Compact Magazine: Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servant
I’m a paying subscriber to Compact, the newest digital magazine claiming to be waging intellectual warfare against the scourge of liberalism.
Compact recently published an article by Harvard constitutional law professor Adrian Vermeule titled “Liberalism’s Good and Faithful Servants.” Vermeule argues that the right-liberals of “Conservatism Inc.,” — a label used to denote mainstream “celebrity” conservatism embodied in outlets like the Daily Wire, for instance — are at best incoherent; discouraging any new intellectual development and instead fighting amongst each other.
The opening paragraph reads:
“What passes for the American intellectual right is a sorry thing. Indeed, it lacks even the virtues of unity and coherence; in reality, it is fractured, an ever-changing hodgepodge of views and conflicting mini-movements. To the extent there exists any institutional structure at all, it is only to be found on the right wing of liberalism, Conservatism Inc., which coheres in a brittle way only at the price of stasis, recycling nostrums for Reagan’s birthday, policing intellectual challenges, and establishing yet another Center for Madison and Mammon at some nominally Catholic university or other, funded to the tune of $10 million by some calculating donor who suspects Leo XIII was a dangerous socialist.”
Properly understood, all of this is quite true. The American intellectual right is, indeed, a sorry thing. Very rarely, if ever, do we see a unified front capable of adequately countering and defeating the destructive tendencies of liberalism, because the so-called “conservatives” are merely a right-wing variation of that same liberalism.
But I can’t help but notice the fatal irony of Vermeule’s argument. This irony has less to do with Vermeule himself and more with his decision to be a regular contributor to Compact, a magazine which, by the logic he lays out in his op-ed, might as well be part of the problem he describes.
Compact was founded on a lofty premise. This new, “radical American journal,” as the publication’s slogan reads, proposes an intellectual space in which the anti-liberal left and right converge. So far, in praxis, this premise seems to be wishful thinking at best. The magazine, after all, was founded by two conservatives and one Marxist, and the majority of the articles published lean more toward the right than left.
Aside from a few prominent left-wing intellectuals like Slavoj Žižek, the majority of the authors present right-wing anti-liberal critiques. But even more so, Compact itself, despite its bold assertions, doesn’t seem to be authentically anti-liberal, especially when evaluating it from the perspective laid out in Vermeule’s piece, when he writes:
“Would you like to frequent artisanal coffeehouses in a college town, writing overlong screeds about authentic anti-liberalism and the primacy of the local? Be my guest, says the liberal order, we will even fund you to do so; you are a good and faithful servant. Might you prefer the “traditional” life — a picturesque farm, some chickens, a vaguely Mennonite aesthetic, and an Instagram account? Of course!, says liberalism, you are welcome to be a domestic extremist, so long as your extremism remains safely domesticated.”
What Vermeule is saying here is quite true. In the end, all the edgy intellectual dark web circles are just that. They have very little influence outside their own holes in the wall, both online and in real life. So far, all the neoreactionary and “deep right” thinkers have yet to leave the cafe.
The fatal irony here is that the coffee-shop philosopher’s natural habitat is precisely where magazines like Compact come from in the first place. This is not to say the ideas published in Compact don’t warrant our consideration, but Vermeule’s frustration with the self-congratulatory anti-liberal intellectuals who pontificate endlessly about neoreaction behind a computer screen or in a snooty coffee-shop doesn’t jive too well in a magazine that does just that.
In the end, of course, Compact is just a disseminator of ideas. But perhaps that’s even more to the point: what makes this “radical American journal” any different from all the other “deep right” holes in the wall that hate liberalism? In its so-called quest to subvert, Compact, in actuality, seems to desire hegemony: to become the “go-to” place for edgy anti-liberal takes, all comfortably within the liberal order.