all "poets of some note, who used to see visions of Utopia, and pure republics beyond the Western deep: but finding that these El Dorados brought them no revenue, they turned their vision-seeing faculty into the more profitable channel of espying all sorts of virtues in the high and mighty, who were able and willing to pay for the discovery." 

This, too, is the channel in which the stupidity of men like J.D. Vance and Patrick Deneen was directed. Both started their careers as "Never Trump" traditionalist conservatives. Barely seven years ago, Deneen's famous complaint against liberalism was that it had supposedly given birth to Trump. Now, he has decided that he needs to help Trump destroy liberalism. 

That makes no sense in terms of intellectual consistency—but it makes a great deal of sense in terms of characterological consistency. The through-line is Deneen's moral stupidity and lack of exposure to more than one idea (in his case, the hobbyhorse of "liberalism = bad").

Likewise with Vance. He got his one idea in hand from the Curtis Yarvin blogs and the Peter Thiel dinner table discussion. He decided he was a "traditionalist conservative." And, for a time, this led him to declare he was a "Never Trumper," when this seemed like the ascendent interpretation of the school. But once Rod Dreher, Deneen, and the rest of their kind had all gone over to the Trump bandwagon (complete with Viktor Orbán bunting), he went with them. 

A man who had only ever been given one channel for his stupidity had no other choice. 

It turned out, after all, there was no money to be had in the "Never Trump" school. No pots of sack either. Better to become licensed bard to a series of rich patrons. First, Vance appeared in motley to caper for Peter Thiel. Then, he switched his attentions to Trump. In short, "finding that [Never Trumpism] brought [him] no revenue, [he] turned [his] vision-seeing faculty into the more profitable channel of espying all sorts of virtues in the high and mighty, who were able and willing to pay for the discovery." 

And so we have our "intellectual" vice presidential pick finding himself now in the comfortable pay of our would-be MAGA overlord, receiving all the pots of sack his heart could desire. "Just for a handful of silver he left us," as Browning once wrote of Wordsworth (Wontsee), Southey (Shantsee), and all their turncoat ilk—"just for a riband to stick in his coat." Vance has indeed sold his birthright for a pot of sack. 

I just wish he hadn't sold all of ours along with it.